Death Knell for America

Here are the opening paragraphs of a very good article by Nobel Prize-winning economics Joseph Stiglitz:

The year 2011 will be remembered as the time when many ever-optimistic Americans began to give up hope. President John F. Kennedy once said that a rising tide lifts all boats. But now, in the receding tide, Americans are beginning to see not only that those with taller masts had been lifted far higher, but also that many of the smaller boats had been dashed to pieces in their wake.

In that brief moment when the rising tide was indeed rising, millions of people believed that they might have a fair chance of realizing the “American Dream.” Now those dreams, too, are receding. By 2011, the savings of those who had lost their jobs in 2008 or 2009 had been spent. Unemployment checks had run out. Headlines announcing new hiring – still not enough to keep pace with the number of those who would normally have entered the labor force – meant little to the 50 year olds with little hope of ever holding a job again.

This article goes on to spell out the dangers and horrors to be expected in 2012.

Here is his vision of the future:

Even before the crisis, there was a rebalancing of economic power – in fact, a correction of a 200-year historical anomaly, in which Asia’s share of global GDP fell from nearly 50% to, at one point, below 10%. The pragmatic commitment to growth that one sees in Asia and other emerging markets today stands in contrast to the West’s misguided policies, which, driven by a combination of ideology and vested interests, almost seem to reflect a commitment not to grow.

Tragic.

Crystal Balling America's Future

Blogger The Big Picture has a post that notes that five years ago the Wall Street Journal had an article by Robert Frank clearly identifying the brave new world of "plutonomy" that the US, UK, Canada, and Australia were entering.

Exactly 5 years ago today, the WSJ published this post (Plutonomics) about a rather fascinating study on wealth inequality.

It was written by of all folks, Citigroup global strategist Ajay Kapur. In 2005, Kapur’s research team “came up with the term ‘Plutonomy’ in 2005 to describe a country that is defined by massive income and wealth inequality. According to their definition, the U.S. is a Plutonomy, along with the U.K., Canada and Australia.”

What are the basic characteristics of Plutonomies? According to Kapur:

1. They are all created by “disruptive technology-driven productivity gains, creative financial innovation, capitalist friendly cooperative governments, immigrants…the rule of law and patenting inventions. Often these wealth waves involve great complexity exploited best by the rich and educated of the time.”

2. There is no “average” consumer in Plutonomies. There is only the rich “and everyone else.” The rich account for a disproportionate chunk of the economy, while the non-rich account for “surprisingly small bites of the national pie.” Kapur estimates that in 2005, the richest 20% may have been responsible for 60% of total spending.

3. Plutonomies are likely to grow in the future, fed by capitalist-friendly governments, more technology-driven productivity and globalization.

Kapur also noted the impact massive income and wealth inequality had on other aspects of the economy: Savings rates, national debt level, spending patterns, reaction to high commodity prices, and more. All of these, he claimed are substantially affected by the ultra wealthy.

Note that this was from 5 years ago today — circa January 2007 was, ten months before the market peaked, 11 months before the Great Recession began, and 15 months before Bear Stearns, 21 months before Wall Street (AIG BAC C FNM LEH, etc.) collapsed, and about 55 months before Occupy Wall Street began.

Quite fascinating . . .

It is worth your time to go read the entire Robert Frank post in the WSJ. I haven't read his upcoming book The High-Beta Rich: How the Manic Wealthy Will Take Us to the Next Boom, Bubble, and Bust but I've got a hold on it at the library and expect to be entertained and appalled.

Here is a different Robert Frank, this is Robert H. Frank who teaches at Cornell University in a PBS Newshour interview with Paul Solman:



If you listen to 8:00 into the above video you find an interesting straddling of the middle. He argues from the right for the value of the free market and from the left for the importance of government in regulating the market and ensuring a fair playing field. (Funny, this isn't Darwinian. This is Adam Smith who has been misconstrued by the political right to be only the "invisible hand" guy when, in fact, he very much appreciated the role of government in helping to establish the possibility of a market.)

Don't confuse the Robert Frank who writes for the Wall Street Journal with the Cornell professor. Both have something interesting to say, but they are two different voices, but unfortunately with the same name.

As for America's future, it will succeed only if it gets off the destructive path that is creating a more and more unequal society and gets back to something more like the 1950s and 1960s when the middle class bloomed, America was prosperous, and the future looked unlimited. The future requires a more pragmatic politics that isn't dogmatic right or dogmatic left. It needs a politics that overthrows the idiocy of Reaganism and that overthrows the idiocy of a nanny state. The US needs a renewed robust middle, a real middle class, and a real political middle.

What Does 2012 Hold for Employment in the US?

Here is an excellent post by the Calculated Risk blog:

Question #5 for 2012: Employment

by CalculatedRisk

Earlier I posted some questions for next year: Ten Economic Questions for 2012. I'm trying to add some thoughts, and a few predictions for each question.

5) Employment: The U.S. economy added 1.64 million total non-farm jobs or just 137 thousand per month in 2011. There were 1.92 million private sector jobs added in 2011, or about 160 thousand per month. Although this was an improvement from 2010, this was still weak payroll growth for a recovery. How many payroll jobs will be added in 2012?

First a little "good" news. It appears that most of the state and local government job cuts will be over by mid year 2012. Just eliminating the employment drag from these job cuts will help.

from: Calculated Risk
Click to Enlarge
Here is a graph of the annual change in government payrolls since 1970. Over the last 3 year government employment has decreased significantly (this is a combination of Federal, State and local government). It appears job cuts will slow in the first half of 2012, and government employment might be neutral in the 2nd half of this year.

For 2011, the BLS reported 280 thousand government jobs lost, and my guess is this will slow to around 100 thousand in 2012 and most of the jobs lost will be in the first half of the year.

As predicted a year ago, construction employment increased in 2011. Although the increase was small - just 46 thousand jobs - this was the first increase for construction employment since 2006, and the first increase for residential construction employment since 2005.

I expect construction employment to increase at a faster rate in 2012 - not a boom - but better than in 2011. Unfortunately employment growth will probably slow in some other sectors. As an example, although auto sales will probably continue to increase in 2012, the rate of increase will slow since most of the recovery in auto sales has already happened. This suggests that private job creation will probably be about the same in 2012 as in 2011, even with some pickup in construction.

Private Payroll JobsHere is a graph of the annual change in private payrolls since 1970.

From: Calculated Risk
Click to Enlarge
Last year was disappointing given the high level of unemployment, but it was still the 2nd best year for private job creation since the 1990s.

My guess is private employment will increase around 150 to 200 thousand per month on average in 2012; about the same rate as in 2011.

With over 13 million unemployed workers - and 5.6 million unemployed for more than 26 weeks - adding 2 million private sector jobs will not seem like much of job recovery for many Americans. Hopefully I'm too pessimistic.

One of the tragedies of the "too small to succeed" stimulus of 2009 was that it didn't include enough money covering a long enough period to prevent the massive firing of state and local public workers including teachers, police, firement, etc. The Republicans have been intransigent on stimulating the economy because for them "job #1" was hurting the economy to prevent Obama being re-elected. They weren't interested in helping the 99% who are suffering from the greatest unemployment since the Great Depression or the ten million homes that were repossessed by the banks throwing people out onto the street. Their only concern is to make sure that the top 0.01% continue to make the multi-million incomes and hold on to the hundreds of millions and billions in wealth.

The only economic stimulus the Republicans believe in is the trickle down effect of activites such as the new boom in super-sized yachts. The only "jobs" that the ultra-rich want to hand on to are those personal service jobs where people "service" the rich for meagre wages while all the good wages, the middle class wages, disappear in the "new economy" that trickle down Reaganism has delivered over the last 30 years.

Europe as the Apocalypse

Here is a doom-and-gloom view of the world from the Wall Street Journal. They look at the problems in Europe and spin a tale of imminent calamity for the whole world. I, however, see the WSJ as a Cassandra:



The WSJ is like those prophets in mid 1940 wrote off England and proclaimed the end of the world as we know it and the start of a new age of barbarism. On the other hand, I believe in "muddle through". The Brits muddled, Hitler over-reached in Russia, and finally America joined the fray and the world managed to find a way to avoid the obvious bleak tragedy that all the experts foretold.

A Glimpse into the Future

Here is a talk by Cory Doctorow on the future of computers given the impulse by corporations to control "rights" that require them to tie down their "customers" in thousands of ways to ensure maximum profit:



Skip the first 2 minutes of intros to get into the Doctorow talk.

A full transcription of the talk can be found here.

Cory offers up lots of thoughtful points. This video is well worth your time.

ECRI on the US Economy

ECRI seems to be the best prognosticator of the economy. This interview of Lakshman Achuthan reveals a serious concern about the direction of the US economy:

Walk Like a Man, Fast as You Can

I'm amazed at the progress in robotics. It is solid. The day when robots take over the manual aspects of life is getting much closer.



What is less clear to me is the day when the robots will take over the intellectual aspects of life. Dedicated "smart" software is impressive, but I haven't seen any general purpose intelligence worth beans. Progress on this side of technology is much, much slower.

But the robots are coming, the robots are coming!

Peeking into the Future

Here is an interesting film on the effects of the digital age and networking are having on shaping the future. I like this. This is optimistic about the future. We need more of this...

The Future Has Arrived

Here's a bit from the BBC with a wonderful story about new technology:

Scientists have succeeded in forming a "feedback loop" between a computer and a common yeast to precisely control the switching on and off of specific genes.

The computer controlled flashes of light to start and stop this gene expression, "learning" how to reach and maintain a set value.

The groundbreaking approach could find use in future efforts to control biological processes, such as the production of biofuel from microbes.

It appears in Nature Biotechnology.

The approach is a comparatively simple means to take control of fantastically complex biochemical processes to achieve a desired result.

"The neat thing about this is that there are many people who have tried to do things like this by, for example, coding in the cell itself a synthetic circuit, putting genes and mechanisms in the cell," said senior author John Lygeros, of the Automatic Control Laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich.

"That's had limited success up to now."

...

"It's quite difficult to engineer synthetic circuits that do something robustly in the cell, and the hope is that by augmenting this with external signals, you can get them to behave better," he said.

"That for example may have applications in biofuel production, or antibiotic production, where they use genetically engineered organisms to increase the yields of reactions."

Go read the whole article to get all the details.

This is a big step into "the future". I can foresee all kinds of new production and processing done using biological techniques. Chemists must be licking their chops with visions of gearing up to produce all kinds of hard-to-make molecules.

This is a huge step into the nano world with a wonderful new control technique. This isn't the grey goo doomsday scare story that the anti-technologists love to trot out. This is a technique that gives very precise control at human scale to nano processing.

Technological Optimism

I'm a big fan of technology. I buy into the Julian Simon view that any "limits to growth" are wrong-headed because it ignores the fact that the ultimate resource is human ingenuity.

Here are some bits out of Paul Krugman's latest NY Times op-ed looking at the upcoming future for solar energy:

For decades the story of technology has been dominated, in the popular mind and to a large extent in reality, by computing and the things you can do with it. Moore’s Law — in which the price of computing power falls roughly 50 percent every 18 months — has powered an ever-expanding range of applications, from faxes to Facebook.

Our mastery of the material world, on the other hand, has advanced much more slowly. The sources of energy, the way we move stuff around, are much the same as they were a generation ago.

But that may be about to change. We are, or at least we should be, on the cusp of an energy transformation, driven by the rapidly falling cost of solar power. That’s right, solar power.

...

These days, mention solar power and you’ll probably hear cries of “Solyndra!” Republicans have tried to make the failed solar panel company both a symbol of government waste — although claims of a major scandal are nonsense — and a stick with which to beat renewable energy.

But Solyndra’s failure was actually caused by technological success: the price of solar panels is dropping fast, and Solyndra couldn’t keep up with the competition. In fact, progress in solar panels has been so dramatic and sustained that, as a blog post at Scientific American put it, “there’s now frequent talk of a ‘Moore’s law’ in solar energy,” with prices adjusted for inflation falling around 7 percent a year.

This has already led to rapid growth in solar installations, but even more change may be just around the corner. If the downward trend continues — and if anything it seems to be accelerating — we’re just a few years from the point at which electricity from solar panels becomes cheaper than electricity generated by burning coal.

And if we priced coal-fired power right, taking into account the huge health and other costs it imposes, it’s likely that we would already have passed that tipping point.

But will our political system delay the energy transformation now within reach?

Let’s face it: a large part of our political class, including essentially the entire G.O.P., is deeply invested in an energy sector dominated by fossil fuels, and actively hostile to alternatives. This political class will do everything it can to ensure subsidies for the extraction and use of fossil fuels, directly with taxpayers’ money and indirectly by letting the industry off the hook for environmental costs, while ridiculing technologies like solar.

Krugman is making the point that the upcoming 2012 elections are going to be important for many reasons. A big one is that they will decide whether the political right gets to continue blocking technological advance in the energy area. The sad fact is that China is quickly becoming a leader in this area (along with Germany) and the US, which used to lead the world, will soon be a "has been" and utterly negligible. All thanks to the Neanderthal thinking of the Republican party that favours the rich and corruption over the American people and a better future.

The Robots are Coming, the Robots are Coming!

And on bicycles no less...



Maybe this "takeover" by the robots won't be so bad. This robo-guy is a midget on a bike. He isn't the hulking threat that Klaatu was in The Day the Earth Stood Still. And this isn't the gray goo that threatens to swallow us up and they populate the earth with their slimy descendants.

Personally, I'm looking forward to the day that I can sit down and have a friendly chat with a robot that not only makes a good companion but will help tuck me in bed at night and make sure I have three square meals a day. I'm an optimist with the fear of a little pessimism because I know some idiot will steal the warm and fuzzy robo-future and replace it with hulking RoboCop look-alikes who will beat me with a baton if I have an independent thought. The evil have a way of stealing sweetness and light and replacing it with power, dominance, fear, and pain. They prefer the future in shades of black. Oh... and with them on top.

Peak Oil has Peaked

Here is an interview of Daniel Yergin author of "The Quest: Energy Security and the Remaking of the Modern World"

In 1991 Yergin published "The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power". He is an expert in oil. I trust his views and not the doom-and-gloom crowd who sell "peak oil". Sure oil is a finite resource, but it will last a lot longer than any of the fanatics who want to close down industry and go back to a romantic image of 1820s pastoralism realize. Read the book:

Update from the Front in the On-Going Computer War

Two years ago the US/Israel opened that latest offensive in the War of the Worlds that may be the Götterdämmerung of our civilization. They released the Stuxnet virus to degrade the Iranian attempt to build nuclear weapons.

In the interim, China has used viruses and worms sneak into computers around the war probably in preparation for opening a new front in the Computer Wars.

Now there is a mysterious outbreak of a virus in the US's drone fleet. It isn't clear who has unleashed this new attack and what the intentions of the probe may be.

We are in the fog of war and in the opening stages of WWIII.

From Wired magazine:

A computer virus has infected the cockpits of America’s Predator and Reaper drones, logging pilots’ every keystroke as they remotely fly missions over Afghanistan and other warzones.

The virus, first detected nearly two weeks ago by the military’s Host-Based Security System, has not prevented pilots at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada from flying their missions overseas. Nor have there been any confirmed incidents of classified information being lost or sent to an outside source. But the virus has resisted multiple efforts to remove it from Creech’s computers, network security specialists say. And the infection underscores the ongoing security risks in what has become the U.S. military’s most important weapons system.

“We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back,” says a source familiar with the network infection, one of three that told Danger Room about the virus. “We think it’s benign. But we just don’t know.”

Military network security specialists aren’t sure whether the virus and its so-called “keylogger” payload were introduced intentionally or by accident; it may be a common piece of malware that just happened to make its way into these sensitive networks. The specialists don’t know exactly how far the virus has spread. But they’re sure that the infection has hit both classified and unclassified machines at Creech. That raises the possibility, at least, that secret data may have been captured by the keylogger, and then transmitted over the public internet to someone outside the military chain of command.

Go read the whole article.

Most wars are fought with the bottom 90% of the population in a fog. We will be victims of this new war. We will have our economies wrecked, lives lost, and most of us won't even know there are battles going on, who is involved, and what kinds of devastation are being inflicted. We are like the serfs of the Middle Ages. Our feudal lords (the top 1% who control the government and military) are fielding armies that scourge the land and we know nothing about it until the armed columns descend upon our tiny village and put us all to the sword.

The Future of the Occupy Wall Street Movement

Here is a thoughtful piece looking beyond the immediate demonstration Occupy Wall Street:

The Wall Street protests seem to be gathering strength and expanding beyond the geographic limits of downtown Manhattan. The media, too, is finally amplifying the story. Whether they will grow larger and sustain themselves beyond these initial street actions will depend upon four things: the work of skilled organizers; the success of those organizers in getting people, once these events end, to meet over and over and over again; whether or not the movement can promote public policy solutions that are organically linked to the quotidian lives of its supporters; and the ability of liberalism’s infrastructure of intellectuals, writers, artists and professionals to expend an enormous amount of their cultural capital in support of the movement.

... Right now, it appears that anti-hierarchical, relatively inexperienced people are “running” the Wall Street protest. And they are doing big demonstrations really well. So far, so good. Anger can beget action. And action itself can be a battering ram that knocks down the doors of history.

But anger alone can’t sustain action. And action alone can’t sustain political militancy. Much like today’s Wall Street movement, the French students who struck their universities during the Events of May 1968 had a charming way with utopian sloganeering: “Be Realistic, Demand the Impossible!” as they said back then. But the students couldn’t work out a sustained alliance with their working-class allies or move to making structural demands for change that their militancy could leverage. They were not, in fact, realistic. In the end, a massive Gaullist backlash cleaned their clocks.

...

Experienced organizers teach the less experienced and expand the circle of competent leadership. Rosa Parks was an activist veteran. Key CIO staff who organized the steel industry in the late 1930s got their start by organizing the great 400,000 worker strong steel strike of 1919. Betty Friedan was no novice housewife—she worked for a militant, leftist union in the 1940s. And today academics are learning that the Tea Party is composed not only of the newly disgruntled, but also of many people who have been politically active, some of them since the Goldwater campaign.

And what’s striking about the Tea Party after two plus years is not the Koch brother’s seed money, or the disruptions of congressional town hall meetings in 2009, but, more impressively and relentlessly, the sheer numbers of grass roots chapters around the country that regularly meet in order to implement their pressure campaign on the Republican Party.

...

The phrase, “we are the 99 percent” nicely encapsulates the potential of OWS to become a movement of democratic extension. But right now, the precise demands of the Wall Street demonstrators include grandiose ideas like abolishing consumerism. A bit vague, and can even Lloyd Blankfein get it done by the end of the next quarter?

...

Finally, the emergence of the Wall Street movement is a reminder that the liberal left has not in quite a few years actually driven anything like a mass social movement in this country. When Obama was elected, some people made the mistake of thinking that an election-bounded jolt of energy that conflated a charismatic candidate with a popular political vision was such a movement. Nobody thinks that anymore.

The left does have something important however: a coterie of several thousand intellectuals, academics, writers, and engaged professionals who articulate liberal public policy, generate empirical and analytical expertise through the Internet, the media, and universities, and staff the offices of advocacy groups and progressive politicians on the local and national level.

This is, as I said, important, but, up to now, some people have imagined that the byplay between smart bloggers and tweeters, or even the charged pen of brilliantly argumentative and intellectually courageous Nobel Prize winners, in economics actually represent a vast swell of citizens demanding substantive change. But to paraphrase a guy who understood real political power: How many troops does Paul Krugman have?

But when a movement does arise, it needs an articulate exposition, and the brainy liberal left infrastructure’s time has come. Edmund Wilson put down his Proust long enough to report from the bloody coal mines of Eastern Kentucky. College professors all over the country held public “teach-ins” to educate their students and others about the history of the Vietnam War and American interventionism.

So there’s a big job out to do explaining and defending the Wall Street demonstrators to curious Americans. Krugman’s Army may be on its way.

Let's hope that "Krugman's Army is strapping on their best militant ideas and preparing to join the ranks and fight the good fight. It will be a hard battle but the goal is worth it: win back America for the 99%!

What the Future Looks Like

Creepy greedy corporations are winning the war. They have bought all the politicians and what you get is something like the following:

Italy's insane Internet law prompts removal of Italian Wikipedia

By Cory Doctorow at 4:21 am Wednesday, Oct 5

Prompted by Italy's punitive (batshit) wiretapping law proposal, Wikipedia has removed its Italian version and now directs anyone trying to find Italian Wikipedia to a page explaining that Italy's Internet law will make it impossible to have an Italian Wikipedia:

This proposal, which the Italian Parliament is currently debating, provides, among other things, a requirement to all websites to publish, within 48 hours of the request and without any comment, a correction of any content that the applicant deems detrimental to his/her image.

Unfortunately, the law does not require an evaluation of the claim by an impartial third judge - the opinion of the person allegedly injured is all that is required, in order to impose such correction to any website.

Hence, anyone who feels offended by any content published on a blog, an online newspaper and, most likely, even on Wikipedia can directly request to publish a "corrected" version, aimed to contradict and disprove the allegedly harmful contents, regardless of the truthfulness of the information deemed as offensive, and its sources...

The obligation to publish on our site the correction as is, provided by the named paragraph 29, without even the right to discuss and verify the claim, is an unacceptable restriction of the freedom and independence of Wikipedia, to the point of distorting the principles on which the Free Encyclopedia is based and this would bring to a paralysis of the "horizontal" method of access and editing, putting - in fact - an end to its existence as we have known until today.

My understanding is that Bill Gates has recently bought up all the rights to oxygen and is planning to implement a per-breath access fee. If you want to breathe, you will have to pay because he owns "the rights". Oh, and Apple is tired of waiting for people's eyeballs to wander over their various iEverything devices, so they have bought the copyright to all the world's languages. If you don't want to be illiterate, you will need to license from Apple the right to read. Any peek at a letter or word will cost you!

Peak Oil

For the doomsday crowd that follows regular predictions of gloom-and-doom, the "peak oil" story has been a good one.

The typical "picture of doom" is something like this from Wikipedia:

Click to Enlarge
That picture is pretty convincing. We are on the slide to perdition. Only a bleak and hopeless future awaits us...

But wait a second. Here is a more recent graph from an article in the Houston Chronicle:

Click to Enlarge
The article goes on to report a "new peak" in production:

North America appears headed for an oil renaissance, with crude production expected to hit an all-time high by 2016, given the current pace of drilling in the U.S. and Canada, according to a study released by an energy research firm this week.

U.S. oil production in areas including West Texas' Permian Basin, South Texas' Eagle Ford shale, and North Dakota's Bakken shale will record a rise of a little over 2 million barrels per day from 2010 to 2016, according to data compiled by Bentek Energy, a Colorado firm that tracks energy infrastructure and production projects.

Canadian crude production is expected to grow by 971,000 barrels per day during the same period, with much of the oil headed for the U.S.

Combined, the U.S. and Canadian oil output will top 11.5 million barrels per day, which is even more than their combined peak in 1972.

Goldman Sachs has estimated the U.S. could move from being the No. 3 oil producer behind Saudi Arabia and Russia to the No. 1 spot by 2017.

It's a reversal of the steady downward production trend that started after 1971, when U.S. oil production peaked around 9.5 million barrels per day.

I know this is a shock and disappointment to the end-of-days crowd. But this is an old story. If you followed the Club of Rome with its best seller in the early 1970s, the book "Limits to Growth" you've seen this tale before. It is so convincing. The end is nigh! Repent!

But human ingenuity keeps foiling that tale of gloom and despair. It is so seductive to believe that there is no hope and we must give up our sinful "modern ways" and go back to our pastoral past when we were disease ravaged and lived an average of 34 years. But those pesky scientists and technologists keep ruining out return to a "golden age" by creating new techniques or helping us conserve or producing a new substitute. This story is older than civilization. But the siren call of "repent! the end is nigh!" keeps winning because it appeals to our dark side that expects us to be punished for "having it too good".

The Club of Rome pessimists are still in business and no doubt still selling their siren song of "the end is nigh!". But you are better off reading "The Ultimate Resource" by Julian Simon. Unlike the Club of Rome, Simon has been right more than wrong. But unlike the Club of Rome, Simon is ignored by the press. It is so much easier to sell papers with the story of doom-and-gloom. Nobody wants to hear that we will "muddle through" or that we can count on "human ingenuity". We want morality plays. We want punishment for sinful ways, the excesses of the past. Nobody wants dull fact, reasoned judgement, and a scientific attitude. It doesn't sell.

A Vision of the Future

It takes a twisted mind, a cartoonist's mind, to put things into perspective and come up with the whacko future that awaits us. Here is Scott Adams of Dilbert fame trying his hand at this game:

According to biologists, billions of years ago the first sea creature wiggled onto the beach. This was a pivotal moment in life's long march from amorphous sea snot into the highest form of mammalian beings—hedge-fund managers. Many people see that as an improvement, but I'm not judgmental. What we don't know is why the first sea creatures were so anxious to leave their ocean habitats. My guess is that it had something to do with taxes.

Reliable people on television have informed me that taxes are the root cause of all behavior. And that means we can predict the future by looking at tax policy. In fact, I hear tax-related predictions every time I accidentally stop thinking about myself long enough to notice that others are talking. What I haven't yet seen is anyone correctly predicting the future based on tax policy. Apparently that burden has fallen to me.

Go read his article in the Wall Street Journal to see his vision in all its gory glory.

My only quibble with Scott Adams is that he has chosen the wrong side in this struggle for the future. Instead of the hedge fund managers taking the great leap from land back to sea, the really serious historic step will be taken by the land lemmings rushing to form a "more perfect union" and creating a real democracy, i.e. realize what was only a gleam in the eye of the architect's of America's Constitution. They will take the fateful step of stopping the flow of taxes from the bottom 90% into the pockets of the top 1%.

OK, I admit I have a lousy track record at predicting the future. But at least my vision has the benefit of decency and honourableness to its credit. Instead of constantly caving to the demands of the greedy rich who have painted the US and the world into a corner of bankruptcy and ruin, my vision has the benefit of letting the legions of hard working get a chance to inherit the fruit of their labour.

Pay It Forward

This is what great civilizations are built on. People doing the right thing and giving a helping hand to the next generation. Here is Neil deGrasse Tyson talking about Carl Sagan:



If you want to read a really good book, read Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World.

Oil and Technology Opening the Door to Energy Self-Sufficiency for the US

Here is a bit from a press release by the American Chemical Society:

New technology that combines production of electricity with capture of carbon dioxide could make billions of barrels of oil shale — now regarded as off-limits because of the huge amounts of carbon dioxide released in its production — available as an energy source. That’s the topic of the latest episode in the American Chemical Society’s (ACS) award-winning “Global Challenges/Chemistry Solutions” podcast series.

Adam Brandt, Ph.D., notes in the podcast that almost 3 trillion barrels of oil are trapped in the world’s deposits of oil-shale, a dark-colored rock laden with petroleum-like material. Brandt and colleague Hiren Mulchandani are at Stanford University.

The United States has by far the world’s largest deposits in the Green River Formation, which covers parts of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. The domestic oil shale resource could provide 1.2 trillion to 1.8 trillion barrels. But concerns over the large amounts of greenhouse gases — mainly carbon dioxide — released by current methods prevent many companies from trying to extract oil from shale.

Brandt’s answer is EPICC — a self-fueled method that generates electricity, as well as the heat needed to produce that electricity from shale. The report, which appears in ACS’ journal Energy & Fuels, describes how EPICC could generate large amounts of electricity without releasing into the atmosphere carbon dioxide from burning the shale. That carbon would be captured and stored underground as part of the production process.

The new podcast is available without charge at iTunes and from www.acs.org/globalchallenges.

The gloom & doom crowd is going to be seriously disappointed. It reminds me of those in the 15th century gnashing their teeth about the disappearance of old oak forest just as Britain was rising to be the world's sea power. Or those doom & gloomsters who have been rushing about for the last 50 years warning about "peak oil". It is always very popular to linearly extrapolate from the past and discover doom awaits us. But their requires a steadfast ignorance about human ingenuity and technological change. The doom & gloom crowd always ignore "the ultimate resource" as they weave their tales of resource shortages and the doom that awaits us.

The Future is Closer Than You Think

The day of using science to manipulate unwilling subjects has drawn just a bit closer. Here are some bits from a fascinating post by Mo Costandi in the UK's Guardian newspaper's Neurophilosophy blog:

Magnetic pulses applied to a specific region of the frontal cortex can influence peoples' willingness to lie spontaneously or tell the truth, according to a new study by researchers from Estonia.

The findings, published recently in the journal Behavioural Brain Research, suggest that manipulations of brain activity could be an effective way of obtaining truthful responses from defendants and criminal suspects, raising more ethical questions about the application of neuroscience technologies in the legal profession.

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The ability to detect deception accurately is of great interest to the legal profession and security agencies, for obvious reasons. The use of brain scanning data as evidence in courts of law has proven to be highly controversial, not least of all because of doubts about the validity of the data. Some researchers argue that we are now in a position to use functional neuroimaging to detect lies, but the general consensus seems to be that neither the technology nor our understanding of the brain are sophisticated enough.

Bachmann is cautious about how to interpret the new findings, because the sample size of 16 participants is small. He adds that they should be replicated before any firm conclusions can be made about the effects of TMS on spontaneous lying. Even so, the study raises the possibility that TMS could be used to increase the likelihood of getting the truth out of suspects or defendants. It seems likely that some may develop the technique and offer it as a service, as was the case with brain scanning.

"Provided that the method is validated and legal norms are established, it could perhaps be allowed and justified," says Bachmann, "but this should not become a routinely used technique. Basic human rights include cognitive privacy and this would be a clear infringement. If a subject freely agrees, maybe it would make sense, but I foresee heated debates on whether 'knocking truth out of the fellow' can be legalized in principle."

I'm sure the dictatorships and autocrats are clapping with glee. The day when they can reduce their subject population to automatons run remotely by the whims of the ruling class have just taken a big step forward. All hail Big Brother!