In reel-to-reel tape decks, there is a record head and a play head and they are separated by a small gap. The play head comes after the record head, and the record and playback circuitry are separate, so it's possible to monitor a tape recording more or less as its being recorded, albeit with a small delay.
The small delay was often used to produce an "echo effect" on recordings and in the studio. For the echo effect, the tape output was mixed with the line in and patched back into the tape input. Depending on the tape speed, the echo delay could be controlled, and the gain between output and input controlled the echo strength. A gain of greater than 1 produced the "infinite echo" that rapidly became a sound pulsation with its frequency centered at the maximum frequency response of the system.
One practical joke that was often played at radio stations was to hook up a tape deck to generate a delay, then feed the announcer's voice back to him with a fraction of a second delay. I was once trying to get an echo effect on my voice and I found that I'd practical joked myself; I had to remove my headphones in order to continue. The delay makes it almost impossible to speak. It's hard to explain why, but the experience is compelling.
In a course, Voice and Image Processing, that I took at RPI there was a similar demonstration with video. A ball was placed behind a small barrier, and a video camera showed the ball on a TV screen. Normally, you could just watch the monitor and reach behind the wall to pick up the ball. But with a half-second time delay, such a seemingly ordinary task became almost impossible. You soon found yourself reaching for the ball, overshooting, then overcorrecting, then overshooting, etc.
Such a thing is called a 'limit cycle' in systems control theory, but it's pretty eerie to be a part of a limit cycle and unable to break out of it. Eventually, you just stop moving entirely, then veeeeerrrrrrrryyyyyy slowly move your hand to get the ball. It could literally take 30 seconds or more to do that simple task.
There's a bunch of mathematics in systems theory that deals with time delay and "controllability." The upshot is that if you add enough time delay into a control system, it becomes uncontrollable. Your ability to affect events is slower than those events. Imagine trying to pick up the ball behind the wall if it is moving erratically.
One of my favorite jokes is about the economics professor walking through the Quad with his students. One of his students says, 'Look, there's a ten dollar bill on the ground.' The professor replies, 'Can't be. If it were, someone would have picked it up already.'
For a long time, economics was dominated by what are called "equilibrium calculations," models of an economy under steady state conditions, no shortages, prices in equilibrium, all the usual assumptions. Those are the simplest conditions to model and to easy calculate, so they were the first results. Evolutionary biology tended toward the same simplifications, for the same reasons. The advent of the computer, and the growing access to massive amounts of computing power changed the landscape, but it took a while for theoretical models to catch up to the improved tools. In fact, the catch-up is still going on.
I had lunch with a colleague a while ago, and he asked my opinion about global warming/climate change/greenhouse gases. I told him that it was pretty obvious that the signal was out of the noise, the whole process was clearly underway, and was he surprised at this answer? He noted my well-known contrarian streak. I observed that James Hansen hadn't made a wrong prediction since 1988, and I wasn't going to challenge that sort of success.
In truth, I was a little late to the global warming party, partly because of that contrarian streak, but also because I was focusing on the science and not the policy. I was also perhaps yielding too much to my own libertarian leanings. So let's review why I should have been convinced sooner than I was, at least on the policy issues.
From the standpoint of political philosophy, one fact should be paramount: if we do not have a right to the air we breathe, then human rights, including property rights, are meaningless. And that should include the right to have that air remain unaltered. You shouldn't have to prove that harm is being done to you, any more than you should have to prove that people are harming you in order to not want a stream of trespassers walking across your lawn.
Now any given individual has no real impact on the contents of the entire atmosphere, although it's certainly possible for an individual to affect your current breathable air, and you generally have recourse. If someone smokes in your house and you don't like it, you can throw them out. If the neighbor's barbecue is noxious, you can usually complain to some agency, and I, for one, do not consider that to be an infringement on your neighbor's rights, though your neighbor may disagree.
But group behavior can, and does, affect urban, regional, and global resources. The industrial world's propensity for fossil fuels has had an undeniable effect on the concentration of some important trace gases in the atmosphere. Regulating group behavior is not the same as regulating individual behavior. Regulating corporations or national economies is not the same as regulating individuals, and giving free license to groups and organizations reduces individual freedom.
In the case of global climate change, regulating group behavior is essential. Actually, of course, group behavior is regulated. It just happens that it is regulated by those who rule, manage, control, and lead those organizations, the corporate boards, the CEOs, the congresses, presidents, agency heads, judges, and lawyers whose fingers are entwined with the strings of authority.
But authority and control are meaningless if the system is uncontrollable. The global climate system takes decades, if not centuries to equilibrate to any given greenhouse gas level. Glaciers take even longer to melt or rebuild. And the human political process likewise has major delays built into it.
There is a thin straw to clutch at, called feedforward in control theory. Using feedforward, you attempt to compensate for feedback delays by anticipating the system response. But feedforward control is seriously limited by your understanding of the underlying system. Without that understanding, feedforward is useless.
In regulatory policy, science is the feedforward control signal. Science, however, is currently under political attack from numerous quarters. And big money is being spent to target climate research in one part of that attack.
We're going to lose south Florida, and, my colleague suggests, most of Louisiana and Mississippi. California will acquire a new inland sea. Much of Bangladesh will vanish, as will plenty of islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. The fact that these things are going to happen long after you and I are dead does not make the future more palatable. It makes it more inevitable.
Showing posts with label corporations. Show all posts
Showing posts with label corporations. Show all posts
Saturday, June 7, 2008
Thursday, February 28, 2008
The Philosopher's Stone
My favorite lab course at RPI was Radiochemistry, which was the second part of a two semester sequence. The first course was on the theoretical underpinnings of nuclear and radiochemistry. I didn't take it, but talked my way into the second course after an interview with the two lead professors that convinced them that I knew the material well enough. The two were Overman and Clark, who had written our textbook, called simply Radiochemistry, and a little googling tells me that, yes, it was a widely used text.
My favorite lab work in the course was neutron activation analysis, which is very, very cool. After exposure to neutrons, many elements become radioactive, having at least one isotope that does so after neutron absorption. This is especially true of the heavier elements, which tend to have a lot of isotopes and a lot of energy shells in their nuclei. Most of the artificially created radioisotopes have a gamma spectrum associated with them, so if you measure their decay using a multichannel gamma spectrometer, you get a "fingerprint" of that isotope. Repeated measurements also give you decay rate information, and, putting all that together, you can usually get a pretty good quantitative trace element analysis of the original sample. Also, because only a few atoms absorb neutrons, and the product isotopes are usually fairly short lived, it's a non-destructive technique that can be repeated many times using the same sample.
The neutron source we used was called a "bomb" as I recall, not because it could explode, but because it was big and heavy and looked like laboratory "bombs" that contained compressed gas. What our N source contained was, if memory serves, beryllium and cobalt-60, the latter explaining the heaviness of the device. It was very thickly shielded.
Under high energy radiation, beryllium becomes a neutron source. Our source exploited the gamma-neutron reaction, which splits off a neutron from Be-9; the resulting Be-8 is unstable, and goes to two alpha particles. There is also an alpha-neutron reaction that gives a neutron and carbon-12. The early "initiators" on nuclear bombs used this reaction, with polonium as the alpha source, because it doesn't emit any gamma radiation, so it only worked after the Po and Be were brought close together, reducing the likelihood of pre-detonation.
Both boron-11 and deuterium also undergo the gamma-neutron reaction, though not as efficiently as beryllium. Californium-252 is also sometimes used these days as a neutron source, as it undergoes a fairly rapid rate of spontaneous fission.
There are commercial neutron sources that use nuclear fusion as the neutron source. Many of these are basically small particle accelerators that aim a beam of deuterons at a target that has tritium adsorbed onto it. A sufficient number of fusion events occur to make this a viable source of high energy neutrons for industrial applications. The D/T reaction has a characteristic energy (around 14 MEV), which is useful for deep imaging applications. Some of these type of neutron sources are quite small.
Larger installations often use full bore particle accelerators to create fusion, and sometimes the deuterium-deuterium reaction is used. This gives a lower energy to the resulting neutron, but deuterium is much cheaper and easier to work with than tritium, tritium being both radioactive and a proliferation hazard.
Another interesting neutron source is the Farnsworth Fusor, or rather, its descendants. These are "inertial electrostatic confinement" fusion generators, and examples of them have even shown up in high school science fairs. Usually, the rate of fusion is quite low; I've seen numbers for quasi-amateur builds that produce maybe a million fusion events per second. The radiation hazard from attendant X-rays is greater than the neutron hazard. However, I've also seen some advanced laboratory results suggesting output as high as 10^14 events per second which is respectable and dangerous. Once you get to this level of output, radiation damage to the electrical components becomes important, an indication of just how difficult the fusion problem is, since you're still orders of magnitude from practical power production.
If you want a really high neutron flux, the usual method of production is a nuclear reactor. Reactor-based high energy neutrons are usually obtained in a reactor with a fast core but a moderated outer shell that achieves criticality, thereby sidestepping the safety issues that come into play with fast reactors. However, there are "pulsed" reactors that rely on changes in neutron cross section with temperature to create "inherently safe" designs. One such design was described by Freeman Dyson in his book Disturbing the Universe.
Reactors only produce "fission spectrum" neutrons, of course, although for fast reactors the spectrum is shifted toward higher energies. If you really want a big flux of high energy neutrons, failing some major breakthrough in fusion technology, you want a "spallation source."
Spallation is based on the fact that, if you hit a heavy nucleus with a very high energy proton, you get a neutron "splash" effect (this would be the "liquid drop" model of the nucleus, we're using here). The Spallation Neutron Source in Oak Ridge, Tennessee runs a high power (over a megawatt) proton beam at about 1 Gev (1000 Mev) and gets about 30 neutrons per proton in the beam. The neutron spectrum of the output peaks at around 10 Mev, but some of the neutrons have much higher energies.
The Oak Ridge facility uses mercury as the spallation target, with the indication that liquid targets are more robust to the sort of shocks that a pulsed accelerator beam produces. There were some designs from an old USSR program that used a eutectic mix of lead and bismuth for a similar purpose, heated to liquefy the metal.
Remember that I noted above that reactors are sometimes used as neutron sources. One reactor design is to use a "subcritical" fast reactor and drive it to power production via a spallation beam. If, for example, the criticality of the reactor is 0.95, meaning that it is only 95% of the way to self-sustaining, then any neutron introduced into the reactor core will induce a reacton chain of about 20 more neutrons. Thus, a spallation source plus a sub-critical fast reactor can be a copious source of fast neutrons. Moreover, it's overall power balance will be positive; it will generate considerably more power than it consumes.
I've noted before that fast neutrons are a modern equivalent of the "Philosopher's Stone," able to transmute elements, and able to convey, well, not eternal life, but eternal death to those exposed. It's the transmutation aspects that have caught some interest. Fast neutrons will fission all transuranic elements, so, properly run, there is no plutonium et al. remaining after an accelerator driven reactor fuel cycle has run its course. In fact, an accelerator-driven reactor system can be designed to run on nuclear waste remaining from other reactors. It's also been suggested that other long-lived waste products, like technetium-99 and iodine-129 be transmuted to shorter-lived isotopes, taking the nuclear waste disposal problem from a time scale of millennia to a matter of years, or perhaps centuries if you don't want to transmute the cesium and strontium waste isotopes.
It sounds great, doesn't it? Nuclear energy without the waste disposal problem? So what's the catch?
Well, there are a couple of technical catches, such as the fact that even the Oak Ridge facility doesn't have the power to drive a full closed-cycle system. But that's a technical matter, and I have no doubt it's solvable. There's also the fact that such a system requires on-site fuel reprocessing, to extract the transuranics and other long-lived isotopes from the waste stream. That's a chemical engineering problem, and we don't have much experience with designing chemical processes that are totally closed cycle. More accurately, trying to do so has always resulted in some leakage, plus the occasional outright accident.
Still, it might be possible to get the thing to work well enough, technically speaking.
But there's a deeper problem, and that has to do with social and economic systems and ideology. As I've said before, nuclear energy is inherently "socialistic" in the sense that it requires government level planning and operation at every step of the way. Yes, an accelerator-driven nuclear power system would produce a substantial power surplus—at enormous initial capital cost. A government can pick up that tab and take that kind of risk; corporations could raise the money (the estimated price tag for a ADS is on the order of $20 billion, but would probably be notably higher, given NIMBY concerns, etc.) but are simply not trustworthy when it comes to high public risk endeavors. Corporations take risks to enhance profits. It is up to government to regulate corporations' risk taking, but the ascendance of Conservative Movement ideology in this country has degraded the regulatory process to such an extent that one simply can't trust the regulatory function of government. The NIMBY folks are not being mere obstructionists. They are being realistic.
It's said that there was a time, in the early days of explosives manufacturing in Europe, when the owners of an explosives company were required to live on site. Ask yourself how many corporate executives would situate themselves and their families next door to any nuclear reactor site.
ADS systems are well-suited for thorium fuel cycle nuclear power, and India has a lot of thorium, but not much uranium. And if China ever decides to curb its greenhouse gas emissions, ADS systems would look very attractive. Naturally socialistic, remember? Very much in the Chinese tradition. The two countries look like natural competitors in this particular game.
The U.S. does not. The oil and gas men are still in charge, willing to expend trillions for neo-colonial wars and the perpetuation of various sorts of privilege. The idea of spending government money on the creation of actual industrial capital is ultimately foreign to them. So here, as in so many other endeavors, the U.S. will not be on the cutting edge of technology. It is no longer up to the job.
My favorite lab work in the course was neutron activation analysis, which is very, very cool. After exposure to neutrons, many elements become radioactive, having at least one isotope that does so after neutron absorption. This is especially true of the heavier elements, which tend to have a lot of isotopes and a lot of energy shells in their nuclei. Most of the artificially created radioisotopes have a gamma spectrum associated with them, so if you measure their decay using a multichannel gamma spectrometer, you get a "fingerprint" of that isotope. Repeated measurements also give you decay rate information, and, putting all that together, you can usually get a pretty good quantitative trace element analysis of the original sample. Also, because only a few atoms absorb neutrons, and the product isotopes are usually fairly short lived, it's a non-destructive technique that can be repeated many times using the same sample.
The neutron source we used was called a "bomb" as I recall, not because it could explode, but because it was big and heavy and looked like laboratory "bombs" that contained compressed gas. What our N source contained was, if memory serves, beryllium and cobalt-60, the latter explaining the heaviness of the device. It was very thickly shielded.
Under high energy radiation, beryllium becomes a neutron source. Our source exploited the gamma-neutron reaction, which splits off a neutron from Be-9; the resulting Be-8 is unstable, and goes to two alpha particles. There is also an alpha-neutron reaction that gives a neutron and carbon-12. The early "initiators" on nuclear bombs used this reaction, with polonium as the alpha source, because it doesn't emit any gamma radiation, so it only worked after the Po and Be were brought close together, reducing the likelihood of pre-detonation.
Both boron-11 and deuterium also undergo the gamma-neutron reaction, though not as efficiently as beryllium. Californium-252 is also sometimes used these days as a neutron source, as it undergoes a fairly rapid rate of spontaneous fission.
There are commercial neutron sources that use nuclear fusion as the neutron source. Many of these are basically small particle accelerators that aim a beam of deuterons at a target that has tritium adsorbed onto it. A sufficient number of fusion events occur to make this a viable source of high energy neutrons for industrial applications. The D/T reaction has a characteristic energy (around 14 MEV), which is useful for deep imaging applications. Some of these type of neutron sources are quite small.
Larger installations often use full bore particle accelerators to create fusion, and sometimes the deuterium-deuterium reaction is used. This gives a lower energy to the resulting neutron, but deuterium is much cheaper and easier to work with than tritium, tritium being both radioactive and a proliferation hazard.
Another interesting neutron source is the Farnsworth Fusor, or rather, its descendants. These are "inertial electrostatic confinement" fusion generators, and examples of them have even shown up in high school science fairs. Usually, the rate of fusion is quite low; I've seen numbers for quasi-amateur builds that produce maybe a million fusion events per second. The radiation hazard from attendant X-rays is greater than the neutron hazard. However, I've also seen some advanced laboratory results suggesting output as high as 10^14 events per second which is respectable and dangerous. Once you get to this level of output, radiation damage to the electrical components becomes important, an indication of just how difficult the fusion problem is, since you're still orders of magnitude from practical power production.
If you want a really high neutron flux, the usual method of production is a nuclear reactor. Reactor-based high energy neutrons are usually obtained in a reactor with a fast core but a moderated outer shell that achieves criticality, thereby sidestepping the safety issues that come into play with fast reactors. However, there are "pulsed" reactors that rely on changes in neutron cross section with temperature to create "inherently safe" designs. One such design was described by Freeman Dyson in his book Disturbing the Universe.
Reactors only produce "fission spectrum" neutrons, of course, although for fast reactors the spectrum is shifted toward higher energies. If you really want a big flux of high energy neutrons, failing some major breakthrough in fusion technology, you want a "spallation source."
Spallation is based on the fact that, if you hit a heavy nucleus with a very high energy proton, you get a neutron "splash" effect (this would be the "liquid drop" model of the nucleus, we're using here). The Spallation Neutron Source in Oak Ridge, Tennessee runs a high power (over a megawatt) proton beam at about 1 Gev (1000 Mev) and gets about 30 neutrons per proton in the beam. The neutron spectrum of the output peaks at around 10 Mev, but some of the neutrons have much higher energies.
The Oak Ridge facility uses mercury as the spallation target, with the indication that liquid targets are more robust to the sort of shocks that a pulsed accelerator beam produces. There were some designs from an old USSR program that used a eutectic mix of lead and bismuth for a similar purpose, heated to liquefy the metal.
Remember that I noted above that reactors are sometimes used as neutron sources. One reactor design is to use a "subcritical" fast reactor and drive it to power production via a spallation beam. If, for example, the criticality of the reactor is 0.95, meaning that it is only 95% of the way to self-sustaining, then any neutron introduced into the reactor core will induce a reacton chain of about 20 more neutrons. Thus, a spallation source plus a sub-critical fast reactor can be a copious source of fast neutrons. Moreover, it's overall power balance will be positive; it will generate considerably more power than it consumes.
I've noted before that fast neutrons are a modern equivalent of the "Philosopher's Stone," able to transmute elements, and able to convey, well, not eternal life, but eternal death to those exposed. It's the transmutation aspects that have caught some interest. Fast neutrons will fission all transuranic elements, so, properly run, there is no plutonium et al. remaining after an accelerator driven reactor fuel cycle has run its course. In fact, an accelerator-driven reactor system can be designed to run on nuclear waste remaining from other reactors. It's also been suggested that other long-lived waste products, like technetium-99 and iodine-129 be transmuted to shorter-lived isotopes, taking the nuclear waste disposal problem from a time scale of millennia to a matter of years, or perhaps centuries if you don't want to transmute the cesium and strontium waste isotopes.
It sounds great, doesn't it? Nuclear energy without the waste disposal problem? So what's the catch?
Well, there are a couple of technical catches, such as the fact that even the Oak Ridge facility doesn't have the power to drive a full closed-cycle system. But that's a technical matter, and I have no doubt it's solvable. There's also the fact that such a system requires on-site fuel reprocessing, to extract the transuranics and other long-lived isotopes from the waste stream. That's a chemical engineering problem, and we don't have much experience with designing chemical processes that are totally closed cycle. More accurately, trying to do so has always resulted in some leakage, plus the occasional outright accident.
Still, it might be possible to get the thing to work well enough, technically speaking.
But there's a deeper problem, and that has to do with social and economic systems and ideology. As I've said before, nuclear energy is inherently "socialistic" in the sense that it requires government level planning and operation at every step of the way. Yes, an accelerator-driven nuclear power system would produce a substantial power surplus—at enormous initial capital cost. A government can pick up that tab and take that kind of risk; corporations could raise the money (the estimated price tag for a ADS is on the order of $20 billion, but would probably be notably higher, given NIMBY concerns, etc.) but are simply not trustworthy when it comes to high public risk endeavors. Corporations take risks to enhance profits. It is up to government to regulate corporations' risk taking, but the ascendance of Conservative Movement ideology in this country has degraded the regulatory process to such an extent that one simply can't trust the regulatory function of government. The NIMBY folks are not being mere obstructionists. They are being realistic.
It's said that there was a time, in the early days of explosives manufacturing in Europe, when the owners of an explosives company were required to live on site. Ask yourself how many corporate executives would situate themselves and their families next door to any nuclear reactor site.
ADS systems are well-suited for thorium fuel cycle nuclear power, and India has a lot of thorium, but not much uranium. And if China ever decides to curb its greenhouse gas emissions, ADS systems would look very attractive. Naturally socialistic, remember? Very much in the Chinese tradition. The two countries look like natural competitors in this particular game.
The U.S. does not. The oil and gas men are still in charge, willing to expend trillions for neo-colonial wars and the perpetuation of various sorts of privilege. The idea of spending government money on the creation of actual industrial capital is ultimately foreign to them. So here, as in so many other endeavors, the U.S. will not be on the cutting edge of technology. It is no longer up to the job.
Saturday, February 9, 2008
Corporate Libertarians
One of the paradoxes of Robert Heinlein was that he wrote one of the two sacred texts of libertarianism (The Moon is a Harsh Mistress), believed firmly in individualism, and also held the belief that military service was an essential part of that individualism.
To be sure, Heinlein explicitly stated that a healthy society was essential to the individual, so he believed that individualists must also include the social good as part of their own. It’s a sophisticated position, and I only disagree on practically all the details, especially when it leads to things like the belief that Napoleon was some sort of triumphant individualist (a position sometimes attributed to Nietzsche, or that Cesare Borgia was a paragon of enlightened self-interest (Machiavelli).
Current libertarians are less keen on their own personal membership in the military, but they do often identify with collective behavior and groups. However, for a good many libertarians, group identification seems to be with the modern corporation, sometimes called “private enterprise.” I’ll also note that “value” is often assumed to be monetary, and nothing more. For commercial enterprises, of which the public corporation is a good example, that is pretty easy to understand. It’s not quite as clear-cut for individuals, but that mistake is obviously not limited to libertarians.
This “corporate libertarian” critique does not hold for all libertarians. There is, after all, no secret libertarian handshake, no membership card, etc. Anyone can call themselves a libertarian. Still, the most annoying ones are those who fail to understand that the limited liability corporation is a profoundly privileged beast, one whose existence weakens such things as the individual right-to-contract, and individual property rights in general. I will stipulate at the outset that I think the corporation is a very powerful and useful invention, but it does require certain sorts of regulation if it isn’t to seriously harm individual rights, and often corporate libertarians seem more interested in eliminating those essential regulations than upholding the underlying individual rights.
Let’s consider how this can work with an extreme case: contract murder. I’m sure pretty much everyone would recognize that a contract to perform an illegal act is itself an illegal contract, and totally unenforceable. Furthermore, it’s pretty easy to see that both parties in a contract hit (the killer and the one who pays for the killing) are guilty of criminal conspiracy.
What would be the effect of making such contracts legal, and absolving the one who takes out the contract from penalty? Obviously this would weaken criminal law, but less obviously, it would also weaken contract law, since it would set civil law against criminal law. In a similar way, the institution of slavery weakens the institution of property, by putting property rights into opposition to human rights. Property rights in the South during the Civil War were often pretty shaky, what with the armies marching through and all.
The limited liability corporation puts many decisions behind a financial “firewall.” Stockholders and their agents (corporate boards and management) can undertake actions that, potentially, have far greater adverse consequences than they would deem acceptable if their whole net worth was at risk, as it would be in a proprietorship. This means that when individuals enter into contracts with corporations, the exchange is even more one-sided than if it were a matter of an individual contracting against someone with greater resources.
The anti-environmentalism exhibited by many corporate libertarians is another symptom of psychological projection and identification. If, for example, individuals do not have a property right on the air they breathe, then property rights (and individual rights generally) are pretty much meaningless. Similarly, if I own real property that has a stream running through it, I possess certain rights that preclude those upstream from having absolute authority over that stream as it passes through their property. In common law, this would be an easement; Federal and State laws are usually even more explicit and restrictive—to the fury of anti-environmentalists.
Similar easement rights surely exist for such things as migratory animals, flood control, protection of ground water, ecological integrity and so forth. I have an interest in all of these that is best expressed (in my view) as a property right. However, since such things are difficult to monetize, they do not show up in corporate thinking. Generally, only individuals value such things, and since corporate “rights” trump individual rights, then the corporate libertarian inevitably leans toward anti-environmentalism. For that matter, so does anyone who cannot imagine any value except insofar as it can be measured in monetary terms.
To be sure, Heinlein explicitly stated that a healthy society was essential to the individual, so he believed that individualists must also include the social good as part of their own. It’s a sophisticated position, and I only disagree on practically all the details, especially when it leads to things like the belief that Napoleon was some sort of triumphant individualist (a position sometimes attributed to Nietzsche, or that Cesare Borgia was a paragon of enlightened self-interest (Machiavelli).
Current libertarians are less keen on their own personal membership in the military, but they do often identify with collective behavior and groups. However, for a good many libertarians, group identification seems to be with the modern corporation, sometimes called “private enterprise.” I’ll also note that “value” is often assumed to be monetary, and nothing more. For commercial enterprises, of which the public corporation is a good example, that is pretty easy to understand. It’s not quite as clear-cut for individuals, but that mistake is obviously not limited to libertarians.
This “corporate libertarian” critique does not hold for all libertarians. There is, after all, no secret libertarian handshake, no membership card, etc. Anyone can call themselves a libertarian. Still, the most annoying ones are those who fail to understand that the limited liability corporation is a profoundly privileged beast, one whose existence weakens such things as the individual right-to-contract, and individual property rights in general. I will stipulate at the outset that I think the corporation is a very powerful and useful invention, but it does require certain sorts of regulation if it isn’t to seriously harm individual rights, and often corporate libertarians seem more interested in eliminating those essential regulations than upholding the underlying individual rights.
Let’s consider how this can work with an extreme case: contract murder. I’m sure pretty much everyone would recognize that a contract to perform an illegal act is itself an illegal contract, and totally unenforceable. Furthermore, it’s pretty easy to see that both parties in a contract hit (the killer and the one who pays for the killing) are guilty of criminal conspiracy.
What would be the effect of making such contracts legal, and absolving the one who takes out the contract from penalty? Obviously this would weaken criminal law, but less obviously, it would also weaken contract law, since it would set civil law against criminal law. In a similar way, the institution of slavery weakens the institution of property, by putting property rights into opposition to human rights. Property rights in the South during the Civil War were often pretty shaky, what with the armies marching through and all.
The limited liability corporation puts many decisions behind a financial “firewall.” Stockholders and their agents (corporate boards and management) can undertake actions that, potentially, have far greater adverse consequences than they would deem acceptable if their whole net worth was at risk, as it would be in a proprietorship. This means that when individuals enter into contracts with corporations, the exchange is even more one-sided than if it were a matter of an individual contracting against someone with greater resources.
The anti-environmentalism exhibited by many corporate libertarians is another symptom of psychological projection and identification. If, for example, individuals do not have a property right on the air they breathe, then property rights (and individual rights generally) are pretty much meaningless. Similarly, if I own real property that has a stream running through it, I possess certain rights that preclude those upstream from having absolute authority over that stream as it passes through their property. In common law, this would be an easement; Federal and State laws are usually even more explicit and restrictive—to the fury of anti-environmentalists.
Similar easement rights surely exist for such things as migratory animals, flood control, protection of ground water, ecological integrity and so forth. I have an interest in all of these that is best expressed (in my view) as a property right. However, since such things are difficult to monetize, they do not show up in corporate thinking. Generally, only individuals value such things, and since corporate “rights” trump individual rights, then the corporate libertarian inevitably leans toward anti-environmentalism. For that matter, so does anyone who cannot imagine any value except insofar as it can be measured in monetary terms.
Saturday, December 29, 2007
Belting Out
Contract work is often a bit like the old Mission Impossible TV show: the Team is built around The Mission, which usually is subject to impossible constraints and the Team Members all bounce around trying to keep the makeup from slipping, and waiting for the Secretary to disavow all knowledge, etc.
And you get to meet management consultants, each and every one of them fully buzzword compliant and using all the fashionable tools to appear like they can actually deliver on whatever weird fever dream was sold to the organization that hired them. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, eh?
Anyway, one of the current fashions is Black Belts. There are Six Sigma Black Belts, Lean Black Belts, Process Management Black Belts, PFD Black Belts, and who knows what else. I just saw one business card that asserted the holder was a Master Black Belt, though it didn’t stipulate in what. Probably Six Sigma; I think that’s where this PR trick began, and, wouldn't you know it, it was a General Electric thing. There are, incidentally, also Green Belts in these things. I’m just glad they didn’t go for the whole rainbow, Yellow, Green, Blue, Brown, etc.
It’s the general opinion in at least my little stretch of the martial arts community that colored belts are mostly PR. It’s not like there is any licensing board that sets standards for the things. Anybody can hang out a shingle and award any colored belt to anyone they like, and many martial arts schools take the route of awarding lots of promotions quickly as a way of enticing students.
I can only report directly from Aikido, though I’ve had plenty of friends in other arts. For that matter, there are enough versions of Aikido that I can’t speak universally even for that one art. But generally speaking, my fellow Aikidoka don’t speak much of belt colors. For adults, it’s either white or black (In the first dojo to which I belonged, over 25 years ago, there were a few students who were informally given brown belts, but I haven’t seen that practice in over 20 years). The “black belts” are referred to as yudansha, and the first dan grade, shodan, basically means that the holder is now taken as a serious student of the art. There is also a tradition of beginning to wear a hakima (a sort of long black culotte), after promotion to shodan unless one’s sensei says to wear it sometime earlier. One of my fellow students once compared wearing a hakima to painting a big target on one’s back at seminars. It is certainly expected that someone wearing a hakima knows his/her limits in ukemi (having an aikido technique applied to you and surviving it unharmed).
And, of course, shodan (first dan grade) is only the beginning. Then there is nidan, sandan, yondan, and on up, though it gets mighty sparse above that. By the time you get to 5th and 6th dan, (godan and ryokudan) you might as well just give people’s names, since their art has become intensely personalized by then, and there are sufficiently few of them that everyone knows everyone else, more or less, and the differences in numerical rank become less important than their place in the community. More to the point, at that level, teaching is the important service, with Sensei (any teacher), Shidoin (instructor), Fuku Shidoin (assistant instructor), and Shihan (master instructor, or “teacher of teachers”) being the appellations.
I don’t really have a punch line (as it were) for these musings, except to maybe be glad that the Japanese terms haven’t been swiped as management consulting buzzwords. I don’t think I’d react very well to meeting a “Six Sigma Shihan.”
In case anyone is wondering, I began Aikido practice in 1980 at what was then called Aikido of Berkeley under Steve Sasaki Sensei. I had to quit in 1985, for health reasons, and I did not return to practice until 2000, at Eastshore Aikikai, under Elizibeth Lynn Sensei. I was promoted to shodan in the fall of 2005. It's a tradition to give certain promotions at the time of the New Year, and my promotion to nidan has just been announced.
And you get to meet management consultants, each and every one of them fully buzzword compliant and using all the fashionable tools to appear like they can actually deliver on whatever weird fever dream was sold to the organization that hired them. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, eh?
Anyway, one of the current fashions is Black Belts. There are Six Sigma Black Belts, Lean Black Belts, Process Management Black Belts, PFD Black Belts, and who knows what else. I just saw one business card that asserted the holder was a Master Black Belt, though it didn’t stipulate in what. Probably Six Sigma; I think that’s where this PR trick began, and, wouldn't you know it, it was a General Electric thing. There are, incidentally, also Green Belts in these things. I’m just glad they didn’t go for the whole rainbow, Yellow, Green, Blue, Brown, etc.
It’s the general opinion in at least my little stretch of the martial arts community that colored belts are mostly PR. It’s not like there is any licensing board that sets standards for the things. Anybody can hang out a shingle and award any colored belt to anyone they like, and many martial arts schools take the route of awarding lots of promotions quickly as a way of enticing students.
I can only report directly from Aikido, though I’ve had plenty of friends in other arts. For that matter, there are enough versions of Aikido that I can’t speak universally even for that one art. But generally speaking, my fellow Aikidoka don’t speak much of belt colors. For adults, it’s either white or black (In the first dojo to which I belonged, over 25 years ago, there were a few students who were informally given brown belts, but I haven’t seen that practice in over 20 years). The “black belts” are referred to as yudansha, and the first dan grade, shodan, basically means that the holder is now taken as a serious student of the art. There is also a tradition of beginning to wear a hakima (a sort of long black culotte), after promotion to shodan unless one’s sensei says to wear it sometime earlier. One of my fellow students once compared wearing a hakima to painting a big target on one’s back at seminars. It is certainly expected that someone wearing a hakima knows his/her limits in ukemi (having an aikido technique applied to you and surviving it unharmed).
And, of course, shodan (first dan grade) is only the beginning. Then there is nidan, sandan, yondan, and on up, though it gets mighty sparse above that. By the time you get to 5th and 6th dan, (godan and ryokudan) you might as well just give people’s names, since their art has become intensely personalized by then, and there are sufficiently few of them that everyone knows everyone else, more or less, and the differences in numerical rank become less important than their place in the community. More to the point, at that level, teaching is the important service, with Sensei (any teacher), Shidoin (instructor), Fuku Shidoin (assistant instructor), and Shihan (master instructor, or “teacher of teachers”) being the appellations.
I don’t really have a punch line (as it were) for these musings, except to maybe be glad that the Japanese terms haven’t been swiped as management consulting buzzwords. I don’t think I’d react very well to meeting a “Six Sigma Shihan.”
In case anyone is wondering, I began Aikido practice in 1980 at what was then called Aikido of Berkeley under Steve Sasaki Sensei. I had to quit in 1985, for health reasons, and I did not return to practice until 2000, at Eastshore Aikikai, under Elizibeth Lynn Sensei. I was promoted to shodan in the fall of 2005. It's a tradition to give certain promotions at the time of the New Year, and my promotion to nidan has just been announced.
Friday, November 30, 2007
Detcord
So I just got back from Loscon, and boy, are my arms tired. Seriously, we drove, and that always tires my arms.
One of the things about gatherings of all sorts, of course, is that you meet interesting people with interesting stories. One of the folks I shared a panel with (Future Horror, I think it was) is a special effects pyrotechnician. That's part of the deal with Loscon, the connection to the movie biz, especially the technonerdy parts, which I find fascinating because, well, because.
After the panel, he told me a story about going through airport security. The name of this company was on his briefcase, bags, etc., and it included the word "pyrotechnics" and possibly, "explosives." Never mind. He was "randomly selected" for a bag check, and the guy swabbed his briefcase, then fed it into the sniffer. He scratched his head, then took another swab sample and fed it in again. Then he looked at the guy and asked, "What's PETN?"
That would be pentaerythritol tetranitrate, official IUPAC name: 1,3-Dinitrato-2,2-bis (nitratomethyl) propane. It's the principle ingredient in detcord, detonating cord that's used as a superfast fuse for triggering simultaneous explosions.
Okay, so the name "Department of Homeland Security" gives me the Orwellian creeps to start with. I noticed several weeks ago that on the TV show Smallville, they concocted a fictional name for the same organization and called it the "Department of Domestic Security." Smallville is based on Superman, a comic book character. What does it say when a comic book story has a less hokey name than the real thing?
Many people have noted the ongoing dynamic of "terrorism," where real or imagined threats are taken as license not to make policy changes that might actually address security, but rather as excuses to erode legal rights, expand police authority, and generally harass segments of the populace. Part of the wink, wink, nudge, nudge is that the Authoritarian Right assumes that these powers will never be used on them, but rather on other ethnic groups and the Right's political—and social—enemies. They are wrong, of course, but they never figure that part out. There are Russians who still yearn for the good old days of Stalin. For that matter, some still yearn for the Czar.
A recent trilogy of episodes on South Park had the nice conceit of terrorists invading "Imaginationland," literally attacking, not reality, but our imaginations. Last June, after Amy had her toothpaste confiscated by airline security, I realized that the policy of confiscating gels and liquids was to protect us from the terrorists in "Die Hard with a Vengence," i.e., from a type of explosive that does not actually exist, but has appeared in a movie.
Then there is the phenomenon of various pundits just salivating at the prospect of another 9/11 type event, often fantasizing it taking out some "left wing type" who have transgressed, who "don't love America," at least certainly not enough to fantasize about having famous landmarks blown up because they didn't like some election result.
Okay, so none of this is new, and, frankly, there are plenty of people who have been commenting on the politics of it for longer and at greater length than I have, and many of them are better at it. So why am I adding my oar to the water? Because of the other little thing that slips by in this story.
The airport security guard who asks "What is PETN?" is not to blame in this story. He's underpaid and undertrained and he knows full well that his job is basically harassing people, not actually improving their security. Besides, the sheer boredom of swabbing people's shoes and briefcases day after day would turn almost anyone's brain to mush.
But this stuff is supposed to be important, right? Shouldn't they at least try for the appearance of competence? Well, that would violate Conservative Movement Ideology, wouldn't it? I mean, government is supposed to be incompetent.
But wait. These are not government employees. They are employees of companies that have been contracted to provide these services. These companies are supposed to be "more efficient" than government.
Ah, but more efficient at what? Well, the purpose of it all has come to be "provide shareholder value," which is to say, "to make money." And there is some efficiency there, after all. But paying your workers well, training them, well, that just gets in the way of efficiency.
I once saw a documentary on John L. Lewis, who ran the United Mineworkers of America for 40 years. It was mostly coal mining, and coal mining is dirty, dangerous, and brutal. Lewis pushed not only for more money, but also higher safety standards. And he made what amounted to a long term bargain with the coal industry: they would not oppose mechanization if the miners got their fair share of the wealth that derived from enhanced productivity. It made sense; mechanized jobs required higher skills, more experience, and were safer. But there would be fewer of them. So Lewis got more money for fewer workers, undercutting his own political power for the good of those that remained.
The same thing happened with longshoremen when containerization came in. Nowadays, "stevedore" is essentially an archaicism; the men in the longshoremens union run those giant cranes and are paid very well. Ben tells me that Eric Hoffer wrote about the phenomenon in one of his books.
That was the deal as everyone understood it after WWII: rising productivity meant better pay in fewer jobs, but the economy as a whole would create jobs, especially "knowledge based" jobs that required college degrees, etc., so overall wages would increase and productivity would rise. They hadn't coined the phrase "win/win" yet, but there it was.
Somewhere along the line, that pact was broken. Somewhere between 1950 and now, the new business model became that of a South American banana republic: beat down the wages for the masses of workers so that those at the top could skim more cream. This is sometimes called the "Walmart model."
It pains me to think that both the engineering profession and science fiction were enablers to breaking the pact, but there that is as well. Engineers have always been their own worst enemies, partly because we love the work so much, and partly because so many engineers wind up in management. But I do not get the part about slowly undercutting the value of expertise and training. It took me forever to realize that new technologies were being accepted or rejected on the basis of whether or not they allowed the substitution of unskilled labor for skilled labor. And once that process begins, you get more and more highly capable people shoved into lower and lower scale jobs. I've lost count of the number of people I know who have to "dumb down" their resumes to find employment. Then, because the workforce is, in fact, overqualified, really, really, stupid managerial decisions sometimes can be made to work—simply because of the sheer competence of the labor force.
As for science fiction, Analog magazine has been the SF equivalent of Fox News for at least a couple of decades now. When was the last time you read an SF story that portrayed a union or government bureaucrat in a favorable light?
At the top, of course, the push for this new business model is the same as it always was: more booty for those who divvy up the spoils. There has been a huge effort to rationalize the vast sums paid to these folks as "the superstar effect," as if a CEO who gets a $50 million pay packet when his company has lost $2 billion in the quarter is somehow comparable to Barry Bonds. Or some hold that "people skills" have become the most important thing in the economy. Which is true, provided "people skills" is shorthand for "kiss up, kick down," treachery, mendacity, and the ability to pass off criminal behavior as standard business practice.
One of the things about gatherings of all sorts, of course, is that you meet interesting people with interesting stories. One of the folks I shared a panel with (Future Horror, I think it was) is a special effects pyrotechnician. That's part of the deal with Loscon, the connection to the movie biz, especially the technonerdy parts, which I find fascinating because, well, because.
After the panel, he told me a story about going through airport security. The name of this company was on his briefcase, bags, etc., and it included the word "pyrotechnics" and possibly, "explosives." Never mind. He was "randomly selected" for a bag check, and the guy swabbed his briefcase, then fed it into the sniffer. He scratched his head, then took another swab sample and fed it in again. Then he looked at the guy and asked, "What's PETN?"
That would be pentaerythritol tetranitrate, official IUPAC name: 1,3-Dinitrato-2,2-bis (nitratomethyl) propane. It's the principle ingredient in detcord, detonating cord that's used as a superfast fuse for triggering simultaneous explosions.
Okay, so the name "Department of Homeland Security" gives me the Orwellian creeps to start with. I noticed several weeks ago that on the TV show Smallville, they concocted a fictional name for the same organization and called it the "Department of Domestic Security." Smallville is based on Superman, a comic book character. What does it say when a comic book story has a less hokey name than the real thing?
Many people have noted the ongoing dynamic of "terrorism," where real or imagined threats are taken as license not to make policy changes that might actually address security, but rather as excuses to erode legal rights, expand police authority, and generally harass segments of the populace. Part of the wink, wink, nudge, nudge is that the Authoritarian Right assumes that these powers will never be used on them, but rather on other ethnic groups and the Right's political—and social—enemies. They are wrong, of course, but they never figure that part out. There are Russians who still yearn for the good old days of Stalin. For that matter, some still yearn for the Czar.
A recent trilogy of episodes on South Park had the nice conceit of terrorists invading "Imaginationland," literally attacking, not reality, but our imaginations. Last June, after Amy had her toothpaste confiscated by airline security, I realized that the policy of confiscating gels and liquids was to protect us from the terrorists in "Die Hard with a Vengence," i.e., from a type of explosive that does not actually exist, but has appeared in a movie.
Then there is the phenomenon of various pundits just salivating at the prospect of another 9/11 type event, often fantasizing it taking out some "left wing type" who have transgressed, who "don't love America," at least certainly not enough to fantasize about having famous landmarks blown up because they didn't like some election result.
Okay, so none of this is new, and, frankly, there are plenty of people who have been commenting on the politics of it for longer and at greater length than I have, and many of them are better at it. So why am I adding my oar to the water? Because of the other little thing that slips by in this story.
The airport security guard who asks "What is PETN?" is not to blame in this story. He's underpaid and undertrained and he knows full well that his job is basically harassing people, not actually improving their security. Besides, the sheer boredom of swabbing people's shoes and briefcases day after day would turn almost anyone's brain to mush.
But this stuff is supposed to be important, right? Shouldn't they at least try for the appearance of competence? Well, that would violate Conservative Movement Ideology, wouldn't it? I mean, government is supposed to be incompetent.
But wait. These are not government employees. They are employees of companies that have been contracted to provide these services. These companies are supposed to be "more efficient" than government.
Ah, but more efficient at what? Well, the purpose of it all has come to be "provide shareholder value," which is to say, "to make money." And there is some efficiency there, after all. But paying your workers well, training them, well, that just gets in the way of efficiency.
I once saw a documentary on John L. Lewis, who ran the United Mineworkers of America for 40 years. It was mostly coal mining, and coal mining is dirty, dangerous, and brutal. Lewis pushed not only for more money, but also higher safety standards. And he made what amounted to a long term bargain with the coal industry: they would not oppose mechanization if the miners got their fair share of the wealth that derived from enhanced productivity. It made sense; mechanized jobs required higher skills, more experience, and were safer. But there would be fewer of them. So Lewis got more money for fewer workers, undercutting his own political power for the good of those that remained.
The same thing happened with longshoremen when containerization came in. Nowadays, "stevedore" is essentially an archaicism; the men in the longshoremens union run those giant cranes and are paid very well. Ben tells me that Eric Hoffer wrote about the phenomenon in one of his books.
That was the deal as everyone understood it after WWII: rising productivity meant better pay in fewer jobs, but the economy as a whole would create jobs, especially "knowledge based" jobs that required college degrees, etc., so overall wages would increase and productivity would rise. They hadn't coined the phrase "win/win" yet, but there it was.
Somewhere along the line, that pact was broken. Somewhere between 1950 and now, the new business model became that of a South American banana republic: beat down the wages for the masses of workers so that those at the top could skim more cream. This is sometimes called the "Walmart model."
It pains me to think that both the engineering profession and science fiction were enablers to breaking the pact, but there that is as well. Engineers have always been their own worst enemies, partly because we love the work so much, and partly because so many engineers wind up in management. But I do not get the part about slowly undercutting the value of expertise and training. It took me forever to realize that new technologies were being accepted or rejected on the basis of whether or not they allowed the substitution of unskilled labor for skilled labor. And once that process begins, you get more and more highly capable people shoved into lower and lower scale jobs. I've lost count of the number of people I know who have to "dumb down" their resumes to find employment. Then, because the workforce is, in fact, overqualified, really, really, stupid managerial decisions sometimes can be made to work—simply because of the sheer competence of the labor force.
As for science fiction, Analog magazine has been the SF equivalent of Fox News for at least a couple of decades now. When was the last time you read an SF story that portrayed a union or government bureaucrat in a favorable light?
At the top, of course, the push for this new business model is the same as it always was: more booty for those who divvy up the spoils. There has been a huge effort to rationalize the vast sums paid to these folks as "the superstar effect," as if a CEO who gets a $50 million pay packet when his company has lost $2 billion in the quarter is somehow comparable to Barry Bonds. Or some hold that "people skills" have become the most important thing in the economy. Which is true, provided "people skills" is shorthand for "kiss up, kick down," treachery, mendacity, and the ability to pass off criminal behavior as standard business practice.
Monday, October 1, 2007
Electric Cars
I haven’t seen “Who Killed the Electric Car?” a documentary directed by Chris Paine about the EV1, a General Motors electric automobile that was withdrawn from (limited) production in the late 1990s, after a California Air Resources Board rule mandating some “zero emission vehicles” was rescinded. That doesn't mean I don't have opinions about the matter, of course.
There’s been a fair amount written about the entire affair, and I’ll only add the point that I suspect that one major factor was never addressed by the filmmakers or anyone else. In every large organization, the major decisions at the top have more to do with personal infighting amongst the managers than anything external. There were people pushing the project, for a variety of reasons, including some who wanted it sabotaged from the beginning, and they got their way. To whatever extent it was a con job designed to demonstrate that there was no market for electric vehicles only underscores the point. The GM divisions that were making big bucks selling gas guzzlers were never going to let an alternative vision get a fair hearing; the eventual fate of the Saturn is a good demonstration of the phenomenon.
Nevertheless, we do have some electric cars on the road now, though they are called “hybrids” and they burn gasoline in a motor to generate electricity that then runs electric motors to power the drive train. Some versions of the hybrid have the gasoline engine connected directly to the drive train and use the electric motors to add power when needed, and to recharge the batteries when the drive demands are less than the gasoline engine output.
A major part of the deal with hybrids is to greatly narrow the operating conditions of the gasoline engine. Under constant, optimized load conditions, you can finely tune the engine performance to maximize fuel economy and minimize emissions of pollutants. The other secret of any electric engine is that it can use “regenerative braking,” i.e., when the car slows (or if you’re going downhill), the electric motors become electric generators and you can recapture and store a substantial amount of the vehicle’s kinetic energy back into the batteries.
Having the internal combustion (IC) motor available finesses the major drawback of electric vehicles, limited range. Typically, EVs only manage less than 100 miles on a full charge, and take substantial time to recharge (1-15 hrs). Hybrids have the full range of gasoline powered vehicles.
The next obvious step in the development pathway is the “pluggable” hybrid, which allows the vehicle to be brought up to full charge from an external electrical source (and there would be a larger battery pack, bringing the thing closer to the true electric vehicle in electric storage). For a substantial number of commuters, the IC engine would seldom need to be engaged; one fellow who has “hacked” his Japanese hybrid claims that his overall fuel efficiency is over 100 MPG, though that doesn’t take into account the fuel burned to produce the pluggable power. (Actually, I seem to recall that he has home solar power panels, so he’s just the greenest of the green, isn’t he?).
Some environmentalists (and some fake environmentalists who carry water for the energy industry status quo), argue that electric vehicles merely shift the power generation (and pollution) elsewhere. That ignores the fact that IC engines operate at a pretty low thermodynamic fuel efficiency (the efficiency of converting the heat of combustion of the fuel to motive force, ignoring losses in the drive train), generally around 25%, though highly optimized, high compression engines can exceed 30%. By contrast, ordinary steam turbines generally start at 40% efficiency, and combined cycle and other tricks make more modern large stationary plants as much as 55% efficient.
It’s also considerably easier to manage pollution control from a single, large point source (whether the regulatory process manages to accomplish this is another story), and there is some hope that such things as geological sequestration of combustion CO2 might reduce the greenhouse gas emission from such facilities as well. Such tricks are pretty well out of the question for mobile vehicles.
Then there is the matter of the impending changeover from fossil fuel driven electric power generation to renewable sources. Wind power is already economically competitive to fossil fuels in many circumstances, and will become more so as the greenhouse gas "externalities” (economist-speak for “beggar thy neighbor”), are rationalized. As a scientist and engineer, I’m also a fan of nuclear power; I just don’t trust our current industrial oligarchy to do it in anything like a safe and sane manner.
There is also the photovoltaic option. The overall field and the statistics behind it are pretty slippery, but it looks like the cost per peak watt for photovoltaics have been halving at something like 5-10 year intervals, while the install capacity has been going up more dramatically, as each price reduction opens up a larger market. Also, in contrast to the U.S., Europe and Japan have been using regulatory action, subsidies, and guaranteed market tactics to encourage alternative energy, rather than discourage them. (In the U.S., a giant game of “crack the whip” has some governmental entities attempting to encourage alternate energy sources, while other entities penalize them, which is a good way to generate paralysis and wasted development efforts).
If you put photovoltaic cells on an automobile, you don’t get a “solar car” in the sense of being able to run on sunlight alone, but (the last time I did the calcs anyway), you do get the equivalent of about 10-20 miles per day of solar driving in the sunbelt areas of the country. That’s not trivial in terms of oil consumption; on average, it could reduce the fuel consumption of a hybrid by around 15-25%. If you’re already driving to work on the charge you got the night before, you’re down to needing maybe a half-gallon of gasoline per day on your daily commute.
That looks like the natural channel for the technology to follow, but there are plenty of things that can screw up a lovely vision of the future, including those who just plain want to keep everything “under control.”
There’s been a fair amount written about the entire affair, and I’ll only add the point that I suspect that one major factor was never addressed by the filmmakers or anyone else. In every large organization, the major decisions at the top have more to do with personal infighting amongst the managers than anything external. There were people pushing the project, for a variety of reasons, including some who wanted it sabotaged from the beginning, and they got their way. To whatever extent it was a con job designed to demonstrate that there was no market for electric vehicles only underscores the point. The GM divisions that were making big bucks selling gas guzzlers were never going to let an alternative vision get a fair hearing; the eventual fate of the Saturn is a good demonstration of the phenomenon.
Nevertheless, we do have some electric cars on the road now, though they are called “hybrids” and they burn gasoline in a motor to generate electricity that then runs electric motors to power the drive train. Some versions of the hybrid have the gasoline engine connected directly to the drive train and use the electric motors to add power when needed, and to recharge the batteries when the drive demands are less than the gasoline engine output.
A major part of the deal with hybrids is to greatly narrow the operating conditions of the gasoline engine. Under constant, optimized load conditions, you can finely tune the engine performance to maximize fuel economy and minimize emissions of pollutants. The other secret of any electric engine is that it can use “regenerative braking,” i.e., when the car slows (or if you’re going downhill), the electric motors become electric generators and you can recapture and store a substantial amount of the vehicle’s kinetic energy back into the batteries.
Having the internal combustion (IC) motor available finesses the major drawback of electric vehicles, limited range. Typically, EVs only manage less than 100 miles on a full charge, and take substantial time to recharge (1-15 hrs). Hybrids have the full range of gasoline powered vehicles.
The next obvious step in the development pathway is the “pluggable” hybrid, which allows the vehicle to be brought up to full charge from an external electrical source (and there would be a larger battery pack, bringing the thing closer to the true electric vehicle in electric storage). For a substantial number of commuters, the IC engine would seldom need to be engaged; one fellow who has “hacked” his Japanese hybrid claims that his overall fuel efficiency is over 100 MPG, though that doesn’t take into account the fuel burned to produce the pluggable power. (Actually, I seem to recall that he has home solar power panels, so he’s just the greenest of the green, isn’t he?).
Some environmentalists (and some fake environmentalists who carry water for the energy industry status quo), argue that electric vehicles merely shift the power generation (and pollution) elsewhere. That ignores the fact that IC engines operate at a pretty low thermodynamic fuel efficiency (the efficiency of converting the heat of combustion of the fuel to motive force, ignoring losses in the drive train), generally around 25%, though highly optimized, high compression engines can exceed 30%. By contrast, ordinary steam turbines generally start at 40% efficiency, and combined cycle and other tricks make more modern large stationary plants as much as 55% efficient.
It’s also considerably easier to manage pollution control from a single, large point source (whether the regulatory process manages to accomplish this is another story), and there is some hope that such things as geological sequestration of combustion CO2 might reduce the greenhouse gas emission from such facilities as well. Such tricks are pretty well out of the question for mobile vehicles.
Then there is the matter of the impending changeover from fossil fuel driven electric power generation to renewable sources. Wind power is already economically competitive to fossil fuels in many circumstances, and will become more so as the greenhouse gas "externalities” (economist-speak for “beggar thy neighbor”), are rationalized. As a scientist and engineer, I’m also a fan of nuclear power; I just don’t trust our current industrial oligarchy to do it in anything like a safe and sane manner.
There is also the photovoltaic option. The overall field and the statistics behind it are pretty slippery, but it looks like the cost per peak watt for photovoltaics have been halving at something like 5-10 year intervals, while the install capacity has been going up more dramatically, as each price reduction opens up a larger market. Also, in contrast to the U.S., Europe and Japan have been using regulatory action, subsidies, and guaranteed market tactics to encourage alternative energy, rather than discourage them. (In the U.S., a giant game of “crack the whip” has some governmental entities attempting to encourage alternate energy sources, while other entities penalize them, which is a good way to generate paralysis and wasted development efforts).
If you put photovoltaic cells on an automobile, you don’t get a “solar car” in the sense of being able to run on sunlight alone, but (the last time I did the calcs anyway), you do get the equivalent of about 10-20 miles per day of solar driving in the sunbelt areas of the country. That’s not trivial in terms of oil consumption; on average, it could reduce the fuel consumption of a hybrid by around 15-25%. If you’re already driving to work on the charge you got the night before, you’re down to needing maybe a half-gallon of gasoline per day on your daily commute.
That looks like the natural channel for the technology to follow, but there are plenty of things that can screw up a lovely vision of the future, including those who just plain want to keep everything “under control.”
Thursday, September 6, 2007
The Little Scotsman
The Nashville Public Library that was home to much of my misspent youth was one of the original Carnegie Libraries, built in 1904, with the book stacks in an iron skeleton and translucent glass floors that were characteristic of many libraries before electric lighting took over the world. Leather soled shoes on glass generates a lot of static electricity on dry winter days, and many was the time when the first touch to the railing on the metal stairs brought this library patron a sudden exit from the world of daydreams.
A friend taught me the trick of holding a metal coin tightly and touching it to the railing to discharge the static. I’m not sure whether this was to reduce the shock (which it did, if only by eliminating the surprise and reducing involuntary muscle contraction because of the tight grip), or to maximize the spark. Sometimes we’d get sparks that traveled a goodly inch or two, occasionally with branching, like real lightning.
Nashville got a new library building in 1965, but for years afterwards, there were still books on the stacks that bore the imprint of the Carnegie Library of Nashville.
There was a feature on Carnegie a few nights ago on the PBS News Hour. While Economics Correspondent Paul Solman did a pretty good job, given the venue and time constraints, he missed some pretty important points.
First, Carnegie actually considered himself a friend of the working man, much like Henry Ford did a while later (before Ford, like Carnegie, resorted to the hired muscle of the Pinkerton Agency). In fact, in 1886, Carnegie wrote an article defending unions. But when the workers at the Homestead steel mill began thinking of the plant as more theirs than his (culminating in a worker seizure of the plant in 1892), Carnegie took action.
But he took action by proxy. Carnegie was actually on a trans-Atlantic voyage at the time that his partner, Henry Frick (who had joined his own coke making operation with Carnegie Steel in 1881), hired the Pinkertons who laid siege to the plant. The Pinkertons lost the battle, but the incident gave the Governor of Pennsylvania the excuse to send in the state militia, who evicted the workers and strikebreakers were then used to re-open the mill.
Carnegie was in telegraphic communication with Frick during the entire episode, and his reputation as a “friend of the working man” pretty much ended in that incident. But Carnegie continued to consider himself a friend of the downtrodden to his dying day, and always blamed the Homestead “incident” on Frick. He may have used that as part of his rationalization for attempting to later screw Frick in a buyout deal in 1900.
In 1901, Carnegie sold Carnegie steel to J. P. Morgan, or, more accurately to the bank, the J. P. Morgan and Co., to form the core of U. S. Steel. U. S. Steel was capitalized at a billion dollars; Carnegie was paid $480 million, and became the richest man in the world.
Carnegie was a Spenserian Social Darwinist, but, unlike many Social Darwinists, he didn’t believe in inherited wealth as a blood right. Instead, as he had written in “The Gospel of Wealth,” he believed in the “stewardship” of society by the wealthy, and that included large doses of philanthropy. Upon obtaining half a billion in 1901 dollars (on the order of an inflation adjusted 10 billion in today’s dollars, but a vastly greater sum in terms of, for example the fraction of U.S. GNP), Carnegie proceeded to give most of it away, to foundations of varying purposes, including the building of libraries.
But here is what you seldom hear in stories about Carnegie: Yes, he built libraries and put books in them, but he did not pay the salaries to librarians; he did not pay for the maintenance and upkeep of the buildings. Those tasks were left to the cities that got the libraries. Carnegie leveraged his philanthropy with a large amount of public money; eventually far more than he had actually given.
This was social engineering on a large scale, and it used private money to sway the priorities of the public purse. I was, as I have said many times, a major beneficiary of Carnegie’s social engineering. I daresay that I was just the sort of bright, self motivated individual that he had in mind as a beneficiary. Indeed, Carnegie started his real business ascent at a telegraph operator (see “I have a Code,”and made his first stake by investing in deals that he learned of as the telegrapher, i.e., what we now call insider trading.
Andrew Carnegie is in no way any sort of libertarian, Randite, or even Spenserian
role model. A great deal of his success had to do with being fortunately the right person in the right place at the right time. He lived in a time when government was at the beck and call of wealth, and his wealth derived in part from the land grants given to railroads (which bought his steel), the use to state troops to break strikes, and a complete disregard for polluting the property (and bodies) of other people. In the end, his greatest philanthropic achievement was to divert tax money to a purpose of his conception.
Yes, I’m an heir to Carnegie’s philanthropy, and rightly glad of it. Still, we bite the hands that feed us, and when you set out to enable education, especially self-education, don’t be surprised if some of the ideas that result are not entirely what you had in mind.
A friend taught me the trick of holding a metal coin tightly and touching it to the railing to discharge the static. I’m not sure whether this was to reduce the shock (which it did, if only by eliminating the surprise and reducing involuntary muscle contraction because of the tight grip), or to maximize the spark. Sometimes we’d get sparks that traveled a goodly inch or two, occasionally with branching, like real lightning.
Nashville got a new library building in 1965, but for years afterwards, there were still books on the stacks that bore the imprint of the Carnegie Library of Nashville.
There was a feature on Carnegie a few nights ago on the PBS News Hour. While Economics Correspondent Paul Solman did a pretty good job, given the venue and time constraints, he missed some pretty important points.
First, Carnegie actually considered himself a friend of the working man, much like Henry Ford did a while later (before Ford, like Carnegie, resorted to the hired muscle of the Pinkerton Agency). In fact, in 1886, Carnegie wrote an article defending unions. But when the workers at the Homestead steel mill began thinking of the plant as more theirs than his (culminating in a worker seizure of the plant in 1892), Carnegie took action.
But he took action by proxy. Carnegie was actually on a trans-Atlantic voyage at the time that his partner, Henry Frick (who had joined his own coke making operation with Carnegie Steel in 1881), hired the Pinkertons who laid siege to the plant. The Pinkertons lost the battle, but the incident gave the Governor of Pennsylvania the excuse to send in the state militia, who evicted the workers and strikebreakers were then used to re-open the mill.
Carnegie was in telegraphic communication with Frick during the entire episode, and his reputation as a “friend of the working man” pretty much ended in that incident. But Carnegie continued to consider himself a friend of the downtrodden to his dying day, and always blamed the Homestead “incident” on Frick. He may have used that as part of his rationalization for attempting to later screw Frick in a buyout deal in 1900.
In 1901, Carnegie sold Carnegie steel to J. P. Morgan, or, more accurately to the bank, the J. P. Morgan and Co., to form the core of U. S. Steel. U. S. Steel was capitalized at a billion dollars; Carnegie was paid $480 million, and became the richest man in the world.
Carnegie was a Spenserian Social Darwinist, but, unlike many Social Darwinists, he didn’t believe in inherited wealth as a blood right. Instead, as he had written in “The Gospel of Wealth,” he believed in the “stewardship” of society by the wealthy, and that included large doses of philanthropy. Upon obtaining half a billion in 1901 dollars (on the order of an inflation adjusted 10 billion in today’s dollars, but a vastly greater sum in terms of, for example the fraction of U.S. GNP), Carnegie proceeded to give most of it away, to foundations of varying purposes, including the building of libraries.
But here is what you seldom hear in stories about Carnegie: Yes, he built libraries and put books in them, but he did not pay the salaries to librarians; he did not pay for the maintenance and upkeep of the buildings. Those tasks were left to the cities that got the libraries. Carnegie leveraged his philanthropy with a large amount of public money; eventually far more than he had actually given.
This was social engineering on a large scale, and it used private money to sway the priorities of the public purse. I was, as I have said many times, a major beneficiary of Carnegie’s social engineering. I daresay that I was just the sort of bright, self motivated individual that he had in mind as a beneficiary. Indeed, Carnegie started his real business ascent at a telegraph operator (see “I have a Code,”and made his first stake by investing in deals that he learned of as the telegrapher, i.e., what we now call insider trading.
Andrew Carnegie is in no way any sort of libertarian, Randite, or even Spenserian
role model. A great deal of his success had to do with being fortunately the right person in the right place at the right time. He lived in a time when government was at the beck and call of wealth, and his wealth derived in part from the land grants given to railroads (which bought his steel), the use to state troops to break strikes, and a complete disregard for polluting the property (and bodies) of other people. In the end, his greatest philanthropic achievement was to divert tax money to a purpose of his conception.
Yes, I’m an heir to Carnegie’s philanthropy, and rightly glad of it. Still, we bite the hands that feed us, and when you set out to enable education, especially self-education, don’t be surprised if some of the ideas that result are not entirely what you had in mind.
Friday, March 2, 2007
Fighting City Hall
Despite what your generic Libertarian/Randite/Nietzchean/Rugged Individualist might try to argue, human beings are pretty much natural collectivists. Real hermits are rare, and usually crazy, to boot. We begin life with, at the very least, familial links, and if those are sour, it’s hard to have anything other than a subsequently sour life. We clump together in tribes, extended families, communities, SIGs, clubs, parties, religions, nations, and ideologies, each with membership requirements, secret handshakes, passwords, responsibilities and privileges.
Now the philosophy of individualism wasn’t a 19th Century invention, though it’s always worth repeating that all ancient traditions date from the latter half of the 19th Century. But the Stoics and the Epicureans have some claim to individualism, and although the “superior man” mentioned in the I Ching is also “The Boss,” there is certainly some notion of individual focus to be found within those poorly translated texts. (Given the age of the thing, I daresay that even the Chinese is a poor translation, just as 18th Century English novels read differently now, despite having exactly the same words as originally written).
Each of us is heir to an immense wealth of pre-existing human knowledge, not just the writings of the past, but the wisdom represented by tradition, the common sense encapsulated in “standard practice” and the wealth of all the pre-existing capital, the roads, the buildings, the cleared forests, grandma’s wedding ring and the old homestead. Without all of that, each of us is an ignorant primate shivering in the dark.
Moreover, even taking all of that as given, even granting the idea that past is prolog, and now is the time me, myself, and I will choose to strike out on my own self as a pure individualist, the fact of the matter is that those groups of organized people I see around me are just so damn big and powerful that I might as well be the Monty Python flea assaulting a bull elk.
Given that reality, it’s easy to see the appeal of the authoritarian. Maybe one can rise to the top of the authority pyramid, to command from the heights of power and write one’s own name on the pages of history. And if not (and for the vast majority of people, not will be the operative word), it can be enough to identify with the tribe, the herd, the nation, especially if that group is personified as an individual, the Ruler, the Big Man, Der Fuehrer, the Man, the Boss, the Big Cheese, the Head Guy, the Top Dog, the Man at the Top.
Heinlein himself isn’t a good example, because, bless him, he was as idiosyncratic as they come. But I’d always wondered how it was that he became a patron saint of libertarians, opining as he did so frequently, about the desirability of military service. Ah yes, it’s The Army of One. It’s a puzzle as great as how Ayn Rand, Ms Atheism personified, seems to be beloved by so many who wound up as Christian Conservatives.
But add in enough Freudian mechanisms, Identification, Projection, and the ever popular Rationalization and Denial, and you can get from point A is A to point Pi (transcendental and irrational) without even pausing to take a deep breath.
There’s a truly fascinating (and entertaining) bit of rumination posted on Economist Brad Delong’s site about the invention of the “corporate person:”
I’ve always held that the “limited liability” privilege granted to corporations was a sort of encapsulation of aristocratic, and hence, state power, so social, i.e. governmental regulation of corporations is not only desirable, but inevitable. The only real question there is who reaps the benefits. I’ll still hold to that, but Delong points out that the granting of “rights” to the corporate person was an example of “judicial activism” in the late 19th Century, by the U.S. Supreme Court. It was, in fact, a deliberate (and totally inconsistent) conflating of the original constitutional use of “person” (referring to slaves), and “corporate person.”
Thus, corporations came to have “rights,” including free speech and the right to due process.
The idea of “corporate rights” like “states rights” is to my way of thinking pernicious. Rights are constructs created to protect fragile individuals from powerful groups. The idea of collective “rights” looks an awful lot like a way of undercutting the very idea of individual rights, confusing the issue in order for groups to gang up on individuals.
But hey, I’m just one guy. Why should my opinion matter? You can’t fight city hall. Or, for that matter, General Electric.
Now the philosophy of individualism wasn’t a 19th Century invention, though it’s always worth repeating that all ancient traditions date from the latter half of the 19th Century. But the Stoics and the Epicureans have some claim to individualism, and although the “superior man” mentioned in the I Ching is also “The Boss,” there is certainly some notion of individual focus to be found within those poorly translated texts. (Given the age of the thing, I daresay that even the Chinese is a poor translation, just as 18th Century English novels read differently now, despite having exactly the same words as originally written).
Each of us is heir to an immense wealth of pre-existing human knowledge, not just the writings of the past, but the wisdom represented by tradition, the common sense encapsulated in “standard practice” and the wealth of all the pre-existing capital, the roads, the buildings, the cleared forests, grandma’s wedding ring and the old homestead. Without all of that, each of us is an ignorant primate shivering in the dark.
Moreover, even taking all of that as given, even granting the idea that past is prolog, and now is the time me, myself, and I will choose to strike out on my own self as a pure individualist, the fact of the matter is that those groups of organized people I see around me are just so damn big and powerful that I might as well be the Monty Python flea assaulting a bull elk.
Given that reality, it’s easy to see the appeal of the authoritarian. Maybe one can rise to the top of the authority pyramid, to command from the heights of power and write one’s own name on the pages of history. And if not (and for the vast majority of people, not will be the operative word), it can be enough to identify with the tribe, the herd, the nation, especially if that group is personified as an individual, the Ruler, the Big Man, Der Fuehrer, the Man, the Boss, the Big Cheese, the Head Guy, the Top Dog, the Man at the Top.
Heinlein himself isn’t a good example, because, bless him, he was as idiosyncratic as they come. But I’d always wondered how it was that he became a patron saint of libertarians, opining as he did so frequently, about the desirability of military service. Ah yes, it’s The Army of One. It’s a puzzle as great as how Ayn Rand, Ms Atheism personified, seems to be beloved by so many who wound up as Christian Conservatives.
But add in enough Freudian mechanisms, Identification, Projection, and the ever popular Rationalization and Denial, and you can get from point A is A to point Pi (transcendental and irrational) without even pausing to take a deep breath.
There’s a truly fascinating (and entertaining) bit of rumination posted on Economist Brad Delong’s site about the invention of the “corporate person:”
I’ve always held that the “limited liability” privilege granted to corporations was a sort of encapsulation of aristocratic, and hence, state power, so social, i.e. governmental regulation of corporations is not only desirable, but inevitable. The only real question there is who reaps the benefits. I’ll still hold to that, but Delong points out that the granting of “rights” to the corporate person was an example of “judicial activism” in the late 19th Century, by the U.S. Supreme Court. It was, in fact, a deliberate (and totally inconsistent) conflating of the original constitutional use of “person” (referring to slaves), and “corporate person.”
Thus, corporations came to have “rights,” including free speech and the right to due process.
The idea of “corporate rights” like “states rights” is to my way of thinking pernicious. Rights are constructs created to protect fragile individuals from powerful groups. The idea of collective “rights” looks an awful lot like a way of undercutting the very idea of individual rights, confusing the issue in order for groups to gang up on individuals.
But hey, I’m just one guy. Why should my opinion matter? You can’t fight city hall. Or, for that matter, General Electric.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
