…..and by that I mean do modern liberal democracies, even within the constraints of constitution and law, place too much emphasis on sustaining individual freedom to behave, profit and consume as desired and as means allow?
quotes of note
"“Yes, reason has been a part of organized religion, ever since two nudists took dietary advice from a talking snake.”
— Jon Stewart..
"God is playing a comic to an audience that's afraid to laugh."
“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
— Voltaire..
"What happens when we're dead? The irony is that all our questions will be answered after we die. We spend our whole life trying to figure out the truth and the only way we'll find out what it is, is to get hit by a bus. And the only comfort that religion offers is that God is driving that bus."
— John Ryman, "When Galaxies Collide"..
“Knock, And He'll open the door
Vanish, And He'll make you shine like the sun
Fall, And He'll raise you to the heavens
Become nothing, And He'll turn you into everything.”
—Rumi.under the hood
find it here
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Expat,
The thing is, you said ‘economically viable’ industries. And of course it is very very easy to make money, and pay low-level wages, exploiting natural resources if the lion’s share of the costs of doing so -which would be the pollution and the environmental destruction and the clean-up costs- are not factored into the profit and loss balance sheets of the exploiters. So the question that needs to be asked is: economically viable for whom?
The Chinese don’t seem to mind a bit of dust and dirt. And they have toxic air to breathe and epic environmental destruction to deal with, even in their own country, not to mention in countries where they are merely strip mining without the least concern for the local inhabitants or the local eco-systems. And paying subsistence-level wages. And killing a very large number of those low-wage workers -either quickly in accidents or slowly with poisoning- because health and safety rules either don’t exist or aren’t bothered with. But Hell Yes, they are making money.
Surely that is not the kind of dusty & dirty type of industry that you admire? Surely you agree that nobody should be allowed to make a profit out of natural resources only because they dump the true cost of exploiting those resources into everyone else’s air and water and soil?
Bluthner – All that you say sounds pretty much like what I remember. I was intending to emphasize the smirking, winking “subversives” whose intent was/is to mock changing terminology, changes that occur as people become somewhat wiser, more educated, and more tolerant and realize that certain terms are offensive or inapplicable to a great number of people/ethnic groups. For instance, people used to think nothing of using the term “Spics” for Hispanic peoples but of course most everyone now knows that’s offensive. Darn that political correctness. Heh heh
Surely I’m the only one here old enough to remember Lenny Bruce’s routine about LBJ trying to say Negro, at least when he first delivered it. But now, thanks to our marvelous System of Tubes…
Did you mean me or Expat? I certainly don’t object to safety regulations. I saw one messy fatality and couple of severe injuries on the job when I was younger, and narrowly ducked a couple of incidences myself. I can see some regulations and costs imposed for externalities. But is that really what we are discussing or would you prefer to see costs and regulations imposed that will drive some industries out of existence? Even if you don’t, the price of the regulations and costs will be paid first by the working class. I have to get back to my basic point. If you believe that workers should earn decent wages, then they the opportunity to work at wages that require skills, because jobs that menial will pay low wages regardless of how much you wish they would pay more. Trying to invent industries whose cost structure does not allow them to operate on their own merits only creates jobs at perpetual risk of ending based on government whims and the next election. We saw that last year as wind turbine and blade manufacturers cut back thinking the production tax credits would end.
Words are strange things
Dog!
So it turns out after all this time that you are really a tax & spend liberal only pretending to be conservative! Who woulda thought!
And this is how I know that’s what you are: you want to tax all of us, and heavily (as well as borrow very heavily, but so long-term that only our children and theirs will have to pay the staggering debt) in order to provide some jobs now! (Of course your brand of tax & spend liberalism has a Clintonian/Blairish tinge, in that you also want to hand a large chunk of the proceeds from your new taxes & borrowing over to the owners of private partners in your job-creating ventures, who will take the lion’s share, but then they deserve it, right, for putting up the capital, though at no real risk.)
No? Then how else can you describe a program that places huge burdens on society, now and far into the future, that wastes (in the legal sense) valuable assets which belong to all, but the profit that comes from wasting them goes only to a few, that leaves a huge bill all of us have to pay, even though only a few benefitted from it, what else can you call that kind of behavior except a tax?
If you let a strip miner poison a river for the sake of some subsistence-level mining jobs (and making the strip-miner a fat fortune), don’t you see that all the profit is really just borrowed against both the cost of cleaning up the river and the wasted asset of the parts of the river that will never recover? And the sickness that will come to people who end up ingesting the poison? And that the same principal applies when you poison the air, or the soil? How are these burdens not taxes? How are they not debts and wasted assets?
Is it just because they don’t involve actual transfers of cash money this week?
Anyway, here’s a big welcome to the Tax & Spend Cafe! (But you were really in here all along, you sneaky sly Dog.)
heh, heh. Funny guy.
You are, of course, talking about solar and wind developers and their investors?
You still dance around. Mining or mineral exploration is active in many states where safety regulations are in place (though they vary from state to state). Perhaps you disagree with their effectiveness, but in some states the efforts are pretty much not permitted at all or are so constrained as to be effectively at a standstill. What opportunities are those states providing for their working classes?
You wrote earlier that the opportunities for upward mobility are no longer so great in the US, yet that is regional. The prospects are higher in some parts of the country than others, and it is generally in the more conservative states where opportunities are increasing. Consider also how we’re choking so many opportunities to advance through education as we’ve treated schools and colleges more as sources for offering employment, bloating their budgets and driving up tuition costs, rather than institutions whose primary mandate is to provide an education.
You don’t really have a solution to offer regarding prospects for the working class, other than you might growl a bit about it all being the manufacturing industry’s fault for outsourcing. However, I do think you are comfortable with the idea of a permanent underclass, albeit you might argue more that there should be a bit more taxing so as to toss them a few more crumbs. The primary problem that we’ve seen over and over with that idea is that those whom you would tax a bit more have options that enable them to shuffle their affairs beyond your reach.
NF. Ok, I went to the library last night and saw they had a copy of Russell’s book which you recommended to Expat, so I checked it out. I’ll have a bit more traveling to do soon, so a weighty tome might just be what the doctor ordered (I wish I could adapt to reading on a tablet)
Speaking of Tom “Suck on This” Friedman and Lenny Bruce and China and industry and thought…a few current quotes from America’s foremost funnyman-cum-philosopher…
The NY Times equivalent of “Hah hah hah, that was more fun than a colonoscopy…”
I need these people (I really do), so I’m not complaining…
Tommy,
I don’t think it’s me who’s dancing.
Is it mining and minerals we are talking about? You never said. (I guessed mountaintop removal coal strip mining and fracking might be what you were referring to.)
And we aren’t, as far as I know, arguing about safety regulations. I think we both agree that they are essential. What I am trying to say is that in order to determine whether an industry (or a mine) is ‘economically viable’ is that we have to take all the costs into account in order to make that assessment. Which includes not only the cost of extraction, and of doing it so the workers are safe as they extract, but also the costs that the rest of us have to bear. Are you saying we should not take those other costs into account? Yes or no?
And if you think I have ‘growled’ about how it’s industry’s fault for outsourcing, then I don’t think it is possible that you have actually read anything I have written on that subject in this discussion so far. I never, ever said it was ‘industries’ fault”. I never ever said it was anyone’s fault. I said it was a process that was as inevitable and inexorable in a global market as the tide coming in!
And I agree, I have offered no solution to the lack of low-skill jobs, or to the low wages that are now necessary to stop a lot of low-skill jobs going overseas. The only solution I have suggested is that we have to educate our young people so more of them are qualified for higher-skills jobs. And that doesn’t necessarily mean university, either. I’ve never said that. I have said that education is one thing we can do, and maintaining the infrastructure and civil society necessary to support the kind of economy that makes more higher skilled jobs possible is crucial.
I may well be mistaken, but as I read it your only solution is to create jobs in mining and mineral resources that are dependent on ignoring vast costs that all the rest of us are going to have to pay. Do I read you wrongly there? I don’t want to read you wrong. But if that is not what you are saying then I’m confused.
As for solar and wind developers, I haven’t mentioned them at all, but I do notice that the vast costs we are paying to subsidize them at the moment are, well, costs that have been identified, and that we are all paying for out in the open. And that aren’t banking up a lot of poisons in the groundwater and air that no one is talking about, and that we are going to have to pay through the nose for later, or our children and grandchildren are going to pay for.
The thing is, I seem to be arguing for a more honestly market-based approach than you are!
Which is funny, you being a conservative and all. And me, well, not.
Dog,
Re Russell: what I linked to was a free pdf of the whole damn thing.
Dog,
Glad we’ve granted that, because otherwise we’d be here forever, arguing about oil industry subsidies (and $8bn a year really is a trifle) and doing all kinds of selective arithmetic (viz., 2011, globally: $523bn for fossil fuels, $88bn for renewable energy. Or, US, 2002 – 2008, $72bn fossil fuels, $29bn other, excluding nuclear [but including $5bn for ethanol from corn]. But should one exclude nuclear? After all, US, 1973 – 2003, R&D only: fossil fuel, $24bn, nuclear $70bn…) And so it goes: we could nit-pick numbers all week and never even get to milk, and what we really would never get to is how much of those subsidies are good and who they’re good for. I’m very glad we don’t have to do that, so a hundred thanks for the acknowledgement.
The two I’d like to talk about are Aerospace & Defense (A & D) and computers in general: the first because it’s still going on (is it ever), and the second because it’s subsidized nature is greatly under-appreciated. But I’ll reserve A & D for another time, and cravenly so, because there’s so much there that it will be a lot of work keeping it to a reasonable length. Only, I’ll pause just a second and get a gripe of my chest. A & D is mostly where I’ve been working the last 17 years, so your taxes paid for the keyboard I’m typing on, the coffee I’m swilling and the very room that stands between me and the piles of snow outside (thanks to everyone for that, by the way). They also pay my Bill O’Reilly-worshipping partner’s salary but, strangely, he doesn’t see himself as feeding off the public tit. Neither, somewhat more surprisingly, do nine out of ten of the people I work with: they consider themselves veritable warriors for free enterprise and wouldn’t recognize state capitalism if it bit them on the neck – which indeed it does, usually several times a day. Strange. Very strange. We will discuss this, I promise, but first…
A Short History of Subsidized Innovation, Installment 1: The Smart Phone and the Cold War.
There were computing machines before WWII, Turing published in 1937, and the general purpose von Neumann machine must have arisen sometime. It arose during the war because its time had almost come, there was work for it to do (especially code-breaking work) and that work was going to be attempted, computers or no, so no issue of who was going to pay for all these geniuses to play in the basement ever arose. Which is fitting, considering my theme.
After the war, between any significant commercialization of computing and the wartime emergence of von Neumann machine – the term refers to its architecture and is not meant to give one man credit for other peoples’ work – a developer of one of the early spinoffs (Brainiac or Geniac, I don’t remember which) famously estimated that five such machines could satisfy the world’s demand for computing power! What – was this genius also a moron? How could he not know that sixty-some years later it would be veritable child abuse to deprive one’s teenager of at least three computers vastly more powerful than his pride and joy? That the processor of this kid’s iPod – never mind his PlayStation or his smartphone – would be so much more powerful than his own that most of us would need a computer just to calculate the difference in power?
But of course he wasn’t any kind of fool. He was being practical. He naturally considered “the world’s demand for computing power” to mean those problems that scientists, mathematicians and engineers were working on right then which couldn’t be done with a slide rule or a tabulating machine but could be solved by his computer. There was no demand for anything else in the same sense that there is no demand today for honeymoons on Mars (but just let somebody offer them for, say, five grand a pop…) I would also guess that he knew full well that every scientist and engineer and mathematician would want one of his beasts if only he could have it – but who would pay for such extravagance?
He soon found out who would pay for it, didn’t he? Uncle Sam, with a friendly nudge from Uncle Joe, that’s who. Mostly the DoD of course, but not only them. (I grew up inside a National Laboratory in the ‘50s and saw with my own undimmed, grade school eyes the permanently visiting scientists from IBM and Univac filling up the cafeteria and working out the rough specs for next year’s new toy with the people who would use it: so many of those crew cut, white-and-short-sleeve-shirted interlopers that there was often no place for me to eat my damn pie, which was my afternoon reward for sitting still and watching Science happen all day…) When it came to demands for power, the DoD was only one of many subsidized money tits. But when it came to volume… that was something else again. The Dod sucked up the first generation of everything (even as it was paying for the next two) and IBM, already a hugely successful company, became a blue chip forever. And so, on only a slightly lesser scale, did many, many other companies, most of them forgotten. So did the universities that suddenly learned that Computer Science could be lucratively distinguished from applied mathematics and electrical engineering (which also saw their subsidized budgets soar). So, eventually, did two or three generations of proto-geeks, and the builders who built their houses and the grocers who sold them their soup, and on, and on, and not one in a hundred of them with the elementary courtesy to even once whisper “Gee, thanks, Uncle Joe” if only to themselves… Ingratitude, thy name is Legion.
One illustrative anecdote before two more general and important ones: I once met a man who, a couple of years before or after 1960, worked on an amazing air force computer in Germany. He said it could track the position of every aircraft in Europe in near real time! I was hugely skeptical: the hard disk hadn’t even been invented then, and the concept of real time computing was purely theoretical. He saw that he’d have to reveal some details, so he did. This machine, which occupied the innards of a carved-out mountain, contained thousands of drums of wire, all connected to each other – so much wire that a signal transmitted down it took around a second to come out the other end. This was their storage device: thousands of radar inputs fed in and refreshed when they came around again, each input tagged with a code that would direct it to hundreds of pseudo-radar scopes watched by dogfight controllers connected to every allied airbase on the continent… Was this the state of the art? Who the fuck knows? It’s just one bit of it that I picked up by accident after a couple of beers at a boring convention…
Now my two more general fragments of anecdotal history: the transistor and the disk drive. The transistor first, because it came first and because it crosses several layers of subsidization. Already by 1945, the vacuum tube was seen to be the practical limit of computing power. First, reliability. Computers would soon reach the point where a really significant increase in memory size (i.e., in the number of tubes) would guarantee that some tube would fail in the course of any single computation. Second, heat. Vacuum tubes are hot. A vacuum tube-based computer with the power of an iPod would ignite the atmosphere, but of course it would stop working long before it got a chance to do that. Something better was needed, but what could it be? So money was thrown…
When Shockley and friends invented the transistor, they did it mostly because they had a laboratory in which to do it – and permission to use it for theoretical work in solid state physics. This laboratory, Bell Labs, was already subsidized (mostly, he suggests, and purely to be provocative, for the great benefit of humanity) by every telephone user in the US – because Ma Bell was a legal monopoly, with a long term interest in remaining one and no competing short term goals to excite and provoke its stockholders. And Ma Bell looked around and saw where the money was being spent, and she went to bed every night with orgasmic visions of the royalties that a patent on the un-burnout-able miniature vacuum tube would summon. And so she said, go to… I will cherry pick the consequences: no transistor, no integrated circuit; no integrated circuit, no iPod, no Mars rover, no laptop, no blog to clutter up with these musings; and no laboratory, and no permission to use that laboratory for purely speculative research – no transistor. And one observation: no one has ever, ever seen the combination of laboratory, qualified people to work in it and permission for them to use it on such a scale without full, complete and utter subsidization of one kind or another. Nobody. Ever. Not once.
Anecdotal fragment number two: the hard disk. The gross theory is simple, not much different from the theory behind magnetic tape. But the problems of creating magnetic tape and the equipment to use it were relatively trivial, requiring only a tiny fragment of the defense budget and quickly released to the commercial world. The impediments to creating the hard disk were monumental in comparison: we didn’t have the metallurgical knowledge to make them, we didn’t know how thin enough magnetized films could be created, yet alone applied on an industrial scale – indeed, we hadn’t yet begun to imagine what a factory for making hard disks would even look like, yet alone figured out how to build them at a profit on anything like commercial scale. Yet other forms of storage were too slow to allow the urgently (and governmentally) sought goals of mass on-line data access and real time computing. So money was invested. In metallurgy laboratories. To create thin magnetic coatings and, wholly elsewhere, to invent the technology for applying them. Scads of money. Oodles of money. For years, without a single hard disk to show for it (much less any factory to build one in), and only because our collective eyes were on the collective prize of success – that, and of course, the trivial fact that we’d already decided to spend that money on whatever seemed most promising way outside the current financial reporting period…
Years later I got to use one of the first really cheap (really cheap, because everything’s relative) commercial magnetic disks. It stored a colossal 1.2 megabytes of data! It cost only a couple of hundred 1975 dollars and the drive it sat in could be had for a mere ten grand. In a very few years we got 100mb disks and we programmers told each other that now, at last, we would rule world, and we did, too – our world at least. (When I get done typing this, I’ll go back to work on a 175mb spreadsheet that will probably be 300mb long by quitting time. And as for one episode for Downton Abbey…) These devices are so literally embedded in our lives and so thoroughly free-enterprised and commercially short-term-ified, that it’s almost impossible to recall why we have them at all. Yet…
That’s all for now. Just a little background, nothing more, but not anything like the whole story, either. But: were all the people who took all that money for so many years really the anti-capitalist “left” or the frivolous, soft-headed tree-huggers of yesterday? Really?
Bluth,
I believe that when Tommy alluded to “most” (meaning some) low-paid workers rising upwards, he was referring to career advancement from on-the-job learning. The kid on the dock becomes a machine operator, the machine operator advances in skill and general knowledge and eventually makes foreman — that kind of thing. (If I’m wrong, I’m sure he’ll correct me.) But that can only happen in certain kinds of workplaces. There is no such path for the burger flipper or the store clerk, outside of a relatively tiny number of non-corporatized stores. As labor becomes commodified it necessarily remains low skilled. The higher-skilled jobs that young people today could be trained for are mostly still unimagined. Of course, there is a gap between what industry, even now, is looking for and can’t find enough of, and of course it’s in the public interest to fill that gap from the ranks of the otherwise-doomed young, and of course we’re not even doing that on any significant scale. As for medium paying jobs for the rest of the ever-appearing young? Well, I ask you — where’s the Return on Investment?
Very soon somebody will show up to remind me yet again of the ever-exploding, internet-based work-future that’s already got a foothold (e.g., me) and is sure to unleash undreamt of business opportunities nationwide in the relative blink of an eye. Before they get here, a dose of cold water. I hope to once again spend next week in Vermont, where I’ll be more or less able to work on a struggling low speed network. For which the people of the town I’ll be in are properly grateful, because many of their neighbors get no internet at all. Because the monopolized provider who promised it in exchange for its monopoly ran into some oh so unexpected, elementary arithmetic-based problems but, in the process, also became Too Big To Fail. So the area continues to empty of young people and those promised start-ups are starting up in downtown Chicago (which doesn’t, in itself, bother me at all — but still…) Just an anticipatory counter-quibble; that’s all.
Oh, jeez. You guys really need me to stir the pot. Ok.
Bluthner. There are externalities. The real question is can they be realistically identified and funded. Consider landfills. For over 20 years not all landfill operators have to have a closure plan and I believe they must be pre-funded (sort of like a pension obligation – you fund as you operate the landfill and are allowed to assume some level of earnings on your funding). The landfills recover operating costs and funding costs through tipping fees.
Mountain top coal mining can likewise be required to restore the mountain top to a point where it is hard to discern that it was once removed. Certainly open pit mining is safer than going into tunnels. One of your great ironies, however, is that the use of coal for generating electricity has had a big bite taken out of it by natural gas, often recovered through fracking (an unfortunate name, made worse by Battlestar Gallactica’s use of the term).
.
Ummm. The 30% rebate for solar installations and the 2.1 cent per kWh production tax credit are certainly known numbers. What is less known are the impacts of higher electricity costs on companies’ siting decisions. Ditto also for the stress that large scale solar projects can put on arid communities’ water resources.
What you are basically arguing is that you want fewer industries that require moving huge amounts of dirt around or drilling deep holes because they cause other problems that may not be adequately funded by the taxes or fees they pay. That may be true, but you are making an implicit tradeoff here. Operating the equipment that moves large amounts of dirt or drills deep holes pays well. It is often unionized. You don’t have an alternative for these folks, and you are quite willing to toss them onto the ash heap as you don’t really believe what they do is worthwhile.
Infrastructure, by the way, often requires skilled workers. However, much of it is a local not federal responsibility. I often hear it said that Obama should approve funding of massive public works projects to repair bridges, highways, sewer systems, etc (though fortunately people have learnt something of planning and have realized that little is shove ready). However, perhaps we should discuss of the efficiency of cycling our tax dollars through the federal government to fund something that is the responsibility of the state and local governments.
Your bit about training for skilled jobs that don’t require a university degree is fine. In high school I took wood shop, metal shop and auto shop, classes that were unavailable to my sons at their high school. Junior colleges have long offered vocational training. However, there is too much of “we’ll train people for the new industries that haven’t been invented yet but that we’d really like to see invented.” How that is any sort of recipe I don’t know.
Having hired some young people in recent years I continued to be appalled how many of them can’t write coherently and how many can’t do simple arithmetic. Some emphasis on that now would not go astray.
I have to come back to my earlier assertion. Environmentalists are generally comfortable with the fact that their policies will throw people out of work. Often, they don’t really like the people tossed out of work, but they may argue that a little more social welfare might make things a little less rough on them.
At a fast food restaurant presumably someone could progress to shift supervisor or even store manager, but any small business offers few opportunities for promotion unless the business itself grow.s
NF. I appreciate that the link was to a pdf, but I really can’t read several hundred pages on a screen. I”ll have to do it the old fashioned way. I’ve read the first few chapters though, and you are correct, it is very well written. I appreciate the recommendation.
Let’s set a couple of more points on subsidies. For one, if we accuse an industry of benefiting from subsidies, let’s be clear about what they are. For example, if we say the oil industry is subsidized, be clear. Are we saying that exploration costs should be capitalized and depreciated over time rather than immediately expenced? Are we saying that leases on government lands are offered at prices that are too low? Or, like Obama, are we saying that 5 year deprecation on corporate jets is a subsidy but 7 year depreciation is not. It helps to understand the specifics.
I know you’ve worked federal projects and I’ve worked them too. We’re familiar with direct labor costs, other direct costs, benefit burden allocations, overhead allocations, and allowable vs unallowable costs in overhead, plus negotiated profit. I’ve been through DCAA audits, and in a smaller firm it is hard to hide a lot of unallowable costs in overhead from the auditors. Generally, I”ve found the profit on government work to not be all that high, though on a big project it can be steady profitable work paid on time. Sometimes on firm fixed price work, if you can figure away to do it for fewer hours than originally spec’d you might do quite well, though the opposite is also true. I would hardly call work for which you make a smallish profit and deliver an end product to have been subsidized, though perhaps one could argue about the value of the project. I am aware that some firms might fudge the time cards.
So, what I”m trying to differentiate here is a couple of points. I wouldn’t call government contract for which there is an end product that is useful to be subsidized. (Obviously some of the projects might not be considered worthwhile by many and a waste of taxpayer dollars, and that the contractors who are working on those projects may not exist but for this work). The defence industry basically exists only because of the government. However, is developing a fighter that is better than their fighter subsidized? Arguable, though I wouldn’t be surprised if inefficiencies in the contracting process make it more expensive than it need be.
Generally, I’m opposed to any true subsidies, to use for example, 30% rebates on solar installations, production tax credits on wind power, payments to farmers for not growing crops, and government loan guarantees. I am particularly opposed to efforts to try to create a new industry in an effort to destroy an existing industry.
Dog,
Really? I certainly would. And
So… a subsidy requires a big profit, or no work-product? This is news to me. And
Yes, and has been at least since 1941 (and it was partly subsidized before that). I’m beginning to suspect that you think “subsidy” means “public expenditure I don’t approve of.” Say it isn’t so, please…
(On a side note: if you’ve really found yourself in the middle of a true, search-and-destroy mode DCAA audit, I think you’ll agree that nobody gets to fudge the time cards very much or for a very long time…)
I would describe a subsidy as support of a business where the expenditure, tax credit or other benefit has no discernible point other than keeping the business afloat (often perhaps as a result of lobbying and the prospect of campaign contributions). Or at least where the discernible point is for some other purpose that the current administration favors rather than providing a product or service directly to it. Those I”m fundamentally agin’.
Over charging the government is another matter, though I suppose you could make an argument that if it is permitted with a wink and a nod that it is a form of subsidy. As you alluded though, I have found that contracting officers are fairly conscientious.
I’m beginning to suspect you regard all government contracts or payments as subsidies. If so, that is ok, just say so. That does not preclude a discussion of where they are or are not appropriate.
Let’s take an example I’m aware of. I have friends in a couple of companies that have received substantial NASA grants to try to commercialize some of their technology. Why should NASA be doing this, especially if there is no national defence angle to this? Why couldn’t they simply publish that they have a technology that they think could be commercialized and sell or license it to qualified bidders? Save a few bucks, gain a few bucks, and put the risk on people whose business it is to take such risks.
I’ve dealt with DCAA auditors to the extent that the auditor went through a couple of years of historical financials in detail and then our budget to see that it rationally conformed to past experience. This was for purposes of setting overhead rates for a contract we’d just been awarded. We were not subject to a retroactive audit looking for overcharges. This was a 90 person company, not a major defence contractor.
I have a flight to catch in the early morning, so I can’t make a multi-day discussion of this. I will take the book though.
Dog,
Well, that’s not the usual definition of a subsidy, but it’s all right with me. From now on I’ll just work on shrinking “utterly bought and paid for out of tax-generated public funds” down to something more tractable — maybe just publicly (as opposed to stockholder) financed? Hope that will work for you.
Re DCAA: what I thought. Financial-level and budget-level reviews, although are very much part of their mandate, are a long way from the kind of full, horrorshow “prove every one of those numbers and trace them all back to their source and get me every damn authorizing document for every penny” witch hunt that has sometimes subsidized (in the sense I’m now forsaking on your behalf) me for months and months on end.
NF. Apologies. I thought I’d have more time today but go busy. We’ll have to pick this up at a future date, but thanks for the reading recommendation.
Tommy,
Yes it’s not always easy to put a number on ecological ‘externalities’ as you call them. And the track record for putting a far too small a number on those externalities in the U.S. is long (and the difference almost always ends up as profit in a few people’s pockets).
No, I am not at all saying that what people who do those jobs do is not worthwhile. That’s absurd. I’m only saying that whether it makes sense to do it in each particular case can’t be worked out by simply asking ‘are these jobs worthwhile’. The whole operation has to be costed. If you were running a company and you were about to embark on some scheme, and your people came to you and said, well, we know we can turn a profit in the short term, and pay a bunch of employees and make some money in the first few years, but in the medium to long term the costs might be so high that they would not only wipe out the profit but wipe it out ten or twenty thousand times…. Would you be a responsible CEO if you said, Hell… if we can’t put a certain number on the risk let’s just ignore it and make some money now and forget about the future! No. And it’s the same with all your dusty holes and dirt piles. Some have smaller risks and some have huge risks.
And of course every bucket of fossil fuel we burn now now only adds to a huge and looming future risk, one humans may not even survive without a vast die-off if we don’t find viable alternatives, and find them sooner than later. Which means money invested in R&D into renewable fuel sources must be at least as vital to ‘defense’ as any new jet fighter.
That’s like saying, I dunno, back in the ’60s, anybody who’s trying to stop the Japanese harpooning the last blue whale don’t give a shit about the poor whalers who will be out of a job if they can’t harpoon the last blue whale.” Nobody is ‘comfortable’ about putting anyone out of work. It all depends on what costs of that work may be dumping into, onto the world, or what communally held assets they may be destroying. I could just as well say you are generally ‘comfortable’ with the fact that your policies will poison entire populations and destroy large ecosystems that cannot be repaired for thousands of years, if ever. And that you only really oppose environmentalists because you don’t like the clothes they wear or the music they listen to. Which I wouldn’t say, because it would be inane. But I can’t see much daylight between that and your assertion about environmentalists.
And industrialists and capitalists likewise. Squirrel was at the opera last night, to see Benjamin’s ‘Written on Skin’, which takes as its starting point a 13th century story told in an illuminated manuscript. Which reminds me that the development of moveable-type printing put hundreds (perhaps thousands) of manuscript illuminators out of work . . .
Like the recently discovered archaeological evidence from mass graves of men with crushed skulls of the suppression of bronze smelters in favour of the flint axe makers?
I have never understood this idea that environmentalism is somehow to be always confounded with preservation, not conservation, and it cannot be developmental.
Bluth,
Alas, “responsible” is as tricky a word as any. A very large proportion of CEOs would think that generating short-term profit is the most responsible course available to them, and if they forgot it, the Street would soon remind them. Making a bundle and walking away has a better reputation than you seem to think. The systemic drivers of short-term thinking are deeply embedded now and have been for decades, and the CEO who took a pass on that short-term profit — if you could find one, I mean — would generally find himself out of work. For having failed in his well understood primary responsibility of enriching his shareholders, not ten years from now, but today.
Squirrel,
Mr Dog, who lives in northern California, is citing a mindset that he finds grotesque. I find it pretty maddening myself, and if I were immersed in it, I too might decide that rentier nostalgia and a horror of dirty fingernails is all there is to environmentalism. If I had to guess (and I guess I’ll have to) I’d guess that he finds the notion that the Prius-driving weekend rock climbers could ever be right about how industry does and might work too absurd to entertain. If we’re going to persuade him that the picture is even grimmer than he thinks (which is the neighborly thing to at least try, after all) we’re going to have to stretch his perspective quite a lot.
Given my druthers, I’d stand every single practitioner of “he’s so wrong that I simply must be right” thinking up against a wall. Since I won’t get my druthers, and would probably shrink from doing the needful thing anyway. I’m going to have to find another way. The only one I can think of is explaining with far more patience than I usually manage to summon how, in your words, environmentalism can be developmental — and how the deeply-intricate-and-seductive-to-some way we’re operating now is (Bluth’s point) anything but.
Natasha: “Making a bundle and walking away has a better reputation than you seem to think.”
As does losing a bundle and walking away, provided one enjoys certain kinds of privilege and connection. (Unless there’s something more subtle at work in the case of Jon Corzine, Jack Lew and the rest, as there may be.)
Having now lived about 60% of my life on the California coast, and most of that in the Bay Area, it is easy to despair at all the hypocrisy and delusion. The whole “think globally, act locally” mentality is kinda sweet but it has its limits.
Laurie David, for instance, really does care about the environment, I’m sure. But thanks to her ability to connect with and influence some talented men, she found herself in a quandary: “Now that private jets are available to me, thanks to my having married a really smart, successful guy, what do I do? Do I avoid them so that my environmental sentiments don’t seem totally hypocritical, or do I fly around the country the way I want, consuming a thousand times more fossil fuel than some fat pig driving around in a grotesque Class A motorhome? Do I get to keep lecturing these morons about the environment if they find out I really, uh, don’t give a fuck? Will the Huffington Post still publish my work if THEY discover I’m no better than Donald Trump?”
Easy answers, easy choices, of course. So the private jets won out. Laurie David didn’t have to worry about the consequences of being a complete hypocrite because that’s not how human relationships work. Once you’ve made some connections and established some useful relationships, nobody is going to shun you for being full of shit. Arianna will make sure every facile thing you have to say continues to get a hearing, just as somebody, or some group of people, will make sure Jon Corzine never suffers any real consequences for his behavior, which, in fairness, is criminal rather than merely hypocritical.
Yes, the picture is far grimmer than most of us think.
To explore Squirrel’s distinction between preservation and conservation, let us consider the ol’ country schoolhouse. The Center for Green Schools — caveat: a non-profit largely funded by the notoriously left-leaning United Technologies Corp — estimates that it would take, oh, $547bn to bring public school buildings in the US up to code (electrical code, building code, and so on). Now, half a trillion dollars to preserve buildings without beginning to address what goes on inside them (apart from the occasional case of frostbite) would obviously be wastefulness wantonly exemplified, but are there not forward-looking alternatives for conserving educational opportunities? Of course there are.
Bobby Jindal’s successfully inaugurated privatization of the Louisiana public school system has been mostly treated with the drive-by derisiveness we’ve come to expect from the press – largely because of the widespread and irresistible-to-frivolous-minds accounts of some of its legislative supporters’ spasms of very public horror at discovering that they’d just voted to authorize public money for the establishment of Islamic schools – but the innovative details of the plan do merit serious study. They go far beyond the obvious goal of obviating the need to renovate and expand buildings for which there is no longer any need. They boldly address the so-far intractable impediments to learning itself, especially the desire for learning, as even a cursory study of the newly liberated curriculum quickly reveals. What young student wouldn’t want to be taught that scientists have found that real, fire-breathing dragons once roamed the earth*? Who wouldn’t wish to know that “God used the Trail of Tears to bring many Indians to Christ**”, that the Great Depression never really happened*** or that we don’t have to fight our way through Huckleberry Finn because “Twain’s outlook was both self-centered and ultimately hopeless…Twain’s skepticism was clearly not the honest questioning of a seeker of truth but the deliberate defiance of a confessed rebel.****”
Above all, what student will not love to learn that math is meant to be easy, that “[u]nlike the ‘modern math’ theorists, who believe that mathematics is a creation of man and thus arbitrary and relative, A Beka Book teaches that the laws of mathematics are a creation of God and thus absolute…A Beka Book provides attractive, legible, and workable traditional mathematics texts that are not burdened with modern theories such as set theory*****.” This is no mere rehashing of the famous but unfortunately never enacted Indiana law that set the value of pi to 3. This law is real and on the books and with it you can now get a passing grade in math just be learning how to disdain it. Indeed, what challenge doesn’t evaporate in the face of rigorously obedient simplification? But we whine and moan and refuse to recognize real innovation even while it’s blossoming under our very noses! No wonder the future seems so challenging these days, so inaccessible to we who refuse to see how it really works…
* Life Science, 3rd ed., Bob Jones University Press, 2007.
** America: Land That I Love, Teacher ed., A Beka Book, 1994
*** United States History: Heritage of Freedom, 2nd ed., A Beka Book, 1996
**** Elements of Literature for Christian Schools, Bob Jones University, 2001 (“Strengthen your student’s understanding of literature by focusing on advanced literary concepts. Analyze literary selections from several genres and interpret them in light of biblical principles.”)
***** aBeka.com.
If we can abolish geology, biology, history and set theory, much less turn our backs on the great Twain, how hard could it be to abolish a few pesky building codes? Exempt schools from all building codes and hey presto, a half trillion dollar problem solved! Off the books!
Virginia already excommunicated sea level rise. Next week we pass a law eliminating cancer and diabetes.
And next month we outlaw the Grim Reaper hisself! Ain’t no trick to budget balance politics.
Bluth,
Not to mention economics — I left that out. “Global environmentalists have said and written enough to leave no doubt that their goal is to destroy the prosperous economies of the world’s richest nations.” (Economics: Work and Prosperity in Christian Perspective, 2nd ed. “One semester course…The Biblical views of work, wealth, and stewardship appear throughout the text, helping students to understand the proper economic roles of individual producers and consumers as well as that of the government from a conservative, Christian perspective. “) We can only hope that such slender reeds of truth can withstand the tempest of agenda-based indoctrination.
Set theory? I don’t get it.
My, my, Natasha, what mischief you get up to when left unsupervised by one slaving herself into an early grave.
….and not to be confused with Max Newman who with the GPO’s Tommy Flowers developed Colossus.
On this—the development of human rights and liberties in an empire of diverse societies as its director says—The British Museum’s being provocative . . .
The ‘Cyrus Cylinder’ is on its way to the USA, to be seen first at the Smithsonian in Washington this month. Where, one hopes, one may expect (though perhaps this is assuming too much interest in historical education in the Right) a degree of controversy not limited simply to the fact it’s sponsored by the Iran Heritage Foundation.*
Though, as Neal MacGregor mentions (rather acutely, I thought, considering where it’s going) the Christian Right were it educationally acute enough to notice, might observe that apart from anything else, it proposes the rebuilding of Jerusalem . . .
I like Neil MacGregor . . .If you can spare the time look at his History of the World in a Hundred Objects.
Now that should be on those school curricula.
* Actually a British charity, but could easily, I should think, be faked into more ‘Friends of Hamas’ . . .
Bim,
It seems so harmless, doesn’t it. But dig a little deeper. Teach set theory well, and you are in fact teaching rather a lot of logic, and as we all know, polluting the pure minds of young’uns can lead directly to the dreaded curse of critical thinking.
But there is another, darker aspect to set theory: infinities. Not just one all encompassing (and of course wrathful and vengeance-seeking) Almighty Infinity, but, and whisper it now…. infinities of infinities. Drip that poison into a juvenile mind that is still too plastic to be locked forever against the predations of ideas and, well, it’s a straight down drop into the outright Hellfire of pantheism.
Red,
I join your encomium for Neil MacGregor in whole heart. A first rate mind with not only enormous learning and wit, but a really deep humanity as well. High functioning to an almost absurd degree and kind. A proper mensch.
MacGregor is a ‘culturalist’ (if that’s the word?). And of course, a pantheist. How can you avoid it? Especially if you have free run of the BM . . .
Anyway, cultural Squirrel is off to the opera tomorrow again. Yippee! Covent Garden on Monday, the miniature opera house at the RCM Thursday. (For a hardly ever performed Handel, and actually costing me a fiver more than Monday night did! Hope the interval drinks are cheaper to make up. . .)
At least it’s quicker to get to . . .it took us over an hour and a half on the bus to get to Covent Garden, thanks to bloody CrossRail detours . . .We got there only just in time to grab a free glass of water from the bar, so Sq could swallow enough painkillers to get through another hour and a half of opera. Didn’t have time to read the programme. Never been to the Britten Theatre at the RCM before. Looks lovely, like a doll’s house version.
When the NT’s dramatisation of Pullman’s ‘Dark Materials’ was on, we went to the matinees (cheaper; evenings sold out!). I was interested (but not surprised: as a one-time English teacher and examiner myself, I can see the pretty wide scope for discussion and inquiry) to find it full of teenagers: the books were on the GCSE English syllabus, a couple said. I occasionally wonder what they’d make of that in Texas or Virginia?
As to Pullman, I’ve found out; another example of Catholics and Fundies joining at the hip . . .
Bluth (& Bim),
If I believed in a personal God who created everything in six literal days, I would conclude that Georg Cantor, with his demonstrable infinity of infinities, proved that mathematics is a human (if not Satanic) invention — and that Gödel merely rearranged the icing on the cake. My main objection to the six-day creation folks is mostly aesthetic: they make their poor God do too much damn work, and He has to keep on doing it every day. How could He not have realized that His laws of nature were complete enough that He could just sit back and stop tweaking things? It’s as hard to worship a Divine Moron as it is the Proprietor of the Divine Ant Farm, who is not only eternally fascinated by what goes on in it, not only picks out his favorite ants, but squashes the bad ants every once in a while just for the entertainment value…
Squirrel (& Bim),
MacGregor, yes! Amen!
Re the fundy-catholic doctrinal pelvis: now there’s a Satanic application of set theory for you. The doctrinal intersection of, oh, Ignatius Loyola and Pat Robertson is just about null – yet there are abortions to be banned, wars to be started (if not finished) and elections to be won, so the theoretical tools we use for noticing their mutual otherness are in serious need of banning.
Natasha & Bluth,
Okay, fine, let’s ban set theory! (And let us not forget the role of our favorite imperialist degenerate’s role in its development). Let’s ban it like a 250-calorie, 20-oz. coke in NYC!
What I love (and hate) about the world (and myself) is the constant striving and believing. Can’t we all just agree to tolerate each other with a little solipsistic equanimity?
Speaking of aesthetics and Bloomberg…I agree that there’s something unseemly and ugly about every part of a Big Gulp…whereas a bit of smoke and some Ambien is kind of a work of art…
Bim,
Every poison gives somebody a pleasure.
Every pleasure has some group rabid to ban it.
Before any one can make peace with toleration, she first gotta make peace with the idea that there ain’t no possible final solution, no ultimate arrangement, no perfect and perfectly ordered plan.
This country was created by people who believed passionately in perfect solutions, ultimate orders, and the seamless and frictionless coexistence of all virtues with every other virtue, of each Truth with every other.
They knew we weren’t there yet, but they sure did know, and still do today, that there ain’t no reason but backsliding and the distraction of sinning that stops us from getting there. All of us together.
Most people still think getting there is the point of Democracy. Certainly our leaders have told us so. For coming on 250 years, and longer.
Until we wake up, all of us, to the single truth of Democracy, which is that the only point of the experiment is to keep the experiment going, which means holy shit we had better start cutting each other, and especially the people we disagree with, some slack.
But there ain’t much slack getting cut anywhere anytime.
Might as well commit suicide by Big Gulp. I bet there’s a moment, when you are about two gallons down, when even a Big Gulp feels like a little slice of heaven….
Bluth,
Agreed, agreed – with all of it essentially. You know, for all my mean-spirited condemnation of The Power Elite (and The Mediocre Sadly Striving To Be Elite), I forever return to the conclusion of that 30-day Ignatian Retreat: I know nothing and believe nothing and really don’t care because the world is interesting, provocative and sometimes even pleasurable.
And yet…there’s no forgetting Obama’s joke about drones at the 2010 White House Correspondents’ Dinner…or Robert McNamara…or Hill & Knowlton and their babies-and-incubators strategy…
In full recognition of the benefits of inquiry(self and otherwise) as well as the value of the notion of ‘cutting slack’ for those with whom we disagree – none of it matters much if a person can’t manage a successful bowel movement.
And you wonder why assholes tend to have so much control . . .