Ambient Power

Eco-zealots always whine that if only so-called "renewable" sources of energy had gotten as much research & development money as nuclear then they would have become just as profitable.

Well first of all, we're really talking about ambient energy since nuclear is just as renewable as anything powered by the Sun. The Uranium and Thorium our planet inherited from supernovas during its formation is only going to disappear through radioactive decay. And that won't be for many billions of years.

Second of all, nuclear power became profitable within a decade of its invention. Meanwhile, it's been more than 140 years since photovoltaics have been invented, and more than four decades since NASA has been funding their R&D, and what do we have? Bupkis. What does that tell you?

People seem to think that engineering can do anything, achieve anything. That it's just a question of waving your magic fairy wand and pouring enough money into it. Well it's not. And it's really very, very simple why it isn't. It goes like this:

1. solar power is a DIFFUSE form of power
2. this means that you need a MACHINE to concentrate solar power
3. in our physical universe, a machine must be made of MATTER
4. matter COSTS MONEY

Add it all up and what do you get? Solar power will always be more expensive than nuclear power. Always. Now and for all time.

The only reason hydro doesn't suffer the same fate is because we can use pre-existing mountains and ravines as the collectors. Once dam-builders have to pay for mountains, and this will happen when we start dismantling the Earth for a Dyson sphere, then hydro power will no longer be profitable.

Ambient forms of energy are inherently inferior and no amount of chanting by arch-druids and channeling the power of Gaia is going to change physics.

Oh Nos, Wage Inflashun !!

There's been some worrying about wage inflation happening in odd places like Oklahoma. Let's straighten it out.

Wage inflation is good, asset inflation is bad. Wage inflation benefits workers at the expense of non-workers while asset inflation benefits property owners at the expense of the poor.

Of course, to the Fed, pundits and right-wing economists, who are all shills to the overclasses, it's the reverse. This is why a housing bubble is not considered price inflation, but wage inflation is the work of Satan and must be combatted forthwith. Forsooth!

What's Been Going On

Contrary to popular opinion, any recent price inflation is not a direct function of the asset inflation that's been going on. It's rather a minor side-effect of the means by which it was achieved. Using lots of easy and unregulated credit for asset owners.

Other means of inflating assets exist which would have no effect on overall prices. One is increasing competition for assets, say by moving to a double-income family model which restricts free time and mobility (of commutes) thus artificially narrowing options for workers.

Another is decreasing density which decreases the total number of possible homes within the commuter's habitable area. This is just decreasing supply of homes by squandering very scarce land to build them on. It also contradicts the claims of suburbia advocates who say they are providing affordable homes.

Yet another means of inflating assets is to re-price the assets out of the hands of the locals by, for example, opening up assets to ownership by rich foreigners. Needless to say, sharpening wealth disparities helps this process along.

What Hasn't Been Going On

A final way to cause asset inflation is restrictions on their formation, say if there is a timber or brick shortage for housing. Squandering land would be a special case of this. About the only asset inflation which a sane economy should ever worry about is that caused by resource shortages.

There is a good way of dealing with resource shortages, it's to slow down the economy by scaling back legal working hours. This spreads the pain uniformly instead of concentrating it among borrowers (ie, everyone but the smart rich) as is done by hiking interest rates.

But this is irrelevant because it is the only cause of asset inflation we are NOT seeing, except for land squandering. So basically, all the current causes of asset inflation are the product of an insane society with an insane economic and financial system.

It's Been Going On For Decades

So I hope you see what's been happening. For decades there has been asset inflation without price inflation. Due to the political class being shills to the rich. Recently this asset inflation has been put into overdrive by madmen willing to endure price inflation. What's important to note is that it would take decades of wage inflation to redress the social balance and see a modicum of justice.

Oh yeah, and when someone like Milton Friedman says something astonishingly idiotic like "Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon." what he's really saying is that he doesn't give a damn about the allocation of wealth between rich and poor. Which he wouldn't, being a right-wing shill.

How To Think About EROEI

Some eco-zealots claim the nuclear industry has an EROEI of 10 or 2 or even negative. Ha!

The right way to think about EROEI is to invert it. 1/EROEI is, more or less, the proportion of your industrial economy which must be devoted to producing energy. This assumes the energy industry is no more energy-intensive than other sectors of industry. A not-unreasonable assumption.

So if you have an EROEI of 10 then 1/10th or 10% of your industrial economy must be devoted to producing the energy for the rest of the industrial economy. If you have an EROEI of 30 then this falls to 1/30th or 3%, for a 7 percentage point difference.

Given that booms to recessions happen on a change of just a few percentage points in production, 7 pps of energy overhead matters a hell of a lot. Actually, even pushing up the EROEI to 90 reduces the overhead to 1% which improves the industrial economy. Pushing the EROEI beyond 90 can't improve the industrial economy significantly and that would explain why it isn't done.

Having said all that, you have to ask yourself whether or not you would have noticed if 1/10th of ALL industry everywhere (steelmaking, concrete kilns, road building, automotive, aerospace, shipbuilding, even television manufacturing) was devoted to just producing energy.

You have to ask yourself whether an EROEI of just 10 for a vital component of the energy sector (and nearly ALL of the energy sector of France) passes any kind of sanity checks.

And if you still want to know, nuclear power has an EROEI of 90.

Why Nuclear Plants Shouldn't Be Made Safer

By Carolus Obscurus in response to a (poor) article on nuclear's EROEI.

In spite of theoretical safety concerns, in practise in the West nuclear power has been several orders of magnitude safer than coal, which has killed plenty of people.

In fact, nuclear plants are so safe that their safety may have been counterproductive --- it can argued that for every life saved in improving the safety of nuclear plants several lives have been lost in constructing those super-safe plants. Can't present a graph here but obviously at some stage the rising fatal accident rate associated with increased investments in constructing safe buildings will intersect with the declining fatal accident rate resulting from the added safety.

Not easy to explain to the general public, though. The individual deaths of 100 construction workers employed in building nuclear plants is not headline news. But if a sparrow falls within a radius of ten miles of an operating nuclear power station Greenpeace and co. will start turning on the waterworks ....

Sparrows near Three Mile Island at leukemia risk, Greenpeace claims

Right-libertarians, aka Propertarians, aka Market Fundamentalists, aka Satanists

Or, There Is No Such Thing As "Anarcho"-Capitalism

"Anarcho"-capitalists believe that property rights should trump human rights. They believe that human beings have no rights at all and that property, THINGS, have all the rights. They have no conception nor any desire for justice. They are also fixated on inanimate objects rather than human beings. And they fetishize the ownership relation, believing that all things should be owned / anthropomorphized. They are mentally ill and they are extremely repellent.

In "anarcho"-capitalist philosophy, a person is a thing to be owned. They will cheerfully admit this except they will give you a song and dance about how people should own themselves. The only problem is that ownership is distinguished from possession precisely in that you can sell, lease and destroy an owned thing. So a person who owns their body (as opposed to possessing it as their human right) is by definition capable of selling it. So "anarcho"-capitalists literally believe in slavery.

This should not be any kind of surprise to you since the "freedom to contract" (ie, absolute bindable contracts) is literally nothing more than the ability to enslave your future self to the word of your present self. You could contract yourself out for a billion years of labour as the scientologists do. Or you could enter into a contract you later find despicable because your values were fundamentally altered in the meantime. The propertarians care not because they have successfully enslaved you and they expect you to be obedient.

In fact, the logical extension of the freedom to contract is that you can abduct and kidnap someone, rape and torture them until they break, and then have them "freely" sign a contract which retroactively legitimizes what you did to them by declaring themselves to be your slave. After all, physics does not recognize a difference between future and past, so why should contracts? If you can enslave your future selves, then why not be allowed to enslave your past selves?

Propertarians love slavery. Their "freedom of property" is enslaving all humanity to objects, things. Their freedom of contract is nothing but outright slavery. And even their "owning yourself" is just their attempt to hide their love of slavery in plain sight.

"Anarcho"-capitalists, right-libertarians, market fundamentalists and satanists ARE SLAVERS.

And if you are not repelled by them then there is something deeply wrong with you.

Oh and I call them Satanists because the Satanic Bible was in fact inspired by Ayn Rand. And because it's really all the same thing, right-libertarianism being about the legalisms of egotistical shitbags while satanism is the rituals of egotistical shitbags.

Universal Principles, or Why Chemistry Is An Inferior Body Of Knowledge

Qualities of a Body of Knowledge

What are some relevant qualities by which we may judge the quality of a body of knowledge? We can start with the ratios of rules to facts and of facts to phenomena. We'll go on with the universality of principles, the extent of knowledge, and the simplicity & organizing power of concepts. So when we look at chemistry, what do we see?

In chemistry, there are too many rules for the facts we know. There are too many facts for the phenomena we know. Rules are so far from universal that they can never be called principles - as proved by the fact you can't name a single one that belongs entirely to chemistry. Knowledge of phenomena is very limited. And all concepts are ad hoc, baroque and with limited power.

Principles of Chemistry

But what about "Ka x Kb = Kw" and "all endothermic reactions speed up with increasing temperature"?

The problem with those principles is that they are very far from universal. Although chemicals can be acids or bases, most of them are neither. How exactly is it meaningful to talk about the pH of Uranium Oxide? Or steel? And as for reactions, the problem there is that chemical reactions consume themselves and so they have a nasty tendency of being intermittent. We're not talking then about something that persists but rather something that flickers to life and then winks out. Most chemicals are not in the middle of a reaction!

Concepts of Chemistry

What exactly are the fundamental concepts of chemistry anyways? The chemical bond is one. Unfortunately, talking about the universal laws of bonding would just be a repetition of quantum electrodynamics and electrostatic attraction.

Valence shell electron theory is a staple of chemistry. It explains the periodicity of Mendeleev's table. But Mendeleev's table itself explains nothing further. It only talks about how some chemicals are similar to other chemicals, not why they are the way they are in the first place.

Chemistry doesn't explain why there's two electrons to an orbital (physics does that) and it doesn't explain the shapes or numbers of orbitals (physics sortof does that). Hell, it's not even possible to account for the colour of gold without dragging general relativity into the mix!

Actually, if anything has any claim to being a fundamental concept of chemistry, it's orbitals. That's because orbitals are critical in chemistry yet they are far too complex to compute using physics. They're an emergent property.

Pity the orbitals don't really matter in the far reaches of chemistry. Certainly, everything is made out of them, but it doesn't seem to matter. Probably because when it comes down to it, there's only a few of them that matter at all.

Let's compare with physics.

A Brief Look At Physics

Absolutely everything in the physical universe is made out of energy. For something to even exist, it has to be made out of energy.

Do you know why photons can only travel at the speed of light? It's because if they didn't then there would be a reference frame in which they are at rest. And since their rest mass is zero, this would mean they have absolutely no energy. Thus there would be a reference frame in which a photon does not exist and another in which it does exist. And that's absurd.

Literally, Physical Existence = Energy.

Space then is a near-universal. Everything exists in space except for space itself. Space may or may not be a property that emerged from superstrings.

Information is another near-universal. Everything that exists save possibly space itself holds information in order to exist. The laws of thermodynamics are laws about information. 'entropy' can be defined as 'information we don't care about' thus neatly demonstrating why it has no role in the fundamental laws of physics. Information is a conserved quantity which follows specific laws.

From these concepts alone, it is possible to formulate a theorem about the maximum possible rate of computation in a volume of space at any non-zero temperature. Any attempt to compute more would require more energy, which would increase the energy density past the point a black hole would form which would disconnect you from the heat sink and destroy your ability to compute anything. That is a pretty fantastic thing when you think about it.

And Back To Chemistry

Chemistry has nothing like it. There are a few different orbitals and there are a few types of bonds ... but there seem to be too few types of bond to matter and the different orbitals hardly matter. So no universal laws and no universal theorems. I'm not sure why chemistry is so fragmented but it's a shame.

And that's why chemistry is an inferior body of knowledge.

Natural vs Artificial

From a lovely little discussion I just had.

There is a fundamental magical difference between anything artificial and anything natural.

In fact, this magical difference is even enshrined in physics in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. The laws of physics are deterministic until human beings get involved at which point they become magically non-deterministic (whatever that means).

It is also enshrined in the Lockean doctrine of "natural rights" which the USA believes in. Negative rights are natural (don't require human action) and positive rights are artificial (do require human action). In the communist doctrine of human rights, there is no distinction.

This magical difference is why watching someone drown to death is okay but drowning them yourself is wrong, as every red-blooded American is taught to believe since true freedom is the freedom to drown.

This magical difference is why 4 to 8 milliSieverts per year of natural radiation is perfectly acceptable. But 0.05 milliSieverts per year due to standing outside of a nuclear plant 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year is totally unacceptable.

So now you know the reason why the actions of quadrillions of natural cosmic rays is unimportant compared to a few dozen artificial beams in the LHC. Obviously the latter are much more threatening to us in magic-magic land.

So if a black hole 'just happens', its okay, but if we make it ourselves: no way!

If it just happens then it's nature's revenge or proof of the sinfulness of humans.

Nature is Mother and God is Father, you know. And they LOVE us even as they beat us. In fact, that's WHY they beat us. Because we deserve it!

Magical thinkers "reason" using magic because they're incapable of using logic. In fact, they're incapable of grasping any abstract concept at all.

Hence why they have to recycle the few concepts they do have. Which invariably turn out not to be abstract like "mortality risk" but rather concrete anthropomorphizations like "mother won't be pleased".

Mother won't be pleased with us making black holes on our own. In fact, mother won't be pleased with us doing anything, being independent like and saying what a murderous fucking bitch she is.

Why economics isn't a science

Some unredeemable fools claim that various and sundry economists, notably Friedrich Hayek, are "empirical". This is unbelievable bullshit, but to appreciate the absurdity of that statement, one must know what 'empirical' means in the first place. Which is something economists uniformly don't know.

What does empiricism mean?

Empiricism means that you collect experimental evidence in order to test theoretical models. Those theoretical models are then verified or disproved to the extent that they conform to the experimental evidence. Most crucially, a single mismatch between any part of a model and the corresponding experimental evidence is sufficient to disprove the model.

What do economists mean?

Economists mean that they dream up whatever model they like and if some tiny subset of the model happens to match the experimental evidence then it is verified. It is by no means necessary for a model to match all of the evidence or even most of the evidence. It is sufficient for the model to match some of the evidence for it to be considered "empirical".

For instance, it is possible (and it has been the case) that a model whose every single assumption is violated by reality is still considered correct because some of its conclusions (the ones the economists particularly like) happen to match the evidence.

In fact, it's worse than even that because economic "models" are not even required to be causal. This is actually what the economists mean by "empirical". They mean that the models they dream up are purely analytic tools that have no basis in reality, logic or causality.

To an economist, not only is it perfectly acceptable to model the real physical world as an AD&D fantasy, ignoring the fact that elves, orcs and goblins don't exist. No, far more than that, it's acceptable for the proposed AD&D fantasy to be fuzzy and ill-defined. It doesn't even have to be coherent!

Economics is what you get when you get people to manipulate a bunch of meaningless symbols and numbers. Symbols and numbers which they've had to memorize because they don't actually mean anything. Not in the real world and not in any world since economics falls short even as pure mathematics.

Modern Myths

Someone asked me what are the greatest myths that people hold today.

The biggest myths are probably this:

first, that popularity is more likely to make something true rather than false.

second, that authority is more likely to make something true rather than false.

third, fourth and fifth, that there is something called the scientific method which the scientific community uses which grants it legitimate authority.

These are the main epistemological myths. The number of domain-specific myths are legion.

There is the myth that democracy is electioneering, thus that Cuba is less democratic than France, let alone Canada, let alone the USA.

In physics there is the myth that nondeterminism is intelligible and meaningful.

In metaphysics there is the myth of functional eliminationism, that qualia do not exist.

In politics there are the myths that human rights are anything other than a communist programme and that property is in any way compatible with human rights.

In economics, that financial (aka mainstream, Austrian, Chicago, etc) economics has any bearing to reality and is anything other than a rationalization for economic predation.

There is the myth of Relativism in anthropology, the myth that anthropology is a science instead of an anti-science. The myth that history is a science instead of record-keeping.

There is the myth that human cognition is unitary, that it can't be categorized in levels.

There is the myth that morality applies universally to all humans regardless of cognitive capacity.

There is the myth that genetic diversity is more important than intellectual diversity.

There is the myth that physical reality is magically different from mathematics.

There is the myth of magic, of descendance, of origins, of provenance, of essence, which inflicts all magical thinkers.

There is the myth that the past was better, that the elitism and exceptionalism of feudalism is "grand".

There is the myth that sacred (fearsome and incomprehensible) is good and profane (understood and controlled) is bad.

The most personal myth is that your parents weren't abusive when you grew up because hey, you love your parents right?

The greatest of all domain-specific myths is that complex systems (humans, cities, societies, countries, economies, even transportation networks) are linearalizable. That they can be reduced down to linear superpositions of component parts.

But if you give up the first five, the rest fall down one after the other like dominos.

Mankiw's Idiotic Tall Tax

Another day, another idiocy comes spouting out of the mouth of that neo-liberal shill Mankiw. No wonder he has to disable comments on his blog.

As anyone who knows (real, not fake) economics and is willing to rub two thoughts together will be able to tell you, Mankiw's argument is a sham. It's a complete strawman because progressive income tax is based on a concept of equality of outcome. And another little concept about the differential moral utility of money. These may be concepts that Mankiw scorns and wishes didn't exist (he's certainly trying to ignore them) but they do.

So when Mankiw assumes that taxing "entrepreneurial genius" (whatever the fuck that means) is the same as taxing entrepreneurial outcome, he is being a lying whore and a two-faced duplicitous son of a bitch.

That's because taxing "entrepreneurial genius" is all about equality of opportunity and not equality of outcome. Taxing "entrepreneurial genius" is also neutral towards the differential utility of money, something progressive taxation is not since the whole point of it to change people's behaviour. In other words, the two types of taxation are violently opposed.

And despite the fact Mankiw casually treats taxing "entrepreneurial genius" as an acceptable stand-in for taxing revenues, he knows the two aren't equivalent because he prefers taxing opportunity. That's because, as any good shill must, he doesn't like taxes that affect people's behaviours but believes taxation should let criminals be criminals.

As a moral person, I violently disagree with Mankiw's amoral prescriptions. As a systems designer, I violently disagree with needless duplication (between revenue-generation and moral incentives). So I vastly prefer taxing outcome and not opportunity.

Finally, as a dissident, I despise a lying shill like Greg Mankiw.

It is a testament to the utter depravity of mainstream economics that nobody has yet stood up to throw egg into Mankiw's smug lying face.

Complex Systems

I've always known that systems science (aka systems theory and cybernetics) is in a sorry state. But this was driven home to me this morning when a senior professor in the field commented that "systems mean different things to different people". Hmmm, does it, really?

Systems science is supposed to be abstract, so it doesn't matter whether the system you're talking about is biological or industrial or urban. And indeed, all three of those systems are examples of matter-value systems. Well, what other kinds of systems are there?

It turns out there are 2x2 kinds of systems. There are information systems and matter systems. And each of those can be either pure or valued. So physical systems are pure matter, software are pure information systems. And industrial systems in general are matter-value.

What do I mean by a valued system? I mean one which processes the value of its elements. Or put more baldly, a metacircular system. One that redesigns itself to suit an internalized conception of its own purpose.

An FPGA-based computer whose CPU reprogrammed itself on demand would be an example of an information-value system. But there are other, much more common, systems that fit this category: political systems.

So ignoring chimeras like health systems, we have software, political, physical and industrial systems. And that is all.

Unemployment in Europe

These were a couple of the comments in a reddit thread today about European unemployment.

Hang around playing xbox and commenting on reddit about how much the US sucks - much like everyone else in Germany. Nyuck nyuck nyuck.

I know! It's the same in Sweden (i spend some time there)...
Socialised hispeed internet is a killer of motivation!

Which got me to thinking, this is bad? I'd like to point everyone to the fact that natural resources are becoming scarce. All useful jobs have to do with the extraction, transformation and distribution of these natural resources. Which are becoming scarce.

So useful jobs are scarce. Either people must scale back their motivation or they must become destructive. Germans and Swedes have decided on the former, Americans and English on the latter.

As petrol, lumber, land, grain, wool, rubber, steel, copper, and all other commodities become increasingly scarce, we can either be satisfied with less or we can fight more energetically for what's left.

And don't anyone dare say that everyone should become a programmer / engineer or artist / designer. Most people don't have the analytical functioning for the former, or the creativity for the latter.

Mind you, I'm not a doomer. In fact, I consider doomers to be anti-civilization scum. The current scarcity of natural resources is not a permanent fact of life. It's a product of China and to a lesser extent India rapidly modernizing.

When Nautilus Minerals' venture finally comes online, massive new sources of copper, gold and other minerals will increase their supply.

When 2nd generation high temperature superconductors become available, the demand for copper for generators will be vastly reduced.

And when the world starts building nuclear power plants and mass transit systems in earnest, then demand for petrol and coal will be reduced while supply of both electricity and transportation will increase.

Scarcity of natural resources and the poverty it is associated with,, are not inevitable. They're just unavoidable right now. We might as well make the best of our situation by kicking back and taking it easy.

Definitions of Intelligence

I looked through Definitions of Intelligence and I was struck by how contemptible all these definitions, in fact their entire approach, was. None of them says anyhing about intelligence per se.

They serve merely as a heuristic which an intelligent agent can employ in order to gauge intelligence. Making these "definitions" entirely circular since they depend on what they define in order to be meaningful!

This can be seen simply by looking at the properties of these "definitions" of intelligence and observing that none of them have anything to do with intelligence. What are these properties?

1. goals
2. success
3. interaction
4. environments

Are goals a necessary requirement for an agent to be intelligent? No they are not. An agent could have no goals at all and still be considered intelligent. It might not be considered an agent but that's besides the point.

The point being that whatever makes an agent intelligent can't be the same thing that makes it an agent, otherwise there couldn't be stupid agents.

Is interaction a feature of intelligence? Are environments a feature of intelligence? Is success a feature of intelligence? No, they are not. Not individually and not in any combination. Intelligence isn't what something does, it's what something is.

And that fact is blindingly obvious to anyone of intelligence who has worked or known underachieving gifted children. But perhaps not to imbeciles who wish to deny the notion of gifted intelligence out of petty jealousy.

You see, gifted children are just as likely to become highly unsuccessful in life as they are to become highly successful. So they are "unsuccessful" in "many wide environments". Does this make them unintelligent? Hardly!

Are bacteria intelligent because they can colonize more environments than a human being? Is a single human being stupid because he or she cannot survive in any environment if left alone? Are a thousand idiots more intelligent than a lone genius? Yet this is what the "final definition" implies.

Clearly the standard approach to defining intelligence has deep flaws if it suffers from such trivial counter-examples. The fact these are never noted, let alone addressed, nevermind countered, marks the authors of such work as imbeciles.

Now obviously it's too much to ask an imbecile what intelligence is. Yet this is exactly the absurd situation we are presented with on that page. Definitions produced by imbeciles in a process of group-think. They are entirely unoriginal and the mere aggregation of them adds nothing to them.

Now, if someone capable of originality had been asked to come up with something insightful, they might get "living representation" or something else that would provoke deep thought. Something that has a chance of being right.

Followed up in a formal theory of intelligence.

Choice, diversity and competition

Choice is bad, diversity is good, competition is evil. And the sooner people learn to differentiate between them, the better.

Competition

Competition is defined by sociologists as the willful destruction of your adversaries. Competition is making other people lose. It is anti-social and psychopathic.

Economic competition on a large scale is economic warfare. The victims' bodies (bankrupt businesses) litter the landscape to be picked clean by vultures (called consumers by biologists).

Diversity

Diversity is good because it allows people to use whatever is most closely suited to their needs. If you have a range of numbers from 5 to 10 then none of them are particularly close to 5900. If you increase the range of numbers available to between 0.005 and 10,000 then you'll likely get something much closer to 5900. The same goes for products in general. Diversity adds value, so long as it's actually made use of.

Choice

Choice is a cost, not a value. Nobody wants to choose between three different sizes of toothpaste or 4 different brands of Whitening Toothpaste. Choices impose costs on people, the cost of choosing. Something which is definitely a cost since it is not enjoyed and is avoided wherever possible. It's the reason why people develop routines. The reason they take the same seat in the meeting room after the break. To avoid choosing.

So competition for the sake of competition is evil. Too much diversity that forces an overload of choices on people is evil. And meaningless choices that don't add to diversity are evil too.

How Americans Created The Totalitarian State

Americans have this ludicrous notion of "individual sovereignty". Now, in reality, that's the place Americans don't live in, it's easy to see how absurd this notion is because collectives of all sizes are absolute necessities.

You need cities to suppress suburban sprawl and manage utilities. You need city districts to counter the city's tendency to raze neighbourhoods for highways. You need food coops for decent non-toxic food. You need unions to manage employment insurance. And so on.

But with the Americans' toxic doctrine of "individualism" there is no room for these collectives. Now of course, if a rational response to collectives needs are suppressed then the need for collectives won't just go away. No more than the need for sex and liquor goes away just because Americans are prudes. Rather, the need for collectives re-emerges in some kind of fucked up manner.

And that's how American "individualism" has created the totalitarian state. So for all the Libertarians out there, for all the "small government conservatives out there" you created the totalitarian state you fucking imbeciles.

Go Money, Go! -- Why Faster Currency Is Better Currency

Everyone should already be familiar with the negative-interest currency of Worgl, Austria, and the known effects of demurrage. Effects such as being an intrinsically loose money policy (forcing government to rely on fiscal policy and work restrictions to prevent asset inflation, as it should!), realigning the discount rate towards a socioeconomic level and a future-orientation, decoupling currency interest rates from asset interest rates, and allowing the limited production of free money (free of inflation and debt). This post addresses lesser-known effects of increasing the velocity of money.

Inflation is the product of the quantity of money X its velocity exceeding the value of the goods and services in the economy. Theoretically, if you increase the velocity of money you need to decrease its quantity to get the same inflation. However, inflation is only one measure of the health of the economy. Unemployment is another.

As it happens, unemployment is not affected by the quantity of money changing hands as much as by its velocity. So increasing the velocity of money takes care of little problems called 'depressions'. Especially if you can do it in a debt-free manner (without putting yourself in hock to creditors) and without inflation.

Intuitively, circulating and causing exchanges is the FUNCTION of currency, so the higher the velocity of a currency, the better it is at being currency. But so much for intuition. Let's look at all four ways in which faster velocity is a good thing:

• overhead
• nucleation from stagnant pools, hoarding
• high velocity jobs
• taxes

Overhead

If you have two currencies A and B and A has a velocity 10x that of B then you can choose to inject either 10,000 of A or 100,000 of B into the economy. Now when you inject money into an economy you usually go through bankers. Either the Federal Reserve Banks or foreign creditors. So if you choose to inject 10,000 of A then you'll owe the bankers maybe 1,000 (10%). If you choose to inject 100,000 of B then you'll owe 10,000 (10%) or 10x as much. This despite the fact that 1 A == 1 B, it's just their velocity is different. Now which would you rather owe, 1000 or 10,000? Of course, this was assuming you go through bankers instead of simply printing the money and spending it, which you can do. But even if you print the money and spend it, printing costs you. And printing 100,000 B costs 10x as printing 10,000 of A. For the exact same effect.

Nucleation

One of the effects of having slow currency is that you end up with large standing (stagnant) pools of currency. This is called "savings" and is supposed to be a good thing. Except it's not, it's a really bad thing. Because it is NOT savings. What it is is hoarding. The difference between savings and hoarding is that savings includes investments and hoarding excludes investments.

So those stagnant pools of money are not doing anything for the economy. They're not being spent and they're not being invested. Now since you're printing so much more money, you'd think those stagnant pools of money wouldn't matter ... except they do. Because currency behaves somewhat like a liquid.

Let's think on that for a minute. Money doesn't behave like a gas because it seeks its own level of return and doesn't fill the space of economic activity equally. Money also sticks together instead of automatically dislodging other money. And most relevant for our concerns, money can undergo a phase transition called a 'depression' where it freezes.

Now as everyone knows from physics classes, freezing occurs around impurities and around already-frozen nucleation sites. So basically, by eliminating all stagnant pools of money and by heating up the money, you are massively increasing your buffer against freezing (depressions). This is a Good Thing.

High Velocity Jobs

Are there any businesses that become viable only with high velocity money? Naively, you wouldn't expect any since businesses still receive money at the same rate either way, and each business chooses for itself how much money it hoards. But upon closer analysis, increasing the velocity of money by setting a floor under it does have some effects on businesses. Specifically, it has effects on businesses that extend credit to their customers and depend on payments.

The reason for this is that by setting minimum velocities for money, customers have an enormous incentive to avoid putting off payments. So long as they have money on hand, they have an incentive to pay off their debts rapidly and promptly. Payments may still be missed if customers don't have money on hand, but they will rarely be late. This greatly reduces the risk for a business that extends credit because they can expect a much smoother and steadier stream of income.

And because of that more predictable income stream, the business needs to keep less money on hand for its own purposes. It can operate under tighter margins, with less overhead, and be more efficient. Thus some marginal businesses that would not exist with slow money, do exist with fast money.

Taxes

One of the surprising consequences is that government and government utilities are such businesses. While government can't typically go out of business, it can end up compelled to lay off people as a result of tax arrears. And as it happens, this is exactly what happened in Austria during the Great Depression and the exact opposite of what happened in Worgl thanks to its negative-interest currency.

George W Bush is the new Hitler

It's official folks, GWB is the new Hitler. A variant of Godwin's law has just been made for him.

Plenty of Jobs left to do in the Old Economy

Ahh karma economies, they are wonderful things. If you haven't already done so, you may wish to read Michael Goldhaber's essays on The Attention Economy on First Monday. An attention economy is evolving right now. Attention economies also figure prominently in fiction such as Elf Sternberg's Journals of Kennet Ryal Shardik.

But there's plenty of life left in the old material economies. Especially if we remove some of the perversities heaped upon them. For example, by substituting a decentralized negative-interest currency such as was used in Worgl, Austria to lift it out of the middle of the Great Depression. The bankers wouldn't like that though. Fuck 'em. Such a currency is necessary because there are still a million different jobs to be done in the physical economy. And millions of people unemployed or underemployed or badly employed that could perform these jobs.

A few thousand nuclear reactors have to be built across the planet. Thousands of kilometers of high speed rail track has to be laid in North America alone. Thousands more kilometers of subways and tramways. Fiber optic cables to every home. Sewage systems have to be rebuilt, water treatment plants completely redesigned, desalination plants built in the hundreds if not thousands, the electric supergrids have to be completely revamped. Tens of thousands of parenting centers have to be built. Entire cities have to be built in developing countries, and rebuilt in the USA. Undersea mining of copper and iron ores.

And just for fun, a nuclear-powered Orion spaceship, rebuilding the capital sector to use amorphous metals, 3D printers, and rebuilding companies from the ground-up on an anti-authoritarian basis.

There's no lack of meaningful, valuable things to do. There's no lack of resources with which to do them either. There's plenty of uranium lying around and with that uranium there's plenty of copper and zinc and everything else. There's plenty of potential workers going spare in useless sectors like the military, management, police and the law. They're just being wasted by a financial system that doesn't give a damn about creating meaningful wealth. It's time to change that.

1984's Oceania in 2007

I've often said that totalitarianism and authoritarianism are fully in line with the history and ideals of the USA. The reason Americans don't see this is because of certain other history and ideals of the USA. The history of propaganda and brainwashing.

The USA is an Orwellian nation so just about every single word in Americans' political vocabulary has been twisted and redefined in a way that makes the USA look better. Political words, as Americans know them, are out of line with their meanings as understood by the rest of the human species. They are useless for meaningful communication and only serve to glorify the USA.

So for instance, in the English language 'authoritarianism' means obedience to others' will. In the American language it means something quite different. It means collectivism. Thus, private property which is everywhere regarded as a deeply authoritarian and indeed totalitarian concept, doesn't raise an eyebrow in the USA. Meanwhile, collective endeavours like single-payer healthcare or mass transit or firearms regulations are regarded as "authoritarian" in the USA.

Going on, freedom (redefined as power), democracy (plutocracy), patriotism (fascism), liberty (egotism), free speech (apathy), human rights (civil rights). That last is an interesting one. As everyone should know, and a few people do know, the USA is one of a very small number of nations on this planet that refuses to even so much as recognize human rights. Americans buy into an obsolete and discredited 17th century theory of "natural" rights which none of the rest of the world believes. So-called "natural" rights are gibberish whose "justification" is a primitive State of Nature (ie, anti-civilization).

Furthermore, the American word "liberal" has no analoguous word in the English language. Everywhere else, classical liberals, neo-liberals, and just plain old liberals are right-wingers. Liberalism is an inherently right-wing ideology. As a result, American "liberalism" corresponds to no word in the real political landscape ... except for the term anti-fascism. So if Americans spoke English they would have to admit that their country has been on the brink of fascism continuously for many decades.

Another good example is the USA's being the only country hypocritical enough to use "free speech" as a code word for "end of conversation". How many times do people ritualistically say "I disagree with what you say but will defend with my life your right to say it" when they really mean "I don't give a fuck about what you say, it's never going to change my mind"?

The USA's attitude towards human rights far surpasses hypocrisy. It's a blank stare of non-recognition. Americans don't even comprehend the notion of universal human rights. And when they are told the human rights, they object that "those things aren't human rights!"

The Americans' use of NewSpeak instead of English is itself evidence of a deeply authoritarian culture. Admittedly, it's impossible to say this within NewSpeak errr American so we have to use English! So in the English language, it is fair to say that the USA is a deeply authoritarian culture and has been so since the Great Awakenings which have turned Americans into a nation of total control freaks. The current fad towards overt despotism was begun more than a century ago, not a few decades.

Magical Thinkers

The magical thinker has a complex of symptoms and deficiencies which is variously called Romanticism by David Brin, or Intuitionism, or Intuitive thinking, or Magical thinking, or when I'm feeling pejorative, monkey thinking. They are incapable of reasoning about abstractions because they have a mental handicap similar to but infinitely worse than dyslexia.

A dyslexic sufferer perceives the world as having symbols (barely above perceptions) to be jumping around and not staying still. They'll look at a page and the letters and numbers will be shifting. An extremely strong dyslexic would be incapable of learning to read.

Magical thinkers are much worse off because it isn't symbols that are jumping around but raw concepts. Just like a dyslexic can't read because the letters keep moving, so a magical thinker can't reason (assemble and disassemble ideas out of concepts) because the concepts keep moving around in their head.

Because of this they rely on pseudo-thinking, or lower-level thinking. This lower level thinking, the first three levels of Bloom's taxonomy of cognition, consists of strictly applying the concepts already in their possession. Basically, they are rearranging their prejudices and fitting concrete perceptions to already existing abstractions. Since assimilating (creating) new abstractions is as painful to the magical thinker as learning to read is to the dyslexic (except you only learn to read once) the magical thinker avoids forming new abstractions at all costs.

As a result of this, the magical thinker relies completely on a given set of 'received' abstractions. Abstractions like "nigger". Bingo, there you have racism. But also abstractions like "soul". It should interest you to read Jesse Bering's The God Fossil. Essentially, belief in souls (conservation of qualia / permanence of consciousness) is either innate or learned extremely early. It is only as a young child that most people abandon this belief.

Magical thinkers evidently can't discard such a concept because they 1) rely on it too much, or 2) can't assimilate structural identity. Structural identity by the way is the understanding that a molecule of CO2 is absolutely identical to any other molecule of CO2. Not "the same kind" but absolutely identical. Many (most? all?) magical thinkers cannot understand this concept. They believe that a molecule of CO2 has an essence that designates its identity. That it has a soul.

Other non-abstract "abstractions" which magical thinkers rely on and never learn to discard include emotions and anthropogenic thinking. You see this when religionists anthropomorphize the physical universe in a god. You also see this in eco-zealots when they anthropomorphize nature. Think of Mother Nature, Gaia, "nature will punish us", blah blah blah. You see this also in animal "rights" activists. The notion of assigning morality or rights to animals is self-contradictory gibberish because animals can't reason. That doesn't stop animal "lovers" from saying that animals are "just like us". Or hey, maybe they are. Maybe animals are just like them. Which would give us humans leave to slaughter them like cattle.

That's another problem with magical thinking. Because it is so unsophisticated, it is highly symmetric. It's based on raw associations, correlations, and not more complex asymmetric relations, causations. And the arrow of causality usually doesn't run the way the magical thinker would like it to.

Furthermore, since magical thinkers are incapable of reasoning, but sometimes capable of synthesis, it stands to reason that they would fuck up synthesis. That is, they do not comprehend synthesis. This explains why magical thinkers routinely confuse insight (a product of synthesis) with gibberish. Literal gibberish, sentences that do not have any meaning because they are either not well-formed or are self-contradictory. Generally, magical thinkers do not recognize self-contradiction because they cannot apply modus ponens. The deep magical thinkers think that contradictions are insights. For example: the Mystery of Christianity which is their "three in one" god. "mystery" is just a euphemism for gibberish.

Now consider the fact that magical thinkers confuse gibberish with insight, and that they believe in souls. Suddenly you have spirits and ghosts. If you actually reason about spirits you will realize why they are gibberish. Spirits are not actually non-corporeal because can be seen and affect matter. But they are also not corporeal because they can pass through solid objects. They're gibberish.

The interesting question is why this particular gibberish came about. The answer to this can be found in Lloyd deMause's Foundations of Psychohistory. Humanity was born deeply psychotic and hallucinatory. Hallucinations have many of the traits ascribed to spirits.

The same answer can be found in Julian Jaynes' The Origin Of Consciousness since human beings living three millenia ago constantly hallucinated gods and other divine beings. It was an efficient way for one hemisphere of the brain to communicate with the other hemisphere. And indeed, this explains the importance ascribed to numerology and incantations. Numbers and letters, symbols, are powerful Magic to primitive people. Because they fulfill the crucial function of intra-cranial communication.

Symbols, together with souls, constitutes the whole foundation of any mystical system. Think of JRR Tolkien's fondness for languages and his reliance on Spirits to describe LOTR's cosmogeny. So we see that this explanation describes a great many phenomena.

But the reason why I dragged out Jaynes and deMause is to outline a simple fact. Magical thinkers rely on thought processes and on "abstractions" which have reached us *from the dawn of time*. I do not believe the concepts involved are actually abstract, they are far too innate.

And since magical thinkers are incapable of reasoning and usually incapable of insight, since they depend on others for the few abstractions they can memorize by rote, this explains their obsession with Revelation. And since they have no ability to reason, since they are incapable of evaluating truth, since they have no access to truth, it also explains the various Relativisms. Especially intellectual relativism, where supposedly objective truth does not exist. Recognizing the existence of objective truth would require them to accept they are mentally handicapped and intellectually inferior.