| Saturday,
February 28, 2004 Subject: Cybeterrorism.
http://www.securityfocus.com/news/8136
Subject: Trusting Microsoft.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3492922.stm
Subject: MADMEN
http://www.ajc.com/saturday/content/epaper/
editions/saturday/news_0473506982742054007f.html
Subject: Grand National bookmakers extorted by DDoS
rings.
http://search.ft.com/search/article.html?id=040222003445
Subject: Capitol of Empire.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/22/politics/22DIST.html?ei=5062&en=4c01010c29945d6e&ex=1078030800&partner
=GOOGLE&pagewanted=print&position=
"My daughter used to run up the
steps of the Capitol, turn around, spread her arms and say, `This is my
city,' " said Dan Tangherlini, director of the municipal Department of
Transportation. Now, the steps are off-limits to the public while
construction continues on an underground visitor center that will serve as
the Capitol's sole public entry point.
Subject: CoE.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2004/02/24/bavic24.xml
Subject: Haphazard. (World ends at 10. News at 11)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3517319.stm
--- Roland Dobbins
========================================
On Tariff and economics
Hello, Jerry,
A diamond-hard point:
"I would rather see economic inefficiencies
than disrupted lives."
Each job lost, factory closed, tears out a life's
work. That might not have been so in times when we had a pick of factories
in a town, or in a neighborhood of a city, but now people have to leave when
their work closes down.
Consider:
- Who can plan a coherent life if, as the jolly-golly
"work of nation's" economists, such as Lester Thurow, are correct in
predicting that each of us will change careers -- not just jobs, but trades,
careers, entire collections of skills -- about five times in a typical work
life?
- What happens when the "career change" is forced on
us after 40 or 45 years old?
- What happens to the tissue of life, the spider's web
of interconnections that hold a society together? Specifically, what happens
when the fine teacher's husband is "outsourced", and they pick up their kids
because he has a chance of a job at equal pay in another state? What happens
to the school? To the little league team the husband coached? To their
odd-ball drama group that wants to do John Gay's "Beggar's Banquet" followed
by "Three Penny Opera"?
- Is it a consolation that people who would have
worked in their group, or seen their production, can rent a DVD (produced in
China by near-slave labor)?
- For curiosity, if making a Lexus in the US would
force the Japanese company owners to charge $45,000 per car, rather than
$30,000, who buys the $30,000 Lexus if fewer Americans have jobs?
- If we can imagine an economy of rich people and
servants, what kind of society does that bring? I prefer a yeoman's society
in which everyone lives secure in their skills, their holdings, and their
future. I think that's closely akin to what you have been calling a
"middle-class" society.
- Does anyone seriously believe we can have an economy
made of the two un-outsourcable trades: lawyers and doctors? Well, sure, the
doctirs can prescribe medcine to the lawyers, who can sue the doctors for
malpractice, but what kind of an economy is that?
- Finally, what could be our new, 21st Century ethical
commandment? "Look out for number one"? Hobbes was joking when he described
a society of everyone warring against everyone else. Adam Smith surely never
meant that any economic society could survive if every person treated
themselves as an independent, competing, profit-center. A society like that
would fly apart, as we saw in the '90s. What was the ethic at Enron?
- I recall talking with a rookie programmer in 1997. I
asked: What do you really want? I expected him to answer, "I want to turn
out new systems...I get a thrill to think that I bring life to an idea."
Nope. He said, "I hope to get stock options". So much for the creative
artist/engineer's passion.
(Later, since this has been enough blustering, I'll
explain why outsourced projects turn out garbage. Agile methods cannot be
used by dispersed hierarchical sub-contracting companies. When Indian
programming factories proudly point to the fact that many of them have been
certified as CMM Level 5, it suggests that there is something fundamentally
wrong with the heavy methodology in CMM. The certification is circular: TaTa
Consulting adopts CMM, so CMM certies TaTa...which does NOT mean that TaTa
has improved quality in American projects...only that they've adopted CMM,
which is too academically naive to do anything but bless them with Levl 5
certification.)
Regards,
John Welch
============
Hi Jerry, Here's one ray for hope:
http://www.industryweek.com/DailyPage/news2.asp
U.S. Support For Free Trade Wanes By Agence
France-Presse
Free trade is losing support in the United
States, in particular among high-income Americans, as a growing number of
professionals feel threatened by job outsourcing to low-wage nations,
according to a recent study.
The University of Maryland's Program on
International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) found that among those in the
over-$100,000 bracket, the percentage actively supporting free trade slid
from 57% in 1999 to 28% in January 2004. These results surprised even the
researchers.
"It is rare in any case that any demographic
slice drops 20 or 30 points on any issue," said research director Clay
Ramsay. "It certainly provides evidence for the theory going around now that
job insecurity is creeping up the income scale."
Indeed, the survey found 53% of the respondents
endorse expanded international trade but are not satisfied with the
government's handling of its effects on U.S. jobs, the poor in other nations
and the environment.
I guess that if
rich people's jobs start to get outsourced, then it matters. I just hope
that whatever solution is used will also be helpful to factory type people.
Thanks, Jim P.S. I truly enjoyed Max Boot's The Savage Wars of Peace, now I
don't even blink at the Haiti situation. Also, I now understand why you
advocate a larger Navy and Marine force.
It all sort of depends on whose ox was gored,
doesn't it?
The Wall Street Journal is increasingly shrill on
the subject, with their Thursday February 26 2004 editorisl saying:
"Is it moral to stop foreign people from working
their way out of poverty by closing access to the US market?"
This is hardly an economic argument. If we want to
give money to foreigners, that's an individual decision, not a moral
position for the nation. And does it work that way anyway?
They do point out that regulations in the US
contributes to high unemployment here. ALl true. And if we could get rid of
many of the taxes and regulations that burden US industry, imports would
decrease and we'd have more jobs. But that isn't very likely, or is it?
We live in interesting times.
=====================
Subject: Linux UI Shortcomings
Jerry, Eric Raymond has just published a rant (that's
his characterization of it, not mine) about the shortcomings of the UIs in
Linux. It's available here:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html
It's a bit long and jargon filled, but
interesting to see someone as experienced in Unix / Linux echoing some of
your comments. (Including constant references to "Aunt Tillie").
Chuck Wingo chuck@wingonet.net
Interesting. Thanks to several of you for sending
this reference.
=================
Subject: Panspermia, indeed!
http://radio.weblogs.com/0105910/2004/02/27.html
-- Roland Dobbins
Interesting. I have always used the panspermia
hypothesis in my science fiction stories.
Subject: Bipedal Antarctic carnivores - 70 Myears ago.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/science/02/26/science.dinosaurs.reut/index.html
Subject: Density.
http://www.machinedesign.com/ASP/viewSelectedArticle.asp?strArticleId=56635&strSite=MDSite&Screen=AEROSPACE&catId=379
--- Roland Dobbins
And here is someone I can't help:
Dear Jerry,
I was clever enough to download the W32.Mydoom.F@mm
worm virus, and have subsequently lost very nearly all my Word documents,
including my coursework (I'm a university student). Is there any way of
retrieving them?
Regards,
Sebastian B
But the lesson is clear. Don't open mail
attachments, and back up important documents...
From another discussion group:
Andrew Marshall knows nothing about climate science.
Andrew Marshall's supposedly radical and more
insightful ideas on warfare got fairly thoroughly discredited by the Iraq
war. If the soldiers had been equipped per Marshall's suggestion hundreds or
thousands would have died from small arms fire. Big heavy tanks and APCs
saved lives. Guru Marshall was wrong and the supposedly neanderthal
old-fashioned Army Generals were right.
(and did anyone notice that Commanche was just
cancelled? Another deserved Iraq casualty after Apache's demonstrated high
vulnerability to small arms fire)
I used to be taken in by Marshall's supposed radical
ability to see the military future better. Now I just think he's another
quack who has managed to ingratiate himself with a lot of Congressional
staffers.
Our national security issue with oil is that the
world's purchase of it funds the Wahhabis. We need to obsolesce oil for that
reason, not because of some imaginary imminently looming environmental
catastrophe.
Marshall is trying to play Paul Ehrlich. Ehrlich is
also in a prestitgious institution (Stanford). So surely tens of millions of
Americans must have starved to death in the 1980s. Such a prestigious person
couldn't possibly be a nutcase could he? After all, lots of other
prestigious people took him seriously. They couldn't all have been a bunch
of unrigorous nutters could they? The intellectual herd doesn't stampede
into one folly after another does it?
=================
===========================
Dr Pournelle,
The Highroad to Poverty
"I would rather see economic inefficiencies than
disrupted lives."
Would that it were so simple. Meanwhile, back in the
real world—
Unfortunately it is not ‘one or the other’, but ‘one
leads to the other’; economic inefficiency is the sure and certain path to
far more disrupted, and far poorer, lives than economic efficiency will ever
deliver.
What is proposed amounts to mercantilism, an economic
system and theory popular in early modern Europe, which held that by
developing a wholly domestic supply of materials and markets a nation can be
relieved of dependence on other nations.
Its theoretical basis was effectively demolished by
Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. This important book was published in 1776,
at a time when the power of free trade and competition as stimulants to
innovation and progress was scarcely understood. Governments granted
monopolies and gave subsidies to protect their own merchants, farmers and
manufacturers against 'unfair' competition. Laws forbade the importation or
use of new, labour-saving machinery or cheaper raw materials or finished
goods than could be supplied domestically.
And, not surprisingly, the result was that almost
universal poverty was accepted as the common, natural, and inevitable lot of
mankind.
Adam Smith railed against this restrictive, regulated,
mercantilist system, and showed convincingly how the principles of free
trade, competition, and choice would spur economic development, reduce
poverty, and precipitate the social and moral improvement of humankind. To
illustrate his concepts, he scoured the world for examples that remain just
as vivid today: from the diamond mines of Golconda to the price of Chinese
silver in Peru; from the fisheries of Holland to the plight of Irish
prostitutes in London. And so persuasive were his arguments that they not
only provided the world with a new understanding of the wealth-creating
process; they laid the intellectual foundation for the great era of free
trade and economic expansion that dominated the Nineteenth Century.
The significance of Smith’s message cannot be
illustrated better than by comparing the economies of France, which
continued to stick with the older mercantilist system from ancien régime to
Napoleon’s Continental System and beyond, with Britain, which had
increasingly adopted Smith’s system, finally culminating in the repeal of
the Corn Laws in 1846.
But long before 1846, the evidence was overwhelmingly
in favour of Smith and free trade.
In 1760 (or thereabouts) the population of France was
three times as great as Great Britain’s and the French economy was generally
considered to be about four or fives times greater than Britain’s; France
was the economic superpower of the day. By 1830 or so, the British
population equalled the French, and the British economy was three or four
times as great as France’s.
True, Smith cannot be thanked for all of this change
of fortune, but he can for the vast bulk of it.
The Wealth of Nations changed our understanding of the
economic world just as Newton's Principia changed our understanding of the
physical world and Darwin's Origin of Species did of the biological world.
Would you go back to the pre-Newtonian world of physics? Do you think our
lives would have been better if we had rejected all that physical science
has learned about the world since ‘God said, “Let Newton be.” and all was
light’? For although Smith did not have the last word to say on economics of
course, nonetheless he provided us with the fundament, the ground, that all
subsequent economics has been built upon. Just like Newton did for physics.
So the choice is not between economic efficiency or
disrupted lives, but rather, between economic inefficiency and vast numbers
of disrupted and permanently impoverished lives on the one hand, or economic
efficiency and a (relatively) few disrupted lives on the other.
Whatever path is taken, there will be people whose
lives are disrupted. Under the free trade route which has served the vast,
the overwhelming, majority of the people of the United States so well for so
long, of course some will get hurt. But under any other system, many more
would be hurt, and eventually everyone would be poorer and have
significantly less meaningful lives.
There is no way ahead without casualties, and whatever
the route, if you’re a casualty you’ll take that as conclusive evidence that
the wrong choice was made, but (I’m sorry) that’s because you’re too close
to the problem. Somehow you’ve got to try to step back from your own
difficulties and look at the whole picture.
Yes that’s difficult, but it’s the only path to the
right answer. Because if you are a casualty, you’re going to get back on
course again much quicker, much more certainly, if the right answer is
chosen.
I know I’ve said this before but I’ll now say it
again: it is an exceptionally dangerous error in logic, leading to deeply
mistaken choices, to generalise from the particular.
Jim Mangles
So. Free trade is now a law of nations, and if the
rest of the world vanished so that we were thrown on our own resources,
eventually everyone would be poorer and have significantly less meaningful
lives.
Your fallacy is plain enough to see. Perfection is
the enemy of good enough.
I have ever said that if the goal of the world is
to maximize economic growth, make more things, strive for ever cheaper
stuff, accumulate lots more stuff, then in general unrestricted free trade
and laissez faire internal economics, unrestricted child labor, totally
unregulated economics, might well be the right way to get there. Let the
market decide all things.
That, you tell me, will lead to everyone being
richer and having a significantly more meaningful life.
And yet:
I may know that people live in dire poverty on the
other side of the world, but my life doesn't get better by seeing my
neighbors get beggared in order to raise the wages of Chinese peasants.
Nor, for that matter, is it clear that the market
is always the best path to riches. Might I suggest that conquest does that
sometimes? US conquest of Saudi oil fields, beggaring the Saudi Royal
Family, might well lead to better economic lives for both us and most
Saudis. We aren't going to do that, but not because of market
considerations.
Now it is certainly the case that over the long
haul, everyone on earth will be better off if we in the US will just give up
much of what we have and let the New World Order be created. That is:
they'll be better off so long as economic models rule the world, and
politics and war and conquest are kept at bay. By magic, perhaps? Because
without rule of law, and ordered liberty, the conditions for free market
economics don't exist. And who will keep that order? Well, for the moment,
the nations that have it.
More: we have proved one thing: we may talk about
"level playing fields", but if we can buy goods cheaper from a slaveholding
society that builds things without regard to the damage done to the
environment, and allows a brown cloud visible from space to arise over its
belching factories, we will do that: there are those who will get rich from
the import business and they will happily do what it takes, without regard
to consequences. But if the US really wanted simply to maximize things,
would we be better off getting rid of all environmental regulations, all
child labor laws, all laws against slavery (slavery may be an uneconomic
institution, but not always and in all cases and for all goods); get rid of
all health care obligations; do as William Lloyd Garrison did and fire all
workers when they reach age 50, turn them out into the streets without
pensions because they are no longer as productive; I can think of a number
of labor practices in the US that, were we rid of them, would let us become
low cost producers, and which would significantly reduce unemployment.
And yet, I am not much of an advocate for more
regulations, and I do believe the market is the best regulator in many
cases; but not in all.
For most of history, enormous discrepancies between
the haves and the have-nots have resulted in particular kinds of society.
The one thing you won't get when things get too bad is rule by consent of
the governed. Democracy, I keep pointing out, is, according to Aristotle,
rule by the middle class: those who possess the goods of fortune in
moderation. Those who have enough that they don't care to risk it to gain a
lot more. But for the middle class to rule, it must make up a great part of
the society. We have that, here, so far. But democracies perish when the
political mechanisms are used to transfer the goods of fortune from the
haves to the have-nots. The reason for that is not as clear as it might be:
that is, a distributist society that actually handed wealth out to the many
can endure a fairly long time: but that isn't what happens. What happens is
that the wealth is taken from those who earn it, and handed over to
government, which enriches itself and uses the proceeds to build its power.
Then it provides bread and circuses. And half time Superbowl shows.
Unrestricted free trade not only doesn't hurt me,
but probably helps. I derive significant income from overseas royalties, and
cheaper goods is good for me; while having a larger pool of unemployed is
useful if I need simple services. But I would still rather live in a society
in which people own their own houses, and sweep their own floors and tend
their own lawns.
Of course what I would rather isn't terribly
important.
Over time, more and more of the goods of fortune
will be made by machines, and more and more of the population, particularly
those on the left side of the bell curve, will be unable to compete with
either machines or overseas workers. Of course those people won't just
starve. What will they do? Will they vote themselves largess through taxes?
Will we have a means of distribution that frankly decouples work and
contribution from wages and compensation? I don't know.
So perhaps you're right. Let things stay in the
saddle and ride mankind, and pursue the acquisition of cheaper goods, and
let the weakest go to the wall.
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