| Thursday,
October 14, 2004 A
letter from Russia
All,
I will need quite a bit of time to properly respond,
if I can. I may not be able to do so for lack of data. However, I can say
the following. At present, parts of Russia are in strong rebound. Moscow
crawls (literally) with insane traffic. Commercialism is rampant. Material
prosperity is improving. I saw far more people in cars than using public
transportation. My Russian hosts indicated that this was probably wrong.
Only 30-40% of families own cars. However, this is up from 5-10% a decade
ago. The cars on the streets are decent (size, quality, maintenance, etc.).
Cell phones are universal and service is fine. Very
few people appeared to be suffering in any way. The number of street beggars
was very small. All were very old people abandoned by the change in system.
They were not thin, but did seem to be having a hard time. Heavy
construction is underway on a large scale. Much of the new stuff is of quite
respectable quality.
Note that all of my comments are based on Moscow. Note
that I saw quite a bit of Moscow, not just the area around the Kremlin.
One measure of the disorganization of the old system
was the terrible dental work. Even quite poor people in the US have better
teeth than the middle class in Russia.
People on the streets are well dressed. Nobody lacked
appropriately warm clothes for the cold weather. Actually, I was the only
person who didn't have a coat.
Many people spoke of serious hardships after the
collapse of communism in 1991 and then later in 1998 with the default.
However, these quite traumatic events are in the past.
Crime does not seem to be a serious problem. The
Russian mafia has (allegedly) declined according to many people. However, at
a nice restaurant my hosts identified any number of people they assumed were
in the Mafia. Seemed plausible to me. The mafia is dangerous, but only if
you choose to get involved. Tourists are only threatened by gypsies who
steal wallets (my father was mugged by them).
Corruption and tax evasion are omnipresent. The papers
were full of hair raising tales of massive official misconduct. For example,
one story told of how Gadhafi paid $10/20 million to get a favorable vote at
the UN. The Iraq oil for food scandal was in the news as well.
Misappropriation of state assets after the fall of communism is a story that
won't go away for years, perhaps decades. Tax evasion is universal at every
level. Yukos may be guilty of what it is accused of. I don't pretend to
know. However, having been in Russia I would not rule it out.
Vast numbers of nice restaurants have opened and
appear to be doing well. The quality of the food is high and so are the
prices. Prices are higher than Houston, but lower than New York.
Real estate prices have reached absurd proportions.
$600 per square foot is common towards the city center. Note that mortgages
are not common. Most transactions are for cash. I pointed out that houses,
were I live, are only $100 a foot with a yard and pool. This observation
brought amazement.
A clear negative is the state of education. Wages are
extremely low. Corruption (bribes for grades) is common. Getting your kids
into a decent school is a challenge. The basic US assumption that if you
live in a descent neighborhood the schools will be OK, does not exist.
Family life is troubled. The usual problems of two
career couples with no time or money for kids are commonplace. Of course, in
rural Russia large families still exist in places. For example, many
families lost several kids at Beslan. However, the modern "we can't afford a
family" mindset definitely exists in Moscow.
I was told that life in the provinces is much harder.
I heard people say "outside of Moscow they hate Putin". However, public
opinion polls in all of Russia don't support this claim. Moscow is
apparently getting more of the new wealth of Russia. That point not
withstanding, opposition to Putin is apparently more political than
economic.
I did not detect much enthusiasm for Putin, but some
respect. Apparently he speaks Russian well, unlike his predecessors.
According to my hosts you have to go back to Lenin to find a leader who
mastered the language. The rest (Stalin, Kruschev, Gorbachev, Breshnev,
Yeltsin) butchered the Russian language. This greatly offended the Russians
I met (as much if not more than their policies). Shades of Bush here in the
US.
Peter
You may rely on these observations...
====
On Energy
I read in the mail section of your web site recently
about the problems with moving the UK to an electricity based transportation
regime. I also took the liberty of running the numbers for what it would
take to convert US transportation to run on electricity.
The numbers show that we would need 62% more
electricity generation in the United States just to power our cars, trucks
and trains by electricity. That's 30 hydroelectric dams the size of the 3
Gorges Dam (at $29 billion each, assuming you could find 30 rivers the size
of the Yangtze) or 500 nuclear power plants (at $2 billion each).
Current US Electricity Generation Capacity: 905,301
megawatts 1 gallon of gasoline = 1.3 *10^8 Joules of energy = 36.1 kilowatt
hours Current US Transportation Gasoline Consumption: 375.3 Million Gallons
/ Day =13,537,500,000 kilowatt hours/day =564,000 megawatts
Most stats are available from the US Department of
Energy:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/neic/quickstats.html
The original UK analysis by Prof. Oswald and Mr.
Oswald:
http://www.oswald.co.uk/ocl/windaccountancy04.pdf
Simon Arthur
Well, I had nothing to say about moving the UK to
electricity, but I have often said that the US needs more and cheaper
electric power. For $100 billion we could build 100 1000 Megawatt nuclear
power plants. The $2 billion per plant is a number that includes all kinds
of lawyer extortions, easily fixed if we were serious about building the
power plants. Once you have some kilowatts you will get serious research on
how to use them rather than expensive gasoline.
I have often said, starting back with A STEP
FARTHER OUT in the 70's that if we were magically to convert all our cars
and trucks to electric it would be a disaster because we don't have the
kilowatts. That doesn't mean we ought not start using them.
As to dams, I don't know why that was brought up
except to scare people or something. Incidentally, we have the fuel for
nuclear plants: lots of bombs we don't need now. Each one with a couple of
kilos of 90% U-235 metallic.... About 25,000 in inventory, we probably
could spare half those now.
Energy independence is not cheap, but then the war
in the Middle East isn't cheap, and if we had more domestic energy we
wouldn't need such an expensive foreign policy.
Once you have nuclear power plants you have the
resources to start serious space exploration (the foreign policy is cheaper,
and a Strategy of Technology demands that you stay way ahead of an potential
military rival) and that leads to solar power satellites. Solar Power
Satellites have the great merit of allowing us to EXPORT ENERGY anywhere in
the world (well nearly anywhere; not into places covered with rain clouds
all the time; say to any desert in the world) quite cheaply; which can be
sold, or used in connection with foreign policy.
Energy is good stuff, and few nations regret having
lots of it at low costs.
On
Deconstruction
First
While I substantially agree with Morningstar about
deconstruction, a few of his asides need to be challenged.
1. Goedel's work was not aimed a frightening
mathematicians. It was applying mathematical methods to logic in a new way.
Goedel was a platonist, and he emphasized that as the source of his three
biggest ideas. He was not responsible for the obscurantist interpretations
of his work by bad philosophers.
2. Morningstar's article expresses an arrogant sales
engineer's attitude to science. Einstein's four great papers of 1905 were
understood by very few people. In spite of generations of attempts at
simplification and popularization, the theory of relativity, especially the
general theory, is still a difficult topic. Recent scientific advances,
including mathematics, physics and biology, are also hard to understand -
and not because of deliberate attempts at obscurity.
3. Deconstructionism has an important contemporary and
historical relation to political correctness and also to French
anti-Americanism that Morningstar doesn't pursue. That's ok, given his
limited objective.
JMC
and then:
I once had an affair with a deconstructionist
academic. The physical side of our relationship was more than satisfying in
the usual ways with women. But the psychological side was even more
infuritating than it usually is with women.
Arguing with her was sheer hell. She was always
accusing me of falling back on "social constructs". Suddenly everything was
a social construct set up by rotten capitalist, racist, sexists in order to
put down the lesser breeds. Eventually I gave up and just poked fun at her
ideas. We split up, not surprisingly, shortly thereafter.
Deconstruction is not a philosophical theory, it is an
academic *game*. More specifically it is a classic left wing parlour game
transported to common rooms. The idea is to show off ones cleverness, not
add intellectual value. De-cons should be treated as entertainers, not
informers.
Like all game players De-Cons are a creatures of
fashion. I has gone out of fashion and looks pretty retro now.
JS
And then we have
Subject: TSA
Thought you would appreciate the actions of your
favorite TLA organization.
********** AP: Report Finds Lavish Spending at TSA
Thursday October 14, 2004 2:16 AM
By LESLIE MILLER
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - The government agency in charge of
airport security spent nearly a half-million dollars on an awards ceremony
at a lavish hotel, including $81,000 for plaques and $500 for cheese
displays, according to an internal report obtained by The Associated Press.
Awards were presented to 543 Transportation Security
Administration employees and 30 organizations, including a ``lifetime
achievement award'' for one worker with the 2-year-old agency. Almost
$200,000 was spent on travel and lodging for attendees. <snip>
Earl Smith
Subject: All the way with TSA!
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20041014/D85N6DH81.html
------------------------ Roland Dobbins
=
Subject: Feeling much, much safer
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&e=4&u=/ap/20041014/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/tsa_pricey_party
I especially liked the part about the "lifetime
achievement" in a 2-year-old agency.
Gives a whole new meaning to "terrible twos."
Steve
What did one expect? Did they have any of their
victims there for sport?
=======================
And I post this for my own reasons:
Subject: Great DRM article in Dr. Dobbs Journal
Just wanted to let you know that IMHO, in a mere two
pages, you've managed to say everything that ever needs to be said about DRM
(seriously!). Which won't stop vast tracts of forest being cleared over the
next decades to say more, but everything that *needs* to be said is right
there. Nice job.
============================ Philip A. Schrodt Dept of
Political Science University of Kansas Blake Hall, Room 523 1541 Lilac Lane
Lawrence, KS 66045 USA email: schrodt @ku.edu phone: +1-785-864-9024 fax:
+1-785-864-5700 Home page: http://people.ku.edu/~schrodt Kansas Event Data
Project: http://www.ukans.edu/~keds
==========
And a question:
Subject: odd hotel stuff that I've never seen discussed, perhaps your
readers know about it
I suspect I've been living in a naïve world all of my own. Let me tell
you what happened.
My wife and I decided we'd take the children away for a week next spring
to a nice resort somewhere warm. I called the hotel in which we wanted to
stay and requested a room. They allowed that they didn't have any rooms, all
full sorry, long waiting list...would I like my name added to the list. I
declined.
So I called hotel choice number 2 and asked for a two bedroom place. They
didn't have any but would be happy to put us on a waiting list. They did
have a single bedroom which would allow us to have a bed and we could put
one son on a couch and the other on a double bed. Price was higher than I
wanted, but children and I really want to go on vacation as a family this
year....so reluctantly I agreed.
My wife then called a travel agent, who promptly called us back with the
news that she could arrange a two bedroom suite at hotel #2 with breakfast
included, with airfare, and a car for less than what the original room cost.
She couldn't get us into hotel #1.
Now, what gives? Do travel agents buy blocks of rooms from the hotels? Do
hotels hold back rooms? For what earthly reason? Is there any way to beat
this system? One would think that the hotel would want to take a deposit on
a room months in advance? This is very weird, very!
How do we get into Hotel #1?
Any readers with ideas?
Mark Huth [mhuth@coldswim.com]
Me I have no idea. I know that American Express can
often find me deals. It's a bazaar out there now...
Jerry
Reagan was right again, it seems:
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996526
Ed
Sure. He had read A Step Farther Out...
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