Mail 706 Friday, December 23, 2011

· Social Security Trust

· Mad Max and the Melting Pot

· Inventing the future

· Paying people not to work

· Reactionless Drive

·Starswarm by Jerry Pournelle available on Kindle and Nook. Compares favorably to Heinlein juveniles according to many reviewers.

“Apparently we’re a tasty, terrorist threat. I guess we were also amazed at what can pass through security in one airport, but not in another.”

<http://www.thebostonchannel.com/r/30062442/detail.html>

Roland Dobbins

The TSA Security Theater continues. It’s the most expensive show on Earth, and likely to remain so. The costs are enormous, and the benefits hard to ascertain. If the TSA budget were cut in half, is it likely that the costs due to terrorist incidents would go up by $2 billion a year?

Jerry Pournelle says that unrestrained capitalism would lead to sale of human flesh in the marketplace.

But I thought he meant slaves, not cuisine.

Jim w.

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/45767456/ns/today-entertainment/#.TvVvqvJ-eIB

Words fail me.

Texas schools: first to reach the Accountability Plateau?

An addendum to the previous discussion of the comparison between education results in Texas and Wisconsin:

Obama Administration Education Secretary Duncan is dissatisfied with the performance of Texas schools:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-18/obama-s-education-secretary-says-perry-s-schools-left-behind.html

But it seems that the recent stagnation of test results in Texas may simply be the result of Texas having been an early adopter of the kind of accountability standards that other States are now adopting. When first adopted, those standards produced substantial gains in performance, but recently performance in Texas has leveled off. Maybe that will happen in other States, too.

http://www.edexcellence.net/news-commentary/education-gadfly.html

Rod Montgomery==monty@starfief.com

The first reform of schools should be the realization that the vast majority of children with intelligence of dull normal up can be taught to read in first grade. Those who don’t learn to read should be held back until they do so; the presence of illiterates in classes from second grade up is disruptive and absorbs far too much of the teacher resources which ought to be dedicated to the education of the children who already can read.

When I was in grade school up through 7^th grade there were two grades per room with one teacher and no teacher aides. There were about 20 students per grade. My first three grades were in Catholic schools in Memphis in a middle class parish school. After that I was at Capleville, where the pupils were farm kids collected by school bus from a radius of about eight miles. There was no teacher time to be devoted to illiterates, but in fact all the children at Capleville could read, including a girl about 14 in the 5^th Grade. She was of course somewhat retarded and known to be, but she was pleasant, wasn’t expected to learn much, and married a farmer at age seventeen having reached 7^th Grade.

Our attempts at equality have resulted in a disproportionate percentage of educational resources being devoted to the below average students. This is dangerous to a republic that must compete globally: Steve Jobs famously said he didn’t make Apple Computers in the United States because there weren’t enough quality control engineers and technicians; the schools weren’t turning out people who could make elegant products. This is worth thinking about.

We need excellence. We also need Good Enough.

Social Security Trust Fund Redux

Dear Jerry,

I am unsure of your view of Social Security when you write that Congress

"set it up so that the money that goes into the Trust Fund is replaced by

Treasury Bonds so that government spending can continue to rise

monotonically". I can understand arguing against having any government-run

pension system, but here you seem to be objecting to the Trust Fund being

invested in treasuries. What else would the fund administrator invest in?

Would you prefer that the federal government hold trillions of dollars of

corporate securities? Talk about government control of the economy! What

exactly should the Trust Fund be invested in?

Gordon Sollars

The problem is that the income from Social Security is spent on current expenses. This means nothing has been saved, and the deficit grows exponentially. The Trust Fund trick allows ever growing federal spending, with the result that sometime in the past week or two the debt exceeds annual production. That means that the US owes an entire year’s productivity. This is an enormous sum.

Investment of a Trust Fund of compulsory savings has to be done very carefully; and of course if we had a balanced budget or anything like one there might in fact be a big pot of cash burning a hole in the government’s pockets; but we do not seem to have to worry about that problem. If the Trust Fund were being used to pay off the debt — but then that’s but a dream, isn’t it?

Is it really this bad?

Jerry,

I’m happy to be living NOT in California for a variety of reasons. The article below reinforces how bad it is getting, and I appreciate the references to historical barbarism. Is it really this bad?

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/286354/vandalized-valley-victor-davis-hanson?pg=1

r/Sub.spike

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

As a native of Modesto, I found the following article especially interesting. In it, Dr. Hansen chronicles the central valley’s descent into barbarism.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/286354/vandalized-valley-victor-davis-hanson

I know that the knee-jerk reaction by many conservatives will be to demand tighter immigration controls, and that can’t hurt. But it’s not the full solution. When I lived there (until 1994) I had few problems either with illegal aliens or their children whom I taught in schools. The real problems were the welfare recipient descendants of Europeans in places like Keyes and Waterford, living in trailers and in houses absolutely crawling with roaches.

You live only 200 miles or so south of Fresno, do you not? Do your observations match those of Dr. Hansen?

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Hanson lives in the Central Valley and describes what he sees. He is to the best of my knowledge a truthful man. In Los Angeles the Mayor is instructing the police not to impound the automobiles of illegal aliens caught driving without a license, and there are areas of the city that are in essence “abandoned areas” for some law enforcement purposes. And of course in Arizona there are official abandoned areas posted with warning signs.

Most illegal aliens in Los Angeles are looking for jobs and stability, and many have been quite successful at total assimilation. The US Melting Pot works – if it is not overwhelmed. It’s not a matter of immigration, legal or illegal; it’s a matter of quantity. The Melting Pot can assimilate only so many in a given time. If there is a saturation, or worse, a rejection of the whole notion of assimilation and a turn to “diversity” as a goal, the result may not be what you expect. America has always been very nearly unique in that you could learn to be an American. You can’t learn to be French, or Swiss, or German; but anyone could learn to be American, and people from everywhere have done so.

But that assumes that there is an American culture.

California meets Road Warrior

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/286354/vandalized-valley-victor-davis-hanson

I guess you guys in California need to learn how to deal with Reveneurs.

When the government abrogates responsibility for its citizens, then the citizens have a right to abrogate the government.

What would happen if every customs agents’ car was destroyed after a ticket was written, and no witnesses came forward?

David March

The short answer is Civil War.

Economist on the economics of future planning wrt climate change and other..

Jerry,

The author of this Economist ‘Free exchange’ column seems to be right

up your alley in taking the long view.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2011/12/future-0

Jon

Jonathan Abbey

I have never believed that I can predict the future, but I have long believed that Dandridge Cole was correct when he said you can’t predict the future but you can invent it. There is also prudence: some actions have quite predictable consequences.

My notion of inventing the future is to work on developing more efficient and plentiful sources of energy and raw materials. That was the theme of A Step Farther Out, which is still worth reading.

Michelle Obama’s Unsavory School Lunch Flop [Plus: Watch Gaza Terrorist’s Reaction…]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/track/trackurl.asp?q=spu11fp6du48

The Los Angeles papers and talk shows have been having a field day with this: the kids won’t eat the ‘healthy’ food, and now that there is neither strawberry nor chocolate milk, they don’t drink milk either. This is compounded by the entitlement meals: some kids have no choice but to take the school lunch, but often they won’t eat the ‘healthy’ parts.

I have considerable sympathy for the school authorities in their dilemma, but political correctness gets in the way of everything. I intend to deal with some of this in my next novel.

Pakistan: Man cuts off teenage wife’s lips and nose; police refuse to register a case against him

http://www.jihadwatch.org/2011/12/pakistan-man-cuts-off-teenage-wifes-lips-and-nose-police-refuse-to-register-a-case-against-him.html

And from the women’s rights organizations we hear – dead silence. From the majority of the mainstream media we hear nothing. At least AFP, normally rather apologetic, did mention it. The real problem is that this is normal rather than the exception.

{^_^}

The French Army under Napoleon thought they were carrying Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity across Europe on the points of their bayonets.

Comet Lovejoy Plunges into the Sun and Survives – NASA Science,

Jerry

Comet Lovejoy Plunges into the Sun and Survives:

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2011/16dec_cometlovejoy/

The NASA site even has a little video, which actually shows a surprising sight.

Ed

Subject: Atheist messages displace CA park nativity scenes

Excerpt from the article:

http://my.bresnan.net/news/read.php?rip_id=%3CD9RJQNC80%40news.ap.org%3E&ps=931

…atheists got all but three of the spaces this year because of a new lottery system…

…Two individuals got 18 spaces. One person can request a maximum of nine…

Yes…everyone has 1st Amendment rights…but when two people win 18 of 21 spaces, and you are only allowed to bid on 9, I think the odds are pretty high that the process was subverted.

A nation that works at destroying its own culture probably will not survive as a nation. Why should it?

Paying people to be unemployed, and penalising employers

You occasionally remind readers that unemployment benefits work out as paying people to be unemployed, and that regulating firms’ working conditions and pay levels works out as penalising employers for employing workers. You usually summarise this by pointing out that if you subsidise something (the former) you get more of it, and if you tax it (the latter) you get less of it. It’s like making a horse pull a cart through a noose around its neck instead of a proper harness.

Pretty obviously, things would improve if we simply stopped doing these wrong things. It’s not so obvious that that’s not enough. Unemployment benefits started out from things like the Elizabethan Poor Laws and Bismarck’s Welfare State, not simply out of charity but from a hard headed realism that wanted to buy off the social unrest that was already around and growing from people without work or personal subsistence resources (the technical name for that is "Vagrancy Costs").

It worked, sort of, in the short term, but at the cost of growing the underlying problems for the future – our present. The spread external cost of having the poor around had just been switched for the spread external cost of funding unemployment benefits – even if the accounting in some countries makes it look as if the unemployed are paying for it themselves out of previously accrued payments. But that also means that just getting rid of the things that make things worse, that already grew the underlying problems, would just switch back to the external cost of having the poor around – only now at the higher levels that have been allowed to grow. That means something structural that favours unemployment even when the rest of the economy has been stimulated, so that you have to over-stimulate beyond the optimum for employment to pick up or get a jobless recovery because of an underlying mechanism that is growing all the time.

Economists have actually been looking into this general class of problems – externalities – for about a century, and they have learned a few things. Pigou worked out one approach, and later Coase worked out another. Pigou’s approach was to use subsidies or taxes precisely in order to get more of what you want and less of what you don’t, but in a careful way that actually reduced overall costs. Common sense tells us that taxes and subsidies always make a net burden, whether directly or from the need for funding elsewhere. But the net actually comes from the excess of the cost over the benefit, an excess which comes about because there is a distortion away from the optimum you would have been nearer without intervention. Pigou’s insight was that, if there was already a distortion anyway and you pushed the other way with subsidies or taxes instead, you could get nearer the optimum and maybe even hit it if you had enough information (a near miss didn’t matter much, because the amount of sub-optimality is a second or higher order function of the "distance" from the optimum – "close enough for government work"). Of course, there is still the cost of churning everything through the government, so Coase’s approach of engineering out the externality with property rights is often better, but it may have the hidden catch of yet another material external cost from having to police the property rights. Either way, getting nearer the optimum is always a change from the status quo, and not only does change itself have a cost but also someone’s ox is almost bound to get gored – the optimality is an aggregate, not always an improvement for everyone involved.

What has all that got to do with the price of fish, i.e. unemployment? Simply that there are both Pigovian and Coasian solutions to it. Since unemployment benefits etc. are already handled through governments, and wages are what Keynes called "sticky", Pigovian wage subsidies – that is, wage subsidies that get nearer optimality rather than overshooting it – are faster acting than the Coasian solutions (which include Distributism to make the resources needed for work the workers’ property and slavery to make the workers into property, so they raise other issues). That means subsidy levels have to be set similarly to unemployment benefits or somewhat below, so that people still need paid work but they can afford to work for a wage lower than they need to survive that is low enough to price everybody into work (and to compete with overseas workers, among other things) – a top up wage, not a living wage, whatever that is. After I had done some work of my own in the area (in Australia), I looked around and found that two professional economists had independently come up with something broadly similar: Professor Kim Swales of the University of Strathclyde, along with his colleagues (in the UK), and Nobel winner Professor Edmund S. Phelps, McVickar Professor of Political Economy at Columbia University (in the USA). So I wasn’t simply kidding myself that I knew better than professional economists, since some of those had come to the same thing, albeit using different analysis and pathways to get there.

The big problems with ordinary wage subsidies are that they need huge amounts of funds and – particularly if they go directly to actual and potential employees, as in a Negative Income Tax – that means huge net outgoings while wages slowly and stickily adjust downward enough to price everybody into work. The three of us found the same way around the problem: integrate the wage subsidies with the taxes paid by employers as a tax break per worker, so that actual wages paid out don’t have to fall even though their net cost to employers does, and so that no funds actually have to be paid out by the government but rather the pre-tax break gross tax goes up – something I term virtual wage subsidies. This bigger gross tax does not mean any short term changes to net tax, apart from oxen getting gored in industries that have already paid for equipment to replace labour, say (the system is revenue neutral in the short term and at least budget neutral after that, since tax revenue only falls in lock step with falls in unemployment benefits as employment improves – which raises other taxes). However, it does mean some big numbers in the intermediate calculations, which might frighten some people even though they don’t correspond to anything real any more than the displacement of a ship nearly fitting a dry dock means you need that much water in the dry dock to float the ship. Professor Phelps’s version uses the kind of taxes the U.S.A. already has and applies the tax break using a sliding scale, which keeps the numbers small at the expense of needing more administration and policing. Professor Swales’s and my version uses the broad based VAT/GST we already have in our countries, though I wouldn’t recommend introducing one just to use as a carrying tax – it hurts a lot of other things too.

Well, if this is so clever, why isn’t everybody rich? All three of us researchers have tried to get the message across to our respective political establishments, only to be repeatedly listened to politely and then sidelined without being given sound reasons, or indeed any. It’s almost enough to make you think there are vested interests in keeping people dependent on a drip feed only they can provide…

Anyhow, readers might be interested in this for its own sake, and who knows, some aide to Newt Gingrich or someone might pick up on it and pass it on to him. If anybody wants to know more, when I last checked some of Professor Kim Swales’s and his colleagues’ work was at http://www.faxfn.org/feedback/03_jobs/jobs_tax.htm#23feb98a , some of Professor Edmund S. Phelps’s work was at http://www.columbia.edu/~esp2/taxcomm.pdf (see also his book "Rewarding Work"), and I have some at http://users.beagle.com.au/peterl/publicns.html#NWKART1 , at http://users.beagle.com.au/peterl/publicns.html#LIBRESLN (a Liberal Party Resolution) and following, and at http://alsblog.wordpress.com/2009/05/05/pml-on-tax-reform (a Henry Tax Review submission) – but my numbers are a bit out of date by now. Professor Kim Swales’s modelling indicates that, as my work suggested, there is no overall cost as both GDP and employment levels increase – GDP about half as much as employment levels in percentage terms.

There are some other issues to do with one country’s economy and tax/subsidy system interfacing with those of others, but that’s a whole other story for another email. Suffice it to say that other externalities are at work there, too, so that when a company outsources, that’s the economic equivalent of a wealth transfer – a giveaway – when one country gets some of another’s tax base.

Yours sincerely,

P.M.Lawrence

I would like to believe that we understand the principles of managing an economy, but I don’t believe it. That’s why my ‘solution’ to most of these matters is to get out of the way, and in particular, allow the States to do as they want but be very careful about Federal regulations, labor laws, even child labor laws; let the states have minimum wages, but do not impose such federally; and in general, let the Federal government do what it was formed to do, and stop trying to run the country from Washington.

I don’t think we really understand economic engines. To the extent that we do, Pareto seems closest to me, but he is not much studied now. If we could make every Congressman and Senator read The Road to Serfdom at least once every term it might help, but better would be to keep them from trying to do too much.

The biggest danger is the federal education system. The only way to be sure that no child is left behind is to make certain no child gets ahead. Fortunately the rich don’t believe that nonsense and send their children to places that try to get them ahead. A nation with no kids getting ahead is doomed. Of course as Galton observed in Genetic Studies of Genius , although families of great men are more likely to produce great men, most great men do not come from the families of great men; which was why his “Eugenics Society” tried to find bright people and encourage them to marry early by making early marriage affordable. That would be politically incorrect now.

A society that does not value the smart kids regardless of social origins handicaps itself enormously. We have chosen that primary hamper. Leaving this to the states would at least give some states a chance at setting up systems that favor the bright and able and disciplined over the stupid, disabled, and undisciplined. Insistence on equality of education will result in an economy incapable of sustaining itself.

It does seem to me obvious that paying people to be unemployed will produce as much unemployment as you will pay for.

Thanks.

Rocket Reaction and the Dean Drive

Hi Jerry,

Here’s an article I’ve written about the Dean Drive, from the perspective of what makes a rocket work. I’m a long term researcher in this area, and I have a short video demonstration which proves that Inertial Propulsion does exist. I’m sending this article to you, to publish as you see fit, due to your association with individuals who actually witnessed the Dean Drive in operation. – JV PS: As you advise, I’ve written my million words. ; )

Rocket Reaction and the Dean Drive

A lot of well educated people will say that the Dean Drive isn’t possible, or that it violates the known principles of physics. But this belief isn’t actually true, as can be seen by comparing the operation of mechanical thrusters in general to a rocket’s reaction.

When someone sees a rocket, they will often know that the exhaust is the reaction mass, and that Newton’s Law states that every action has an equal but opposite reaction. When the fuel burns, it releases energy, and this energy is carried by the products of combustion, which is the exhaust. So it is the exhaust which applies force to the rocket. This means the exhaust is the action mass, under Newton’s Law. And the exhaust is also the reaction mass, as we all know, rebounding in the opposite direction to the force it applies. However, the rocket’s movement is NOT a reaction. It’s actually the result of the fuel’s energy being applied to the rocket, with or without an engine and nozzle. (Remember Project Jason.)

Newton’s Second Law of Motion states:

When an external unbalanced force is applied to an object, the change in the object’s momentum is directly proportional to, and in the same direction as the resultant force.

So a rocket’s movement is the RESULT of the applied force. It’s obviously not the reaction, since the rocket can’t move in the direction which is opposite to the applied force. Therefore, the exhaust is the action/reaction mass and the rocket is the responding mass. The same mass which applies a force also experiences the reaction force, and the mass which responds to the applied force experiences Newton’s resultant force. And these same three Newtonian forces are also involved with centrifugal force machines, including the Dean Drive.

The most common argument against mechanical thrusters such as the Dean Drive is that they violate Newton’s First Law, which requires an external force. (Everything has inertia and an external force is required to change speed or direction.) But if you tie a rock onto the end of a string and whirl it around, the First Law proves that your hand IS external to the rock, or it couldn’t apply a force which changes the rock’s direction, from a straight line inertial path to a circlular movement. The force your hand applies, through the string, is referred to as centripetal force. The action of applying this force produces a reaction, in the form of centrifugal force, and this reaction is felt by your hand, as an outwards pull. The reaction is not felt by the rock, which does not experience any outwardly directed force. Instead, the rock experiences Newton’s resultant force.

With a machine, the central shaft which is turning a weighted spoke is the source of the force which acts to pull the weight’s mass into a curved path. But it isn’t only this shaft which feels the reaction force. It’s also the entire mass of the device which is connected to the shaft, through the bearing supports, and the entire mass of the ship which is connected to the device. Only the mass of the revolving weight feels the resultant force. Unlike the resultant movement of a rocket propelled by a reverse stream of exhaust, the movement of a ship propelled by a Space Drive is in the same direction as the reaction force. Reaction mass does not have to be expelled, because it moves in the desired direction of travel. This makes the Dean Drive a Reaction Machine, rather than a ‘reactionless drive’. Unlike a rocket’s Reaction Engine, which quickly runs out of fuel, a Reaction Machine can continue cycling indefinitely, producing an essentially unlimited number of DeltaV maneuvers, as long as it has a power source such as solar energy.

All of this is within the accepted constraints of the known laws of physics. Which, of course includes the Conservation of Momentum tenets. The Conservation Law states: Angular Momentum is conserved, in the absence ot external torque input. The driving motor is external to the revolving mass and can in fact input additional torque when needed.

Here’s a link to a video which shows a simplistic Reaction Machine in operation:

http://youtu.be/yzaJuyPpBcs

This device produces a variety of reactions during the first jump sequence. The last of these reactions causes an extraordinary downwards hop from a point in mid air, where there is nothing to push against. The video includes a second prototype, as a control experiment, whose motor does not tip backwards, relative to the base frame, and this device does not produce an airborne thrust impulse. To my knowledge, this Reaction Machine is the first device shown to produce a thrust impulse in free fall, so it is the first publicly demonstrated working Space Drive. The momentum responsible for the downwards hop does seem to carry over to the next jump. Unfortunately, one weight slipped out of synch, so the subsequent operation became erratic. But one unsupported hop proves the principle.

We are now in the Age of the Space Drive. Commercial Space is wide open. Reaction Machines can get us there, and do so economically. I predict this will include the advent of the Self Launching Satellite (SLS).

Jerry Volland

Remarkable

Thank you.