Category Archives: Technology and Society

Heyday Of The Accord

I had an ’86 three-door LXi that I put over a quarter of a million miles on, all over the west. It still had its original clutch when I sold it, and never needed any major engine work (only problem that caused a roadside breakdown other than timing belts was a sheared distributor shaft once down in Orange County on the 405).

I thought they went downhill in the nineties — they got too big and too soft, and you couldn’t get a stick shift with a six cylinder–what was up with that? As far as I can tell, as far as Honda goes, the Civic is the new Accord.

The Case Against Waxman-Markey

Here. Bottom line:

Waxman-Markey would impose costs at least 10 times as large as its benefits, would not reduce the deficit, and doesn’t even really cap emissions.

But other than that, it’s a great idea.

Not to mention that the bill is twelve hundred pages long. I wonder if they’ll be given an opportunity to read it?

[Afternoon update]

What this bill will and won’t do for the climate.

A “Breakthrough” In Appetite Suppression

Via Futurepundit:

The brain injection part isn’t exactly appealing. But surely some appetite-cutting compounds will be able to travel via the blood. After all, appetite is influenced by the hormone ghrelin (secreted epsilon cells of the pancreas and P/D1 cells of the stomach) and leptin (secreted by adipose tissues). So the blood does contain compounds that make it into the brain.

While we are living in an era with a high prevalence of obesity we are nearing the end of that era. 20 years from now I expect obesity to be rare in developed countries as drugs that suppress appetite hit the market.

So, if they can get around the “brain injection” part, sounds great. Right?

Not to me.

Let’s start with the fact that it is not our appetites, per se, that make us obese. Throughout history, humans with our appetites have not been, for the most part, obese.

It is a combination of our appetites with a body inherited by evolution to resist losing weight in times of scarcity, and plentiful high-glycemic carbohydrates unavailable to our pre-agricultural ancestors, and a lack of need to go running miles a day with a heavy load to bring home food. We are obese because food that is bad for us is cheap, we don’t exercise much any more because we have figured out how to do a living at a desk, and our bodies haven’t caught up.

But you know what?

I like my appetites. I think that appetites are one of the things that make us human. I like digging into a juicy filet mignon, a succulent lobster dipped in butter, an artichoke. I love the taste (and smell) of fresh bread coming out of the oven.

And you know what else? I really like engaging various of my bodily parts with those of another person of the opposite sex, even though it makes no sense, from an intellectual standpoint. I even like thinking about it, or looking at pictures of other people doing it (though not anywhere near as much as actually doing it). That’s an appetite, too. And one that decreases with age, but I haven’t noticed that it’s made me (or I imagine many others) any happier. And (at least from the literature) the age-related decrease seems to be increased in females, which doesn’t in any way enhance the happiness of many males for whom the decrease has been less, particularly when they are the only females available, sans adultery. That seems like a more worthy problem to attack than “reducing appetite.”

Yes, I know that some transhumanists (like Hans Moravec) want to be a robot. This has been the platonic ideal going back at least to…well…Plato. You know, the body distracts us from the higher values of the intellect…bla, bla, bla.

But does the intellect really make life worth living? The platonists, the transhumanists, would like to persuade us that it does, that properly implemented, the pleasures of the intellect will vastly exceed the base carnal pleasures of this rotting form.

Well, maybe. But even though I’m from Michigan, my darling Patricia is from Missouri. Show us.

Then, maybe.

But mere showing won’t be enough of course. We’d have to have a personal demonstration, in which thinking about…whatever…beats an orgasm, or even biting into a delicious meal.

Maybe suppressing appetites is the future, but I hope not, at least for the immediate future. I’d like to think that there are better redesigns of the body to prevent obesity. Because I like my appetite for food, and my appetite for other things, and if this is where technology is taking us, sign me…not up.

Of course, with the current administration, which clearly wants to put the government in charge of our health care, and which will be looking for ways to reduce the cost of such, and obesity being viewed as one of the primary causes of health-care costs, don’t expect that it will merely pay for appetite suppressants, brain injected or otherwise.

Expect them to be compulsory.

The Obama Surprise

Who were the rubes? They were the rubes:

The first surprise to many Valleyites is how innately anti-entrepreneurial the new Administration has turned out to be. Candidate Obama looked like a high tech executive – smart, hip, a gadget freak – and he certainly talked pro-entrepreneur. But the reality of the last six months has been very different. One might have predicted that he would use the best tool in his economic arsenal – new company creation and the millions of new jobs those firms in turn create – to fight this recession. But President Obama has instead appeared to be almost exclusively interested in Big Business as the key to economy recovery.

By comparison, almost every move the new Administration has made regarding entrepreneurship seems to be targeting at destroying it in this country. It has left Sarbanes-Oxley intact, added ever-greater burdens on small business owners, called for increasing capital gains taxes, and is now preparing to pile on cap-and-trade, double taxation on offshore earnings, and a host of other new costs. Even Obamacare seems likely to land unfairly on small companies.

Entrepreneurship has been the single most important contributor to the economic health of this country for at least a century now – and if you were going to systematically destroy that vitality, you couldn’t come up with a better strategy than the one Washington has put in place over the last six months. Indeed, you can make the case that the sole contribution the Obama administration has made to entrepreneurship in America to date is to force all of those millions of unemployed people to desperately set up their own businesses in order to survive.

But as he points out (and it’s a long-standing truism), big business has no interest in free markets:

…you may think that the competitive challenge that big tech companies fear most is from other big tech companies. You know: Apple v. Microsoft, HP v. Dell, Cisco v. Juniper, MySpace v. Facebook. But in fact, that isn’t the case. Sure, those are dangerous competitors; but far more threatening is that clever new start-up that seems to appear out of nowhere. That’s the threat that wakes up Fortune 500 tech CEOs at 3 a.m. That little start-up not only competes with you, it can render your entire business – even your entire industry – obsolete and you don’t even see it coming. Think desktop publishing and the printing industry, the iPod and the music industry – and just look at the terror that Twitter seems to be creating at Google and Facebook these days.

Once you understand this dynamic, a lot of the paradoxical recent business behavior in high tech suddenly becomes explicable. For example, why did the big tech companies embrace such regulations as Sarbanes and stock options expensing – even though they would cost them billions of dollars with no obvious gain? And why would they support a Presidential candidate who seemed to have little understanding of, or sympathy for, market capitalism and business?

Because it was the best strategy to crush the start-ups.

And for the most part, that strategy has worked. High tech has only seen a handful of new companies go public in the last five years – compared to hundreds per year before that. Less noticed is that this means most hot new start-up companies, instead of enjoying an IPO and becoming rich enough to compete full-on against the big boys, now can only grow to a certain size then offer themselves up to be bought by the giants. What had once been hugely valuable competition has now been reduced to a farm system for acquisitive mature companies. [And a side benefit has been the near-destruction of the venture capital industry, which big business always described as ‘vulture’ capital because it drew away their most talented employees.]

Now you see why the tech world joined the Obama team early on in the campaign. Not only did Senator Obama seem like their kind of guy, but each camp saw in him the President they wanted. The entrepreneurs thought they were getting a fellow entrepreneur, and big business thought they get a confederate in taking out the competition.

The entrepreneurs were suckers, but this is going to hurt the big guys, too.

ITAR is another example of this phenomenon. It really hurts the small companies disproportionately, because the big companies, like Boeing and Lockmart have a small army of compliance people in place who know how to work the system, and the costs of whom can simply get charged against their government contracts. This is in fact a big advantage of established aerospace contractors in general — that they have ongoing cost-plus contracts against which they can charge for the bureaucracy made necessary by government regulations, whether ITAR, or simply enforcing the FAR, plus they get an IR&D budget funded by the taxpayers. This makes being a startup all the harder, and this administration looks unlikely to do anything to make it any easier.

Moving Day

Some thoughts on solar-system engineering:

One idea out there is to change the orbit of a good-sized asteroid or comet — about 100 kilometers in diameter — so that it swings by one of the inner planets and then back out to, say, Jupiter. As the cosmic tow truck passes our target planet, it uses its gravitational attraction to tug the planet in the desired direction, then hurtles back to slingshot around Jupiter, picking up more energy in the process. Repeat a few thousand times with a few score asteroids and there you go: Mars in your backyard.

This technique has been proposed as a way to drag Earth away from the ever-brightening sun that otherwise will eventually snuff out life on our planet. It has some downsides, though. One is that each time the asteroid comes by it’ll exert a tidal force ten times greater than the moon’s, wreaking havoc on the oceans and weather. Another is that some Poindexter on the relocation team is bound to make a unit conversion error along the way, and when the asteroid slams into the Earth — well, that’ll be a real pisser. Luckily, we don’t need to worry about things like that if we’re moving Mars or Venus: if we make one planet go boom, we’ve still got a spare.

Once we get the planet where we want it, though, we’ve still got our hands full. However bad the environment on Earth is, Venus’s is worse. Atmospheric pressure is roughly 92 times ours, the planet has no free oxygen or water to speak of, and the surface temp is hot enough to melt lead. Mars has an extremely thin atmosphere but its temperature, while chilly, isn’t so bad, and it’ll get warmer when it’s closer to the sun. That alone might cause enough melting at the Martian poles to release ice-bound CO2 and create a greenhouse effect. If not, we can always try focusing the sun’s rays with orbital mirrors or crashing (smaller) asteroids into the ice.

I don’t see a calculation of what would happen to Venus’ surface temp if it were farther out. Most terraforming plans of either planet don’t generally include moving them to a better location, but it’s worth thinking about — it is, after all, the first three rules of real estate.

Show Us How It Works

Virginia Postrel says do Medicare first:

Think about this for a moment. Medicare is a huge, single-payer, government-run program. It ought to provide the perfect environment for experimentation. If more-efficient government management can slash health-care costs by addressing all these problems, why not start with Medicare? Let’s see what “better management” looks like applied to Medicare before we roll it out to the rest of the country.

This is not a completely cynical suggestion. Medicare is, for instance, a logical place to start to design better electronic records systems and the incentives to use them. But you do have to wonder why a report that claims that Medicare is wasting 30 percent of its spending thinks it’s making a case for making the rest of the health care system more like Medicare.

Because they think we’re rubes. And judging by the voting results last fall, many of us are.

This reminds me of the old Soviet joke (that I’m sure I’ve related at this blog, perhaps more than once, but it remains appropriate). A teacher is lecturing schoolchildren on the brilliance of Karl Marx. A kid raises his hand, and says, “Teacher, was Marx truly a great scientist?” She beams and nods, and declares him the greatest scientist in the history of mankind. “Well,” he went on, “then why didn’t he try this crap on rats first?”

[Saturday afternoon update]

Peter Orszag has responded to Virginia’s question. Hail the blogosphere.

I find this quite telling:

Medicare First–changing Medicare and waiting to see how it works before messing around with the rest of the health care system–won’t work politically.

You don’t say…

Some people might think that cause to rethink. But not these people.

[Bumped]