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  • Republicans Bamboozled?

    George Rebane

    I’m not sure that the tax deal announced by President Obama is all that much of a ‘victory’ for the Republicans.  In fact, I think that the GOP may come out bamboozled by the progressives when this piece of sausage finally emerges from Congress.

    Backing off a bit, it is beyond clear now that the 2009 ARRA (familiar to RR readers as the American Re-election and Redistribution Act) has failed big time.  As JF Cogan and JB Taylor (‘The Obama Stimulus Impact? Zero’) report, data shows conclusively that “state and local government purchases of goods and services did not increase at all in response to the large ($862B) federal stimulus grants.”  The arguments are easy to follow and conclude –

    The bottom-line is the federal government borrowed funds from the public, transferred these funds to state and local governments, who then used the funds mainly to reduce borrowing from the public. The net impact on aggregate economic activity is zero,… .

    In light of these additional results, the left’s claim today that the stimulus packages were too small is ludicrous.

    ChuckAsay2010 

    The truth of the ages remains the same.  It is the generation and aggregation of capital, and its subsequent commitment under risk that creates jobs and grows an economy.  As someone once asked, ‘When was the last time a poor person offered you a job?’  Without such aggregation we would all still be growing our own food and weaving cloth for our own clothes.  It is the concentration of capital that finally let people specialize and become expert at providing a certain good or service that their neighbors needed, neighbors who then could use the time to do something else to provide for the common weal.  (H/T to Chuck Asay cartoon for clarification.)

    These are points that go beyond the ken of a socialist.  Even the famous Lord Keynes did not understand the effects of taxing capital income.  He demonstrated this by prescribing for Great Britain a post-war tax policy that stifled savings and growth for decades.  The incentives to take the natural risk that comes with creating enterprises that hire people totally escaped him.  When reminded of this, he dismissed it in high hubris by responding, “I doubt if people are often as actuarially minded as (such) calculation makes them.”  Well, it turns out that they are and always have been.

    The arguments made by TF Cooley and LE Ohanian (‘The Bush Tax Cuts Never Went Far Enough’) nail this down.  People with money take more risk in starting companies and investing in them when they see a stable future in which their bets have a chance of surviving and prospering.  Tax cuts on income, especially capital income, that are temporary and expire into God only knows what will follow, do not invite people to risk very much of their accrued wealth.

    Given this, the two year extension of the Bush tax cuts is a lame kick of the can down the road.  The prematurely celebratory Repubs are betting that in 2012 they can replace Obama and his road to global collectivism with something that will spur long-term economic growth.  The Dems are betting that they can continue to create enough economic pain (‘don’t waste the crisis’), from what they will advertize as the ‘Republican Watch’, so that their promises of socialist paradise will again buy enough votes to keep their agenda on the front burner.  Given the level of national debt/obligations, states in fiscal crisis, international assault on the dollar, and high unemployment, this wind is not blowing to the benefit of the conservatives or the country.

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  • ‘The 70 Online Databases that Define Our Planet’

    George Rebane

    Well, maybe not, but here’s a compendium of databases and knowledge engines from the MIT Technology Review which everyone should consider putting into their online reference folder.  Enjoy.

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  • An Invitation to More Artful Polemics

    George Rebane

    "Marx and Engels never tried to refute their opponents with argument. They insulted, ridiculed, derided, slandered, and traduced them, and in the use of these methods their followers are not less expert. Their polemic is directed never against the argument of the opponent, but always against his person."  Socialism (1951), Ludwig von Mises

    Polemics – the art or practice of argumentation; especially countering the beliefs and principles of another person.  I am heartened at the general progress we are making on the local blog posts and their attendant comment threads.  The number and intensity of ad hominem ripostes is definitely going down.  And often the comments are excellent and well written amplifications and/or redirections of the topic(s) introduced in the posts.

    Also I have noticed that certain readers are beginning to make a difference between calling someone, say, an idiot, and calling their idea idiotic or referring to a general class of idiots holding such an idea – there is a difference.  Unfortunately others still cannot distinguish between the arguer and their argument, but here hope springs eternal.  To me it is a joy to read a churchillian retort whose entendres not only demolish the target argument, but in its more nuanced reading uncovers the camouflaged barb that encourages and even accomplishes a more penetrating mission – perhaps the essence of artful polemics and a joy to the attentive reader.

    (As an example, my all-time favorite churchillian retort is said to have been given in Parliament to one of Churchill’s great detractors.  In utter frustration the man shouted, ‘Sir, may you either die on the gallows or of a vile disease!’  To which the great Churchill immediately responded, ‘Sir, that will come to pass only if I embrace your principles or your mistress.’)

    No doubt there are simpletons on whom such literary labors are lost.  But let’s not lose heart when such encounters occur.  For then it is an entertainment to watch them miss the point while still claiming its grasp.

    There also seems to be more than a little confusion on the notion of what constitutes ‘name calling’.  It is one thing to state that ‘John Doe is a (pejorative label).’  Clearly John Doe has been called a name and the caller seeks to attach to John Doe all the attributes, explicit and implied, that go with the pejorative label.

    Then we have the case where a class of people is delineated with perhaps a number of spelled out attributes.  The class is then appended with a pejorative label.  No specific individuals are named in this exercise.  Upon reading the described screed, John Doe sees that he possesses some or all of the enumerated attributes, enough so that he may claim or by others be assigned membership in the class in question.

    At this point John Doe has neither been identified nor called a pejorative name by the writer/speaker.  For one, John Doe might not agree that the pejorative label is a proper descriptor of the class, therefore there can be no attachment of the pejorative label to himself, no matter his membership.   And even if John Doe does accept the class label, it is then he who pins that pejorative to himself in the process of an extended association.  In any event, the original piece has attached no pejorative label to John Doe.  As appropriate, that task is left to subsequent efforts.

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  • Senator Doug LaMalfa is sworn in

    George Rebane

    The Steeles and the Rebanes were among those invited to the state capitol today to witness the swearing in of the senators newly elected to the California Legislature.  We bundled into Jo Ann’s van and drove through a clearing rain that turned into a beautiful day as we arrived in Sacramento.  We went up to the senator-elect’s office in the Capitol building and met the other invitees from the Fourth Senate district that Doug LaMalfa will now represent.

    RebaneLaMalfaSteele 

    After enjoying coffee and puu-puus with the other guests, conversations with other conservatives and the senator-elect, we watched the proceedings on the closed circuit monitors in the LaMalfa office suite.  Everyone stood for the singing of the national anthem, the flag salute, and the procession of the colors.

    LaMalfaSwearingIn 

    When we departed in the early afternoon, it was from the offices of Senator LaMalfa.  May he have the good health and courage to persist as he charges into what promises to be a maelstrom of ongoing liberal lunacy in the coming legislative session during which so much of the state’s precarious future will be decided.  (Also see Russ’s NCMW.)

    (P.S.  Before we walked out of the Capitol, we went to the rotunda and into the staircase where the portraits of California’s recent governors grace the walls.  All the portraits of the governors are rendered tastefully showing them as statesmen and political leaders standing in front of appropriate backgrounds.  Then there is the one of our governor-elect and former Governor Jerry Brown.  It is glaringly unique and something to behold – behold it yourself below.  The expression reminds me of one suffering from consternation and puzzlement.  It sums up well his past administration and, I’m afraid, is the visage he again brings to our chief executive’s office.)

    OfficialJerryBrown 

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  • Surviving Augsburg Once More – 1945

    George Rebane

    [This autobiographical sketch recounts the Rebane family’s entrance into the post-war world of displaced persons just after the war ended in Germany, and before the ‘final disposition’ of the east European refugees would stabilize.  We and thousands like us were still in mortal danger of being forcefully ‘repatriated’.  This was to be our second escape from Augsburg.

    The chronological order of these sketches and their links are listed below.  These and future additions, including other related travels, are assembled in the My Story section of RR.  Background on Estonia and stories from my earlier years during the war are marbled into the series ‘Road Ruminations’ written during our June 2008 return trip to Estonia.] 

    ‘Christmas in Stettin – 1944’ , ‘The Last Train from Stettin’ , ‘1945 – The year Easter was cancelled’ , ‘The War Ends in Liederberg’ , ‘Sixty years ago today – 4 May 1949’

    This piece follows the events described in ‘The War Ends in Liederberg’.  The upcoming story of the Geislingen Displaced Persons Camp years will conclude the pre-America phase of my life.]

    AugsburgGeislingenMap 

    Our ride south from Liederberg in the back of the Army ¾ ton truck ended in Augsburg, the war devastated city where in 1518 Martin Luther was examined for heresy and escaped northward in the dead of night.  Within two weeks of the war’s end on 8 May 1945, the western allies established a series of collection points – it was too early yet to call them actual camps – for the hundreds of thousands of east Europeans who were lucky enough to find themselves west of the Red Army when the bullets stopped flying.  Vello, Ellen, and their son Jüri Rebane were among the very fortunate – or were they?

    (more…)

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  • California’s Cleantech Road to the Cleaners

    George Rebane

    [This is the transcript of my bi-weekly KVMR-FM 89.5 commentary that was broadcast on 3 December 2010.]

    The news just keeps pouring in about the wrong track that California has taken, and on which it is now doubling down.  The state continues to be led by the gang that can’t think straight, and the voters expanded its membership in the November elections.  We remain convinced that what has not worked before is still the ticket to return us to economic glory.  The newly elected crew will do all it can to continue raising taxes, increasing the regulatory burden on businesses and consumers, and make us a permanent recipient of the federal dole.

    Examples of some local attitudes and decisions that reinforce this statewide malady were evident in the recent Board of Supervisors’ 3 to 2 vote to add new sprinklers to all newly constructed homes in the county.  Is this another self-inflicted ‘benefit’, or did we have a Hobson’s choice?

    Another example is all the hoopla about green or ‘cleantech’ jobs being promoted for the county.  These jobs satisfy arbitrary government mandates and have yet to prove economically viable in developed country labor markets.  They all need government subsidies to work, and they have yet to demonstrate any net economic benefit.  European countries have tried them and failed.  Before Spain pulled the plug, its cleantech programs destroyed over two jobs for every new one created.

    America is already on the cleantech track sporting its own massive failures such as attempting to make ethanol environmentally or economically viable.  The latest shoe in this unemployment derby dropped in Greenville, Michigan.  There Unisolar, a much celebrated cleantech solar energy plant, has only replaced 320 of the 4,000 jobs the town lost when Sweden’s Electrolux shut its doors.  The common problem is that subsidized cleantech companies are just not creating the jobs, but they are costing taxpayers a bundle.  Unisolar does not expect to expand its facilities in Michigan.

    (more…)

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  • Singularity Signposts – 3dec2010

    George Rebane

    This weekend (4,5 Dec) at Caltech’s Beckman Institute there will be a Humanity+ conference with the intriguing title ‘Redefining Humanity in the Era of Radical Technological Change’.  They plan to stream the presentations live.  Please check this site for conference information and streaming links.

    Two aspects of radical technological change were recently announced.  The first was the formulation of a psychological theory that provides a “new explanation of how humans solve problems creatively — including the mathematical formulations for facilitating the incorporation of the theory in artificial intelligence programs — provides a roadmap to building systems that perform like humans at the task”.  This is a major step toward overcoming the long held skepticism about whether computers could achieve peer intelligence with humans.  Creativity in the various fields of human cognition has always been a hallmark that separates us from other critters, and most certainly from machines.  More here.

    Nanophotonics The software that will be written to implement the new discovery called ‘Explicit-Implicit Interaction Theory’ will need a computer that can at least match the processing power of the human brain.  This is estimated to be around ten petaflops, or 10^16 = 10,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second.  Think of a flop as multiplying two long decimal numbers with a lot of digits.

    Well, it turns out that the fastest supercomputers made by the Chinese and Americans have achieved petaflop (10^15) speed levels.  But recently there has been a lot of work done in the field of nanophotonics.  This is the technology of controlling data-carrying light beams at the nano-scale that can be incorporated into a new generation of computing chips.  Using light instead of electricity allows data to be transported faster inside the chip, and also to use less power.  Billions of tiny electric currents going along little leads or wires generates lots of heat.  That’s what makes the fan speed up in your computer when you do stuff like streaming video or making your pictures look pretty.

    And now the announcement comes from IBM that they have advanced nanophotonics to the level that will allow its incorporation into ultra-fast computer chips.  They estimate that by 2018 advanced computers will operate at exaflop levels.  That is one hundred times faster than the human brain, or 10^18 = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 flops (that’s a billion billions).  There is every expectation that during this eight year interval we will have the ‘creativity software’ created and operating on the world’s fastest computers.  More here.

    It is anybody’s guess in these pre-Singularity years what ideas, solutions, and paradigms such computers will start spewing out when they are fed various kinds of data about our world and how we live.

    Exit Exercise: Now put these notions together with what country will be doing what with what kind of talent in the maths and sciences.  China has more students in the equivalent of our ‘advanced placement’ category than the US has students in all our schools – and these kids are not preparing themselves to be lawyers or art history teachers. 

     

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  • While we rush headlong into that storm

    George Rebane

    California has become one of the worst places in the world to start companies and do business.  Onto this reality we have stitched a plan to save the state’s economy through an anticipated flood of new green (pardon me, ‘cleantech’) companies.   The intent is to subsidize them to success under the helm of the California Air Resources Board that is becoming more Orwellian by the day in its regulatory excesses.  All the while we ignore what other countries will do to compete with us, and how other green companies in the US have fared.  Here is a glimpse of Michigan’s green experience.

    Built on technologies that are new and evolving, green industries spawn lots of start-ups, but they can shrivel just as quickly. Other countries are also pushing—and subsidizing—these same industries, making it hard for them to take root and expand in costlier locales like the U.S.

    "Many places are looking for a miracle, and they think alternative energy plants are going to be a savior," says Daniel Meckstroth, an economist at the Manufacturers Alliance/MAPI, an Arlington, Va., public policy and research group. But the businesses aren't large enough or growing fast enough to create large pools of employment.

    More here.

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  • Belated but Important (updated)

    George Rebane

    Paul Emery of KVMR sent me an email during a time that I have a hiatus in checking emails.  He asked me to post an announcement of an interview that he would have with Dave Wells, Executive Director of the Building Standards Commission about the new sprinkler ordinance.  It aired tonight at 6:07pm.  Paul said that “This is one issue that we probably agree on.”  Perhaps this five minute interview can be posted on the KVMR website (please).  [update] Just received this MP3 file of the interview from Paul.  It is quite revealing of how nameless and faceless bureaucracies jam this regulatory crap down our throats.  Worth a listen; Paul does a good job in getting out the info.  And here's the KVMR link.  This is a follow-up of 'What if we just say NO'.

    Building codes.mp3 web

    A hopeful report this evening from Fox News.  It was the ‘Portland Christmas Tree Bomber’ Mohamed Osman Mohamud’s father who first alerted the FBI that his son was turning into a raghead.  This is a piece of hopeful and heartening news that a loyal American Muslim had the courage and the decency to do the right thing when he saw his son being irretrievably radicalized.  Mr Mohamud saved countless lives while standing with America in its fight against radical Islam.  Please tell people about this.

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  • Will someone call the question? Please!

    George Rebane

    David Skeel of the Weekly Standard picks up a notion frequently discussed in these pages – the federalization of California and the attendant national Great Divide (more here).  In his article ‘Give States a Way to Go Bankrupt’ he argues that "the states are the next frontier in “too big to fail.” In the topsy-turvy world we now inhabit, letting states file for bankruptcy to shed some of their obligations could save American taxpayers a great deal of money".

    Given the divisive condition of the country and its irretrievable fiscal condition, it is clearly time to start doing more than just thinking about such contingencies.  Along the same vein Russ Steele on NCMW asks ‘Is this an idea worth pursuing?’, to the comment stream of which I added –

    In a TBD shape and form California will be federalized. I do agree that in its present form the state is essentially ungovernable. To parse it into two or more states does not require that we transit through territorial status. There are other mechanisms available to bring this about.

    A hopeful sign is that there may be enough leftwingers who believe it is they and their socialist ways that actually generate the country's wealth and pull the rest of us along. It is my heartfelt recommendation that whenever and wherever such views are encountered, that they should be strongly endorsed and their purveyors congratulated for their keen insight. If we work it right, maybe we can get them to kick us out.

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