A plan for the US changing to mostly renewable energy by 2020, written by an investment banker in the energy sector.

Would cost about 100 billion if you do it through wind (less than a tenth of the cost of the Iraq War), and would only involve increasing our current wind power by 30x, and would lower the cost of electricity by 30%-70%, and can be done within 12 years.

I've been re-reading Michio Kaku's book Visions. Most accounts of futurism focus on changes in technology: computers, robots, AI, genetic engineering, medicine, nanotechnology, immortality, space travel, etc. -- but as I think I've written before, there are more important aspects to futurology: political, cultural, and economic changes will be more important and interesting than mere technological changes. And trying to predict the future by focusing merely on technological progress is a bad idea, which is what the book is mostly about.

I think that's why I liked the game Alpha Centauri -- although it too focused too much on technological changes, it also dealt with a lot of social, political, and cultural changes. For instance there's a part in the game where you can "develop" intellectual integrity in your people, which is a cultural development which reduces the rationalization: confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, and the like. (I do hope that occurs because it's one of the major problems and drawbacks of our brains, even if it's a necessary side effect of how they work.)

Of course you could say that the social/political/cultural changes follow and are made necessary by scientific/technological changes, and that's true in part, but a lot of the time scientific/technological changes follow and are allowed by social/political/cultural changes. For instance, it was the social, political, and cultural conditions of the dark ages which kept science and technology from progressing very much -- technology in Europe in the Middle Ages wasn't that much more advanced than under the Roman Empire a thousand years earlier, and in many cases conditions were worse. Yet when culture changed during the Renaissance, improvements in technology, politics, and economics soon followed.

Quick thoughts on what I think will change. ( Read more... )

Why the US recession isn't as bad as it looks.

Points out that if you cut out the two hardest-hit areas -- housing and automobiles -- the economy has continued at a normal 2.5% growth rate, instead of the 0.9% growth rate you get if you include those two (which doesn't even hit the US population growth rate of 1.1% a year). So the problem is fairly isolated to those two. People are buying fewer houses (probably because of the housing loan crisis), and people are buying fewer cars (perhaps because working from home and public transportation is on the rise), but no other part of the economy is really slowing.

I still wish I had invested more in Nintendo back when I did -- the $100 that I put into it in 2004 or so is now around $600. I kind of want to sell it now and be happy with a x6 return, but I think it'll go up even more over the next year as the Wii and DS continue to outsell Sony and Microsoft.

If real life were a fantasy RPG, monetary policy and economics would be the black magic.

This is looking pretty bad.

More on the dollar: "The decline is accelerating. The USD has shed -12.5% of its value in the last year, -3.5% in the last month, and -1.5% in the last week alone."

Not yet hyperinflation (which requires a monthly inflation rate of 20% or more, not 3.5%), but getting there.

One thing I noticed (both in "viral marketing" and the Ron Paul campaign) is that word of mouth is slow; extremely slow in fact, and it's a lot weaker than all those books on it would have you believe. Bits of information, traveling by word of mouth, often take a week or two to spread through a group even under the best conditions (conditions when it's an important bit of news and there is strong reason to tell others about it). Mass media is much faster and usually more powerful. It has its disadvantages: for instance it can only deal with things people know about and can't really say anything new or anything that goes against common belief, but for the most part it's more powerful.

I think this is why grassroots candidates like Paul and Kucinich, even with the internet, are at a disadvantage: word of mouth is too slow for an election, even a relatively long election where people are talking about it years before it actually happens. Media covers Clinton and Giuliani, people talk about Paul and Kucinich and tell others, but the first is much faster.

This is also why independent games are at a disadvantage to mainstream games. They may be more original and more fun a lot of the time, and they may cause people to talk about them more and tell all their friends about them more than mainstream games do, but that is still much less powerful than the cover of EGM or an entry in Joystiq or something.

There is a moderation between these two also: things like Digg or Reddit or the blogosphere are not word of mouth and they are not mass media, they have characteristics of both. They use word of mouth and user-contributions as a source of information, but use media-like ways as the output of information.

Spam is the obverse of both: it uses word-of-mouth like output (email and comments) and media-like (centrally controlled press release) input, which is why everyone hates it, it combines the worst parts of both. What's bad about spam is something that's bad about mass media too: both are centrally controlled press releases by people who are trying to sell you something. And what's bad about spam is something that's bad about word of mouth too: it doesn't communicate effectively and it's easy to ignore (how many times has someone recommended something to you and you've ignored their recommendation or put it on hold forever? It happens a lot.)

I don't think I satisfactorily understand this issue though.

Because the dollar is losing so much value (well, maybe not because of that, but it seems suspicious) they are now releasing a new series of $1 and $10 coins. Each of the $1 ones will have a dead president on it, all of the presidents who have been dead for more than 2 years will get one. Each of the $10 ones will have a dead president's wife; each wife will get one.

Because Jefferson had no wife (while in office), they actually have a made up one for him: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Jefferson_Liberty_First_Spouse_Coin_obverse.jpg (called Jefferson's Liberty).

Recording those small video clips takes a lot of HD space; I realize that if I want to make game trailers for my games I'll need a lot more space to do it in (I only have a ~80 GB hard drive), so I ordered a 500 GB external hard drive for $99 from newegg.com. I'm amazed the price of hard drives has gone down so much recently; just last year it seemed like it was about a dollar per GB, now it's a dollar for five GB?

Especially impressive considering that the US dollar is at record lows; for instance it's at the lowest it's been compared to the Canadian dollar since the U.S. Civil War.

Farm subsidies are more sinister than I previously thought. I just looked into them, and they aren't blanket gifts of money to the agricultural industry, they're fairly detailed and specific and operate as a kind of reverse regulation: instead of penalizing certain things as normal economic regulation does, they reward certain things.

One of those things is the types of food that are rewarded: we subsidize some types of food more than others. The effect of that is to encourage farmers to grow particular types of food. Indirectly, the government then controls our diet.

These are the main things we subsidize (in order of how much money we spend on it): corn, animal feed (eventually to become meat), cotton (eventually to become clothes), wheat (to become bread), rice, soy, dairy, peanuts, sugar, oilseeds, tobacco, wool, vegetable oil. Who knows what foods would be dominant under a free market.

Second, we pay farmers not to grow things -- we pay about 1.3 billion a year to farmers for them *not* to grow any food on their land. Weirder is that even the rare "non-farmers" who don't want to accept that money and want to give the money back because they don't feel it's right to live off of not growing food are refused, they have to keep it, or else move somewhere else.

"Paul has also been an advocate of Employee-owned corporations (ESOP).[81] In 1999, he co-sponsored a bill titled The Employee Ownership Act of 1999 which would have created a new type of employee owned and controlled corporation (EOCC)."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Ron_Paul#Economy

"The three primary characteristics of these EOCCs would have been:

* Employees would own at least 50% of all voting stock in the form of an employee trust. At least 90% percent of employees who worked more than 1000 hours a year would have to be allowed to participate in this trust.
* Employees would be allowed to vote on all corporate issues, including board elections.
* Distribution and valuation rules correspond to existing ESOP rules."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Employee_Ownership_Act_of_1999

I think this is a good idea. The primary complaint about capitalism is that often the people who do the least work get the most money, and that a large segment of the population (people who have money to invest) need do no work at all. I think a big reason that's true is because it's so difficult to have an employee-owned company or corporation under current law; it has nothing to do with the free market itself, it has to do with government laws about what types of companies are allowed to exist, how corporations should be set up, and so on.

One thing I don't like about Ron Paul supporters, though, is that they have the tendency to use pretty straw-men arguments. For instance, they call any politician who isn't in favor of laissez faire economics a socialist: not only Hillary Clinton is called that, but even Giuliani, McCain, Bush (??), etc. -- they're all regularly called socialists by Ron Paul supporters.

Now I'm not defending socialism exactly, but socialism does *not* simply mean government economic regulation. It doesn't even mean redistribution of wealth. Socialism is control of the workers over the means of production -- that's it! The original goal of the socialist movement was to make it so that there isn't a class of people who make a living simply by owning businesses (or investing in them) and not working.

But socialism has been expanded by people to mean any government involvement in anything. I'm a minarchist so I too want government to be as small as possible, but socialism is not another name for government involvement or big government, they're *not* synonyms by any means. There exist libertarian socialists, like Noam Chomsky, who are both socialist and in favor of limited government.

This is a general tendency though; people often criticize things they don't know about. I don't really respect anyone who criticizes a school of thought without having an intimate knowledge of its theoretical structure, it's just ideological warfare otherwise.

Just wanted to write a summary of my current view of economics. Most of these are arguable but I like making blanket statements once in awhile, especially when I'm too tired to nuance it. Remember this if you intend to comment.

1. Laissez faire would not lead to stronger corporations, it'd lead to weaker corporations. The main reason corporations are so strong is because of the government (through corporate lobbyists) passing laws which favor them.

2. Workers should and would own the means of production (the cornerstone of socialism) under a laissez faire system. Less government control of business would mean more control over businesses by the people who work for them and purchase from them.

3. Wage slavery is a symptom of government intrusion on the economy, not of private enterprise. The proportion of people who are paid by the hour (vs the proportion of people who freelance and own their own small business) is correlated with the amount of government regulation of the economy.

4. The government itself is a corporation, it's just one that pretends to be above the rest and has powers none should have. Being anti-big-government without being anti-big-business, or vice versa, is a contradiction (which both Communists and Objectivists make), because one would not exist without the other.

5. A monetary policy of fiat money is what allows the current situation (as opposed to what I described above), but it leads inevitably to economic collapse. It may take 100 years, but it always happens. The difference now is that virtually all currencies are fiat, which has not been the case at any previous era in history, so who knows what will happen: either they will all collapse and the world economy will return to laissez faire and recover after a 150-year depression, or it will continue indefinitely, 1984 style.

Which is better: a world of perpetual slavery and war with ever-decreasing freedom but with comfort and wealth (as we have now), or alternatively, a hundred plus years of a depression including tribal wars and poverty and disease and probably mass death and little to no wealth, but free? Who knows? "I'd rather be free and alive!" -Ron Paul

This guy (who made the documentary above) is pretty talented.

I'm thinking that the public education system would work about five hundred times as well as it does now if it got rid of that textbook and chalkboard and homework nonsense and all it did was have kids watch one documentary a day.

*

"I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world, no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men." ~Woodrow Wilson, president of the United States

"All of the perplexities, confusion, and distress in America arises, not from the defects of the Constitution or Confederation, not from want of honor or virtue, so much as from downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation." ~John Adams, Founding Father of the American Constitution

"The colonies would gladly have borne the little tax on tea and other matters had it not been that England took away from the colonies their money, which created unemployment and dissatisfaction. The inability of colonists to get power to issue their own money permanently out of the hands of George the III and the international bankers was the prime reason for the Revolutionary War." ~Benjamin Franklin, Founding Father of the American Constitution

"Whoever controls the volume of money in our country is absolute master of all industry and commerce...and when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate." ~James A. Garfield, assassinated president of the United States

"The Government should create, issue, and circulate all the currency and credits needed to satisfy the spending power of the Government and the buying power of consumers. By the adoption of these principles, the taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest. The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of government, but it is the government’s greatest creative opportunity." ~Abraham Lincoln, assassinated president of the United States

(Note that JFK, too, was taking action against the Fed and wanted to limit its powers.)