technological singularity
this ain’t yo mama’s ditchweed
Post by Brooks Imperial.
water master plan meeting #2
Today, representatives from Elbert County water providers, districts and planning agencies met for the second time to advance development of an Elbert County Water Master Plan.
What I hoped to observe:
- A room full of engineers discussing mechanics of connecting their water systems into an integrated matrix of water and sewage pipelines spanning Elbert County and joined to various renewable non-groundwater sources from outside of Elbert County.
What I observed:
- Too much thinking about Elbert County’s special quality of life, not a single word about renewable water sources, and no anticipation of commercial or industrial water usage except out by Limon.
What I hope to observe at future meetings:
- An unconstrained approach to water infrastructure that does not presume a smart-no-growth perspective, a plan that does not foreclose industrial and commercial growth, and a plan that allows for conservation but does not buy into the green myth of conservation as a basis for growth.
The Known Universe
Disneyfied economic fallacies
Classic Rivers
low bidders
How The West Won
by Rodney Stark
“Americans are in danger of being badly misled by a flood of absurd, politically correct fabrications, all of them popular on college campuses: That the Greeks copied their whole culture from black Egyptians. That European science originated in Islam. That Western affluence was stolen from non-Western societies. That Western modernity was really produced in China, and not so very long ago. The truth is that, although the West wisely adopted bits and pieces of technology from Asia, modernity is entirely the product of Western civilization.
I use the term modernity to identify that fundamental store of scientific knowledge and procedures, powerful technologies, artistic achievements, political freedoms, economic arrangements, moral sensibilities, and improved standards of living that characterize Western nations and are now revolutionizing life in the rest of the world. For there is another truth: to the extent that other cultures have failed to adopt at least major aspects of Western ways, they remain backward and impoverished.”
| Introduction I. Classical Beginnings (500 BCE-500) 1. Stagnant Empires and the Greek ‘Miracle’ 2. Jerusalem’s Rational God 3. The Roman Interlude II. Early Medieval Progress (500-1200) 4. Blessings of ‘European’ Disunity 5. Northern Lights Over Christendom 6. Freedom and Capitalism III. Medieval Transformations (1200-1500) 7. Climate, Plague and Social Change 8. Universities and Natural Philosophy 9. Industry, Trade, and Technology 10. Discovering the World |
IV. The Dawn of Modernity (1500-1750) 11. New World Conquests and Colonies 12. The Rise and Fall of the Golden Empire 13. Luther’s Reformation: Myths and Realities 14. Exposing Muslim Illusions 15. Science Comes of Age V. Modernity (1750- ) 16. The Industrial ‘Revolution’ 17. Why Britain? Liberty, Merit and the ‘Bourgeois’ 18. Globalization and Colonialism Bibliography |
Is Legalizing Marijuana a Responsible Public Policy?
Webster on religion
Webster’s defines religion as “a belief in a divine or superhuman power or powers to be obeyed and worshiped as the creator(s) and ruler(s) of the universe.” So, some god or gods created and rule the universe, and they must be obeyed and worshiped.
Scientists estimate that the observable universe contains at least a hundred billion galaxies. A galaxy can contain hundreds of billions of solar systems. A solar system can contain many planets and moons.
In short, we don’t know the limits of the universe, however man appears to have an unlimited capacity for adornment.
We have at least 75 major religions each with their own explanation about the god or gods who created and rule this universe. These religions tell us, forcefully in some cases, how those creators and rulers must be obeyed and worshiped.
And some terrible things are predicted to happen to those who don’t obey and worship, including murder and hell. Granted, most devout religious followers aren’t so severe in their punishments. But some estimate as many as tens of millions consider it okay to kill unbelievers.
We have a combinatorial explosion of religious beliefs competing for our devotion, and not a one of them can be objectively proven true for the physical universe as we know it.
This is the challenge faith must overcome and over 8 in 10 people around the world agree with faith.
Back when the known universe was the sun, moon, earth and a few planets, religious beliefs were no less difficult to prove, and the bar was set much lower.
the poverty of equal outcomes
What nation does not have a “policy or practice of aggressively expanding its influence over other countries?” What nation does not have policies to expand its export markets and sell its goods into the markets of other countries? What nation does not attempt to establish trade conditions with other countries in order to obtain the best trade terms possible? What nation does not seek to maximize the comparative advantage of its own economic strengths in trading with other nations?
All nations do these things. A nation that does not have policies to foster trade in favor of its own interests eventually ceases to exist. The same rule applies in business. Altruism resulting in financial loss eventually results in bankruptcy and the cessation of business operations.
The quotation marks in the first sentence above are from Webster’s definition of hegemony. Wherever I’ve seen it employed, hegemony is a dirty word used to imply wrongful conduct on the part of a nation. Hegemony connotes a dark, if not downright evil, intent to dominate and control innocent other parties in order to serve one’s own interests. Writers use hegemony as a pejorative against a nation, a people, and a culture.
The use of hegemony, however, says more about the writer than it does any subject.
First, it indicates the writer’s belief in the existence of a collective mentality, as opposed to individual minds. Attaching a moral quality to hegemony means that a collective choice between right and wrong alternatives can be isolated such that the collective mind can be held guilty of a moral wrong.
How can men make collective choices? Not easily. It requires application of a voting infrastructure to assemble individual choices about a specific moral question into a collective outcome. Even if a vote was taken and some machinery of government acted on that vote, there is no collective entity one can hold accountable apart from the individuals who participated in the collective outcome. But it would be unjust to hold individual participants in a vote responsible for a collective outcome over which they had virtually no causal control.
Moreover, the types of grievances labelled under hegemony are never the product of a distributed decision process such as a vote. Nor are the grievances named with much specificity. Expressions of hegemony are presumed to exist when U.S. firms interact with foreign markets, because the U.S. is capitalist and oriented to the free market, and is therefore a presumptive enemy of the people represented by socialist political systems in much of the rest of the world.
Hegemony is a theoretical presumption, not a conclusion drawn from observed causation. Any theory, however, must be capable of disproof. Hegemony can no more be proved than it can be disproved, so it doesn’t even rise to the level of a theory.
As such, hegemony is an empty vessel for writers to load with any meaning or implication that suits their broader purposes. And the purposes with hegemony always involve a negative connotation. Conversely, the alleged victims of hegemony are always portrayed in the right.
In computer programming, words that function like hegemony are called variables. They get instantiated at run time by whatever they’re connected to in the surrounding code. You have to read the code to figure out the limits. The code one finds around hegemony generally involves a writers prejudice against capitalism, and against the U.S.
But when you look into the actual economic transactions with the U.S. that cross international boundaries, you find firms represented by individuals making voluntary buys and sells in what all parties perceive to be in their own best interests. They are not the outcomes of democratic processes. Each individual buyer or seller satisfies some element of the comparative advantage they represent to realize a profit on their side of the transaction. The price point they agree upon is somewhere in the middle of their two interests.
The fact that comparative advantage is unique to each place, and different from other places, sets a pre-condition for trade, and consequentially for profit by both buyers and sellers. Two parties with identical capacities have no need to trade.
Disequilibrium of comparative advantage enables trade, trade enables profit, profit enables capital formation, capital formation enables investment, investment enables the concentration of technology, technology improves efficiency, efficiency lowers unit costs, etc.
A world where everything is equal, where no comparative advantage exists, or where no one is allowed to act on their comparative advantage, is a place where nothing will change, and nothing will get better.
An equality of condition is a utopian ideal we should all hope to never achieve. Profitable trade is the natural response to economic dis-equilibrium. Socialists wouldn’t have to negatively frame international trade relationships as hegemony if socialism worked.
