Israel-Palestine score-sheet

Outright war between the Palestinian Autority and a privately funded terrorist organisation, I had counted as a "win" for Israel in my three player reference game theory. Since Israel has neither been made illegitimate nor destroyed with recent events, I would have to say that they are ahead of the ball game at the moment. Israel's current strategy may be to engineer a continuation of this civil strife indefinitely.

Marconomics

Dr. Clam, quite flatteringly suggested future Giant robot leaders would be well versed in "marconomics" and therefore avoid the pitfalls of democracies and Holy Roman empires. Somewhere in between Microeconomics and Macroeconomics, is the space where policy matters. A good starting point would be the privatisation/nationalisation axioms. Good Marconomic policy is choosing policies that are shown to work in our grand global experiment that is the rise of nations. Also to have an experimental mindset about new policies.

The other reason why Polar Bears are 100% safe from extinction

Like elephants, tigers, whales, koalas etc., selected large mammals have such an importance in human's consciousness, that an unfathomly high priority ends up being placed on salvaging at least the genetic pool of these animals in captivity, if not special "reserves", where their natural habitat is preserved or they are protected from competing wildlife and human encroachment.

This is with a background of a possible large scale extinction in the chunk of climate specific/sensitive species which is not very visible to the human consciousness. Through climate change, the overall number of organisms shouldn't change that much in any particular class, but opportunistic species will win out over the highly specialised in any particular category.

"Overshoot" Theory

This is my theory about oil prices principally, but it works equally well for prices for a range of other stuff. My theory is to do with pricing as a tool for matching supply and demand, coupled with profits being used to invest in increased capacity, coupled with the long-term average price being a fairly simple function of the cost of extraction. Thus the long term average price is fairly independent of demand and supply. Thus as it runs out, it is the increased cost of extraction of a depleted resource that will determine higher average prices, rather than the discrepancy between supply and demand. That particular increase in cost doesn't appear to exist in the places which have the most oil left.

Thus the supply curve is still behind the demand curve. Capacity is increasing financed with the profits. The Supply will catch up with demand because the profits have nowhere else useful to go other than increased capacity. The (long) delay is because the profits have to build up, the capacity needs time to ramp up. But the march is unstoppable. When the supply and demand curves intersect, prices will undershoot their long term average.

Stuff That should remain nationalised

As in ownership and control.

Lawmaking - The Government is that which makes the laws about stuff.

Law enforcement - Enforce the laws that one makes.

Judiciary - Make judgements about the laws one makes.

Infrastructure - These sort of investments are of such a long term nature, very hard to structure into a market, are natural monopolies, have risks which are hard to insure for, have little advantage of competition, and competition can cause unnecessary duplication of infrastructure and waste. eg Roads, Rail, fibre-optic networks, power networks, airports.

Fallback basic primary school education - Government owned and controlled schools can compete on an even keel with private schools at a primary school level.

Fallback basic universal health care - including emergency, preventative and educational. "elective" stuff should be private.

Pensions - same reasons as for infrastructure. Highly regulated private superannuation system as in Australia is great too.

Disaster recovery - As opposed to insurance, there is no reason why any private interest would have a spare reserve trained specialists for immediate help. The Australian army seems much better for instance.

National Security - Command and control is necessary to at least protect the functions of government.

Privatisation/Nationalisation Axioms

* - Continuous Spectrum. For any "Stuff" there is a continuum of policy of ownership from Government-owned monopoly all the way to unregulated competitive private ownership. Some markers being Highly regulated private monopoly, Government owned but some private subcontracting, majority owned near-monopoly competing with private enterprises, Government services competing in a fairly level field with private. Conveniently economists can come to a consensensus on where on the spectrum a policy puts itself.

* - Independent nation-states able to individually pursue and experiment with policies without being able to impose such policy on other countries or be imposed on from the UN or other supranational entity.

* - The judgement on policy is essentially which country does well in a typical competitive environment in the ideal where the policy concerned is the only point of difference.

* - There is little or no interdependence between different "stuff" being privatised. ie. if A is privatised, and B is privatised, the net effect will be approximately the sum of the effects of each.

* - Price controls on "Stuff" which is nominally privatised has the effect of removing a large chunk of control from private interests and should be considered in the nationalisation end of the spectrum.

The Polar Bear "species" is 100% safe from global warming

Environmental "scientists", I believe have been guilty of Species Inflation with regards to polar bears. One of the things that evolutionary and genetic science has given us is a "tight" definition of a species. Ignoring the look, habitat and lifestyle and just concentrating on the genetics, polar bears are a sub-species of the brown bear. Focusing on the plight of the white bears is just racism.

Threat plus opportunity = zero net cost (approx)

Tourism in Greenland is evidence that Global Warming brings opportunity in equal measure to threat.

Historical Sciences Bah...

I am not really a big fan of the historical sciences. To me it makes a mockery of the word science(*). Scientific method is about repeatable experiments, and everybody knows that... "His-tory neever repeats...". Also, one can always quip back to some asserted historical fact - "Were you there?" you know to "observe" it. Indirect observation, irrepeatable conditions = always conjecture. This especially irks me when experts in their field go to extreme lengths and expense to prove for example A) that Jesus performed miracles or
B) that a particular fossil is the common ancestor of apes and humans.

To me these factoids are primarily used to enforce one's theological convictions, and are therefore pretty useless scientifically.

Even historical ice cores for temperature & atmosphere content statistics have gone as far as is scientifically useful. Todays conditions and issues are so radically different to historical ones, that it cannot help policy decisions today, and are therefore again only useful in promoting ones views (perhaps at taxpayers' expense).

(*) - To tell you the truth, I probably just have a problem with the "SPIN" placed on historical sciences rather than the historical science itself.

Iran

I have had a lot to say about the middle-east with specific reference to Iran in Kraus Rohde's Blog. I may seem to be completely in the camp which believes they truly are "Axis of Evil". In some sense again I agree with Dawk-ins in that it is religion is the problem there. But as Dawkins may believe that it is the essence of the belief in God that is the root problem, I differ in that the problem to me is that the leaders of the church there are the leaders of the country. This elevates the leadership to a "God" status in themselves, at least to their subjects, and to me demonstrates the virtues of separating state powers from religious powers.

But there is one thing that apparently they are leaders in. Some time ago, they decided that citizens could buy and sell kidneys. This has resulted in almost completely eliminating waiting lists and reducing renal-related deaths. This is certainly preferable to the situation highlighted by a Dutch reality show about the agony of waiting for donors.

Thinking... Thinking.... Thunk!

As usual the my spur of the moment environment entries attract comments while my entries on cosmology and budget get completely ignored. What is it about the internet. Posts labelled under "Darwinism" have generated most of my hits lately - go figure.

Where's the figures?

This article states confidently that Australia's emissions grow at twice the rate of other rich countries but was there a link to the data? Does any bloody news service that rants about global warming ever make the data demonstrating latest trends that they mention available? Nope. Where does this place Australia in its notional Kyoto targets that we didn't sign? Until the latest (but not linked) figures we appeared on target. I am quite for the concept of exporting emmissions to exempt developing countries like Indonesia etc. This may invoke a much more rapid transfer of real wealth to the third world, as we tax our Carbon highly, and they can remain exempt gaining a competitive advantage. And the nice thing about competitive advantage is that it isn't a "freebie" like aid, grants, tarriffs or oil resources. They still have to work hard and competitively to take advantage of the advantage.

On the latest posturing of "players" in the "global warming" game, there appears little prospect of (global) emmissions reductions for at least a couple of decades. Plus the moral hazard is just too great. I reckon if (global) emmissions are at 120% of current emmissions by 2030, we will be doing well. The only thing left to guesswork is who everyone is going to blame.

Cosmology

One of the things that always bothered me about the "Big Bang" was the mathematically awkward descriptions of the setoff process. This was alleviated for me somewhat by the newish assertion that the universe quantum tunnelled itself into existence. This takes care of the issue about what there was before by answering "nothing". The problem that it created however (to me) was that A) since there is no visible "antimatter" balancing the matter, there seems a distinct breaking of fundamental rules of some kind and B) What is stopping a big bang happening within our universe at any time to wreck it?. Matter and anti-matter pairs are constantly coming and going out of existence in the vaccuum of space, as far as I know, with no discernible other effects.

My theory is that if our universe and an antimatter copy of our universe were travelling away from eachother at the speed of light, that would resolve requirements of self-consistency of laws of conservation of matter/energy. Infact, one could postulate an infinite number of universes all travelling away from eachother at the speed of light, in matter/antimatter pairs. That would account for the infinite parallel universes that yet other theoretical scientists postulate, and explain why we can't see them.

The Budget

I remember now I was going to say something about the Australian Budget. In the two extremes, the superannuation co-contribution policy built up over the last few budgets is nothing short of pure genius. I may need to explain why this is so but it is a little long-winded. On the other extreme, the resumption and expansion of solar cell subsidies is throwing good money in the bin. The amount of carbon reductions per dollar spent is pathetically small + it distorts the green economy such that private enterprise will flourish chasing the subsidy and not the underlying carbon reduction goal.

Unfortunately, the government has not specified how it will achieve desired higher unemployment for those complaining about the worker "shortage". Even the labor party has twisted the problem around by saying it is a "skill" shortage. It is not. There is just not enough of the trained unemployed like we had in the Keating era.

Got Blogger's Block

Several times I have intended to post but got stuck after reading a bit and thought the better of it. I was going to come up with a brilliant personal example of how in the modern world, one can have a detailed discussion daily with friends that left town decades ago, yet never chat to old friends that live in your suburb still, that in fact you are still friends with. One in particular I see every week because our children go to the same kindy, and had been in the same group as my wife back in Senior camp. Yet I can't demonstrate the irony I feel without divulging more about the people involved than is appropriate in this blog.

Public vs Private - MILITARY

It is surprising that in all my years, I haven't seen an Economist article debating whether defence forces should be privatised and to what extent. Klaus Rohde touches an aspect in Private wars. In my own experience the first time I really thought about was after reading "Green Mars" (Kim Stanley Robertson) a future history novel in which the security arms of multinational companies became huge private armies. Two questions I ask myself are
- What examples of private armies in the world have been shown to be more effective than the standard sort? and
- Should we presume that privatised armies will allocate resources more efficiently, and therefore be more cost effective, or even decisive in situations where resources are subject to extensive competition?

The standard analogical analysis by the Economist leads one to believe that it is more efficient to list those things which shouldn't be privatised because it is a very short list.

As an answer to my first question, a small army of terrorists (these are almost exclusively privately run but funded by sponsoring Governments) can often "defeat" (ie. send packing to go home) a much larger, modern conventional army. I would expect that private "security" companies may have greater success at sticking out a long protracted conflict, and at a much smaller cost in say Iraq.

As an answer to my second question, there is extensive competition for human resources in a conflict situation. These are allocated much more efficiently in a terrorist organisation than in conventional armies. Western world organisations don't seem to be in the market for humans who will readily give up their life to kill for political reasons, but perhaps private security organisations from those countries are recruiting from the same pool of "brave fanatics".

Vote Labor???

We need a higher unemployment rate. It's not just that I like Kevin Rudd somewhat, and that the economic action is concentrated in water trading (and carbon trading). I am being selfish in this instance because a higher unemployment rate is good for small business owners. Ok, so it's not so good for the country as a whole, nor for the newly unemployed, but quite frankly, that's their problem. Kevin Rudd's IR policies are not laid down in stone, but the noises are in the direction of winding back selected workchoice legislation. What would be typical in Australian election campaigns is that the wind back is "minimalised" by the policy wonks. This is a strategy to maximise votes. Why advertise a complete windback when any windback more than the Liberals are promising will achieve the vote of the interested individual.
The "Labour supply shortfall" is an illusion based on the "lump of labour" fallacy. Low unemployment rates have the tendency to give that illusion. The difficulty in finding employees is real, and scaring (all the other) employers away from hiring is the only realistic avenue to making it easier. The unfair dismissal legislation is the obvious choice for a minimalist windback. This will scare the bejeepers out of most small businesses from employing (or even to dismissing while it is still legal) while my own analysis shows these fears to be somewhat overplayed or irrational. This is why on balance it would play in my individual favour.

Blah Blah Game Theory Blah Blah

I am probably not saying anything original by feeling that "Stable democracies" are an artifact of the "political game" establishing a "Nash equilibrium", ie. one where the "players" are each following optimal strategies. (I am asserting that) The resulting policies, economic growth, employment etc. that arise are a result of where that equilibrium is for that particular country. (I am asserting that) The "rules of the game" that determines where the country reaches equilibrium are the governing constitutions of the countries. Therefore, things like voting rules (first past the post, electoral college etc.), enshrined laws (right to bear arms, religious freedom), legal structure (relationship between law making, law enforcement and judgements) all affect where the equilibrium ends up. This is in contrast to the laws that are actually changed under that legal structure. Stuff like taxation law, immigration law etc. will tend not to be able to affect the equilibrium. War and constitutional challenges will potentially affect the equilibrium.
This is the reason voters become increasingly cynical in stable democracies. Voting seems increasingly to be an empty affair, devoid of real options.

Basic assumptions, Geopolitics

How do we sensibly (or even semi-scientifically) discuss the geopolitical issues amongst varying opinions? In Klaus Rhode's entry:Iraq war casualties and Iran, he takes a court-case type of paradigm for analysis. There is an apportionment of blame for, say deaths in Iraq since the war, proven crimes formerly by Iraq, current suspected and proven crimes by Iran and Iranians. This is then taken as a basis for what actions various countries should take, including the US, and whether these actions would be legal, and the likely consequences of taking action or not. My greatest objection to this paradigm is that it doesn't come close to reflecting reality. There is no world court to speak of, laws of nations are still competing with the law of the gun, misdeeds related to war-like actions cannot be brought to justice 999 times out of 1000. Apportionment of blame is realistic in situations (within borders of countries) that have good separation of powers, lots of resources for justice compared to the number of crimes, and little motivation for state-sponsored crime. These three things are not anywhere near happening in the middle east or geopolitically in general, making the paradigm nearly useless as a tool for discussion and analysis.
An example in point I can make for clarity is the use of human shields in Serbia during the war in Kosovo. If civilians are placed in strategic locations that are known to be bomb targets; is the country that dropped the bombs or the country that put them in harms way to blame if they die? Discussions quickly turn from who is to blame to how successful the strategy is. I am the kind of person that can think at the same time that an action is wrong and immoral, and also that if I was placed in that position, that it would be the best move to make. When leaders make decisions based solely on strategy rather than because international laws tell them to, a court case analogy loses all its predictive power and therefore its relevance. When strategy is the main motivating factor for discretionary decisions, game theory gives the best predictive qualities. This is why I can seem to be a game theory ideologue. To take the Iran (potential for the US to make bomb strikes on them) issue: To say that it would cause mass deaths, and would be illegal under international law misses the point entirely. Whether the powers that be decide to go down that path also depends on what Iran does (or "their move"). That Iran would continue toward a nuclear threshold even though they realise that there is an invisible line over which if they cross, the risk of war continues to rise, even if they don't quite know where that line lies, means that they are not afraid of war. The future of their citizens (and in the long term themselves), is also partly in their hands and the provocations they make. The Iraq example should demonstrate that the US is not that afraid of casualties, nor of a protracted conflict. Even if it doesn't deter Iran, it would probably deter others.

Queensland Brass Band Championships 2007

Townsville Brass made pretty much a clean sweep of the B grade events winning the Hymn, Test Piece, Stage March and light music concert divisions as well as the aggregate trophy. We came a close second in the own choice and in the middle of the pack in the street march.

Some reflections: The Townsville bands broke new ground a few years ago by wearing polo shirt uniforms for some events, rather than full suits with jackets. This year for instance we wore them for the street march and the concert. Our D grade band, called Brolga Brass wore them for all their events. I just believe that the suits that just about all other bands were wearing made them look stuffy and overly formal, as well as being completely inappropriate for warm weather.

Playing good music is incredibly therapeutic. Winning competitons even more so.