Ideal Population Size

The USA accounts for 1.9% of global landmass, and therefore 1.9% is a first approximation of the ideal proportion of humanity that should live within the boundaries of USA in a future sustainable global human society. 

Estimates by Limits to Growth advocates of the ideal global society are in the range 500 million to 1 Billion.

That would give us our first approximation USA number as 10-20 million.

Now you could argue that not all land mass is the same, some are more capable of supporting and even thriving despite human existence due to better climates, more temperate areas, more atmospheric moisture, whatever.  I don't actually believe this is true of USA, which has a lot of deserts, etc. (though those could be useful, under limitations, as solar farms).  Current population density is far higher in UK and Western Europe, and many other places.

But even if it were true, that the USA has tremendous geographical advantages for sustainable human sustenance, it would probably only boost the optimal population 2 fold  to 40 million or at very most 5 fold to 100 million.

Now one argument has been made that such numbers are undesirable because "technology as we know it cannot be sustained."  This is wrong because first we have to consider the global numbers because technological development is global.  Secondly 500 million to 1 billion is a better number for a technological society to make real progress, in a sustainable society, as compared to 8 billion where most resources ought to be devoted to the mere initiation of a drive toward building a sustainable society, that being hardly imagined amidst the imperialism, wasteful materialism, and profit maximizing we have now.

Given that material wealth is ultimately constrained by resources and technology, the wealth level should be universal.  We should all be engineers, artists, doctors, or scientists, with technology doing all the energy expenditure.

Others argue that reduction in consumption could save us.  But no possible human society is devoid of waste...and waste can even be worse for very low consuming human societies may lay more waste because they have no other choice.

Meanwhile, NYTimes today had editorial decrying the drop in US population grown rate (now 7%) and exhorting us to remember we need higher growth to continue to dominate China.  Earth be damned apparently.

I'll leave it as exercise to reader to determine degrowth rates to reach, say, 100 million in 2100.  And compare what is required if we start now or in 2080.

Seeing the Devil

It is hard to describe how angry I feel about Robert Mundell.  I'm so angry, I can hardly write this post.  If the Devil (in which I don't believe) had been made incarnate in the last half of the 20th century, it would be as Robert Mundell.  Not Reagan, GHW Bush, or any of the other candidates, for as we know, the Devil doesn't actually do any work, he gets others to do it.  Curiously, Mundell died of cancer of the bile duct.

I'm not sure why TNR published this hagiography by Bruce Bartlett.  I'm seriously thinking of calling them and cancelling my subscription tomorrow.

Mundell is singularly responsible for the collapse of the world I thought I grew up in, as aptly described by Donald Fagan in The New Frontier.  USA was once a leader in actually making good stuff, as well as doing the foundational research to make it possible, such as the origins of the Internet in TCP/IP.  But thanks to so called Supply Side Economics, pioneered by Mundell, that all came to an abrupt end in the 1980's.  Since then we've been a war machine run by a casino.  And it's directly tied to those economic ideas.  Meanwhile, China, which was not affected by Mundell's ranting, is where stuff, ideas, and everything else is made now.  For 40-50 years, thinking inspired by Mundell caused a massive disinvestment in the USA, stagnating and declining incomes for most Americans, and loss of world leadership in science and technology.

And the same is true of Europe, more or less.  Mundell is also known as the Father of the Euro, a disasterous project if there ever was one, I'm sure it will be known in the end, if not already.  Curiously he had devised a fairly intuitive model for an Optimal Currency Area.  Many more liberal economists used this model to argue that Europe was not such an area.  But apparently this model isn't very definitive, because Mundell himself argued everything would be fine.

It's easy to see why Mundell had this lifelong quest to justify tax cutting.  His mother was an heiress who had to sell the family castle because she couldn't afford the back taxes.  (I feel not a bit of sympathy.  No one should be entitled to live in a castle.)  That is the background of this Prince of Evil.  He himself lived in an Italian Villa virtually stolen for $20,000 and finally fixed up with his Economic Nobel Memorial Prize winnings.

The key delusion that Mundell had is often called Supply Side Economics.  The argument is that cutting taxes will somehow increase production, aka supply.  But in fact, the opposite happens.  Cutting taxes increases everything but production, and especially where they are cut.  Instead, tax cutting is a windfall for the wealthy, who put their new change in the foreign investment casino, causing nothing but disinvestment at home.  Local production falls, foreign production increases, and we are pauperized.

Untaxed and unregulated corporations don't bother to make long term, or possibly even short term, investments.  Actual investment is risky, it ties up money where more could be made elsewhere.

At this point, since our Corporations have become nothing but thieves, only Government can do actual investment anymore.  And that's the secret of success in China.

We might have had it both ways, had we not started down the garden path of Tax Cuts starting with Kennedy's (for which I probably couldn't blame Mundell much).  If we had followed the advice of John Kenneth Galbraith, who said there should be much more government spending, we'd be living in Fagan's dream.

Father of Neoliberalism.  Maybe a few others.

When run by a casino, and perhaps otherwise, only the government can and will do long term investment.

What Mundell advocated was to amp up the supply to the casino, not the casino to the supply.

So, you could say, what it really is, is Casino Economics.

My Less Information thesis

I'm still finding that my concept that "the universe has less information than it seems" is a wedge to understanding and solving the mysteries of entanglement in Quantum Theory.  But how could it work.

The most obvious idea is the simulation one.  In that idea, the universe we see is actually a simulation.  Somewhere, this simulation is cooked up from less information than there appears to be.

But the problem with that idea, is that it's too big, and relies on the simulation theory to be true.

Likewise with any sort of God is doing it all theory.

I now see three other more plausible solutions.

A.  Structure.  All the sorts of structure in the universe, such as the warping of spacetime under the influence of mass (aka Gravity) and so on, mean that there is less information underneath it all than there appears to be.

B.  Quantization of Time.  If Time were quantized, this also reduces the amount of information relative to a fully continuous notion of time.

C.  Ideals and Potentials. Plato proposed that the world we see is the Shadow of the real world, which consists of things like perfect circles and perfect horses.   I don't like that vantage, I'd prefer to see the visible world as real.  But then what are things like "circles" ?   An Ideal.   An ideal circle isn't something that actually exists, or information about anything.  It's an ideal whose attributes real objects can approximate.

C1: We often assume Ideals are eternal.  Perhaps they are.  But something related is a Potential, such as the potential that something like a circle could exist.  Before the universe existed, before spacetime existed, could there was no potential of having something like a circle.  Circles require dimensions to exist.  But once spacetime exists, the potential for circles now exists Everywhere in that spacetime.  It need not (as with real information) travel from one part of spacetime to the other.  Potentials are instantaneously ubiquitous everywhere in the same domain.  (And since a Potential, or an ideal, or even meta information, is still a kind of thing, it is uniquely the kind of thing that can travel faster than the speed of light.)

I now have explanations of entanglement based on either B or C1 or both.

A key redundancy in the universe is that of particle A and the historical influence of particle A, say what it has interacted with and when.

Fully grasping this difference means two alternative universes, in which Particle A exists or not.  Then we could see all the historical effects of Particle A by their absence.

However that is also true when we measure particle A.  Prior to our measurement, we can only say there are two alternative universes, one in which particle A property 1 has value 0, and the other in which it has value 1.   Our measurement determines simultaneously which value Particle A has and which of the prior alternative universes we lived in.

If time were quantized, and likely very very small units like 10^-33 sec, there would then be two possible cases of things either being exactly simultaneous or not.  If time is continuous, there is virtually no possibility of thing being exactly simultaneous, only within some arbitary window.

Therefore the quantization necessarily creates this new potential of simultaneity, which is still so small as to be highly unlikely, but highly significant if it is so.

The effect of this is that most cases boil down "not simultaneous, therefore not the same".  If the  cases of simultaneity were indeed special, such as entangled paricles showing same rather than opposing spins.  The subtraction out of that special case from the remaining possibility has curious effects.  We would virtually always find them to be opposing, say if in the special condition of simultaneity they were not opposing.

Underground Utllities and Telco Competition are the Pits

Underground Utilities Are The Pits.  Every year some different telco needs to run their cables across my small back yard.  This means locators and diggers need to access my back yard for 5-20 days every year.  This year it appears to be AT&T and they've been in my back yard 5 days already.  Maskless workers knock at the door each time.  They've been creating a mess around the neighborhood for weeks.  Google, much more nicely, ran their machine up and down the street in one day a few years ago.  They hung tag on the door beforehand saying you couldn't park on the street but I never do anyway.  Afterwards all you see is a line in the pavement.  If I ever switch from Grande I plan to switch to Google.

Bezos in Space

"In February, Jeff Bezos announced he was stepping aside as CEO of Amazon and would become executive chair of the board. He wanted, he said, “the time and energy” to focus on his nonprofit, the Day 1 Fund, along with “the Bezos Earth Fund, Blue Origin, The Washington Post, and my other passions.” Yet he had given relatively little to charity in the past. An early Amazon investor, Nick Hanauer, has described him as uninterested in righting social wrongs. People close to Bezos have long suggested a different purpose behind his pursuit of enormous personal wealth (and committed exercise routine). “The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel,” Bezos said in 2018. “That is basically it.”

That's from the end of a review of a good book about how horrible Amazon is to work for and how it's further destroying the country.

I placed at least two orders through Amazon this week.  Basically no other choice.  On that same basis, I placed my first order from Amazon in 1997.  Price has never been a factor for me, selection and speed has been.  I wish I could choose to pay more to give the workers bathroom breaks and safety.

https://newrepublic.com/article/161891/amazon-exploited-weakened-america-alec-macgillis-fulfillment-review?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=tnr_daily

David Graeber

The late and great anthropologist David Graeber left a tiny oops of a few sentences in his massive opus Debt: The first 5000 years.  It gives a completely wrong description of the origins of Apple Computer.  Ever since, conservative and even liberal economists like Brad DeLong have used this as a Gotcha Point to discredit Graeber's entire thesis, which is that Debt is just as if not more ancient than Barter, and classical (and neoclassical, etc) economists have wrongly dismissed the macroeconomic consequences of personal debt.  It seems that economists would rather not talk about that.

Graeber has an explanation, which appears here in 2012, which seems perfectly plausible to me.  Surely he was aware of the error, and I can understand that he had other tasks more important than getting his publisher to fix this one.  He claims he tried, and once again I have no reason to disbelieve him.

I thoroughly detest the rhetorical approach of scoring gotcha points on insignificant matters while ignoring larger ones.  Graeber claims, and I have no reason to disbelieve, that his larger points have not been so dismissed by other experts.

Meanwhile, there is no larger pile of BS than mainstream economics in all its flavors.  I do find the Post Keynesian tendency and a few others to be worthwhile, but it's not a single theory really.

This is somewhat different than saying Graeber was always correct.  As a communist, I basically don't trust anarchism and therefore anarchists must be getting something wrong, I believe, in their core thinking.  However I haven't been able to prove this to my anarchist friends.  He also did have, as you can tell from the above thread, a lot of personality.

But this has nothing to do with the origins of Apple Computer, of which I believe the key historical fact was the construction of Black Boxes to steal free long distance service over the AT&T system, which led Steve Jobs to the belief that electronics can be fun and profitable at the same time.  But Apple Computer didn't really invent much, it was more a polishing act.  I remember examining computers around 1980 and concluded that Apple had nothing but hype and colored advertisements over anyone else.  The real invention of modern computing occurred at Bell Labs after the industry-wide Multics project was abandoned by Bell Labs and others in 1969.  Working on their own time, technical staff members implemented the core ideas into the Unix operating system, which has itself lived on through MacOS 10, linux, and inspired all others.  Meanwhile, other scientists at Xerox PARC crystalized the essence of Graphical User Interface ideas which themselves had been pioneered by other scientists, and which were then infamously stolen by Jobs himself without royalties or credit (reminiscent of those Black Boxes).  And of course the invention of TCP/IP by DARPA, which survived endless attempts by AT&T and other telecoms to destroy it with proprietary schemes.  And semiconductors and integrated circuits and magnetic storage.  Pretty much everything else since has just been slick marketing, spyware, and misuse of government monopolies.  The IBM PC in particular was a travesty as is its spawn Windows.  Bill Gates should be understood not as a computer geek but as the son of a lawyer.  If we ever want to make real progress again, it had best be for people and not profits.

For what it's worth, a friend of mine tried to get me interested in building black boxes in 1973.  I declined, and I also declined to go to UC Berkeley that year after being admitted (I chose to go somewhere else).  I wonder if I had gone to Berkeley whether I would have ended up on the BSD project, which considerably improved on the speed of Unix--which had been abysmal, and was a household word among computer geeks for decades, and minted a billionaire or two after they started SUN computers--which was the first to pull all of modern computing together aka "the Network is the Computer," and was always a technological pioneer, but could never compete on price and was sold for parts in 2010.  I started programming in 1972 and by 1973 was programming on DEC.  DEC computers--mainly used in academia--had various clunky OS's not totally unlike Unix.  Unix itself had originally been programmed on and ran on DEC computers because they were relatively cheap, open, and ubiquitous in universities.  These were vastly more powerful and flexible than the IBM PC in 1981, which was a catch-up effort by IBM pulling in off-the-shelf parts and an outsourced OS because IBM's in-house personal computer project had gotten bogged down and IBM didn't want to be too late for the game.   At the time there were already dozens of unique Personal Computers, nobody I knew paid any attention to Apple, and Digital Research was the leading maker of Personal Computer OS's.  Gary Kildal of Digital Research--thinking he already owned the world--refused to meet with IBM and so IBM found another guy willing to sign their unwieldy OS contract.  The only reason the IBM PC succeeded was the name "IBM."  Meanwhile, DEC had gotten too big for it's britches...it had begun trying to compete with IBM mainframes with it's VAX line of computers, which were nice but could never be made as fast as IBM mainframes, or even close.  DEC infamously wasn't interested in "personal computers" but rather in "departmental computers."  The company I worked for in the 1980's programmed Computer Aided Design systems on Data General, VAX, and Apollo.  We looked at the original IBM PC and concluded it was not good enough, not even close.  A tiny competitor jumped right in and eventually ate our lunch as the PC and clones got way faster.  The real history of computing is far more complicated than can be described in a few sentences.  And we tend to view the past through the lens of the present.  Back then, where we are now didn't seem to be where we were going, and I'm not sure it was all for the best.  At one time, computer programming was a genteel club and we cared about the goodness of everything.  That's when the seminal progress was being made.  Now it's a sweatshop, modern OS's and programming languages make Frankenstein look cute, and I'm glad to be retired.  I can easily understand how someone not part of this subculture would have trouble writing something accurate and meaningful down.  I often find my intended words mangled on my own screen and can barely imagine what it must be like to get a huge book published.

Jerusalem Definition of Antisemitism

The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA) is a welcome alternative to the wrongful International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) "definition" of antisemitism which conflates criticism of Israel and pursuit of Palestinian rights with antisemitism.  Tony Greenstein gives a very good review and critique below.  

The JDA gives a definite description of antisemitism which could be applied to any form of racism simply by substituting for the words Antisemitism and Jew:  

"Antisemitism is discrimination, prejudice, hostility, or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish Institutions as Jewish)."

In contrast, the IHRA definition is indefinite and slippery, and then used to conflate criticism of Israel, advocacy of Palestinian rights, and anti-Zionism as antisemitism in a series of examples:

"Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.  Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antsemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities."

"A certain perception"  which "may be expressed"...  This is not a definition at all.

https://azvsas.blogspot.com/2021/03/why-we-should-critically-welcome.html