the man’s intellectual property rights

The founder of the Creative Commons license committed suicide after being threatened with 95 years in prison over a copyright violation. The article goes through some of the arguments against standard copyright.

‘Open access’ is an anodyne term for a profoundly transformative idea. Advocates argue that academic research should be made freely available to the world at the time of publication, and that access should not be contingent on an individual’s or institution’s ability to afford a subscription to a given journal or database. Academic authors do not usually write for profit; rather, their work aims to augment the common store of knowledge. What’s more, since the government often funds their research, it’s not a stretch to claim that the fruits of that research should belong to the public. So why should this material be subject to the same access restrictions as a mystery bestseller or a Hollywood film? As with many other inexplicable policies, the blame belongs to a vestigial middleman.

When a university professor finishes a research project, she typically records her results in an academic paper, which she submits for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. These journals—the reputable ones, at least—operate via volunteers, with authors, editors, and peer reviewers all working for free. Nobody gets paid, or expects to get paid, except the publisher. In exchange for the publisher’s services, which include coordinating the publication and peer-review processes, formatting, and distribution, the author concedes the copyright to her article in perpetuity. It’s a simple trade: the academic publisher assumes the financial risk of preparing and distributing an esoteric work for which there’s a limited audience and in exchange retains all the profits that might come from its sale.

In commercial trade publishing, publishers realise profit by selling a book for a relatively low price to a wide audience. Since no wide audience exists for academic papers, academic publishers realise profit by selling them at high prices to the few entities who can’t do without them—libraries and scholars, mostly—which renders these papers functionally inaccessible to the casual or impoverished user.

self-driving cars

Here’s an interesting TED talk on self-driving cars. They are going to save a lot of lives.  I think arguments against them like this one on NPR are ignorant at best and immoral at worst. If you can save a million lives a year and you choose not to do it, you are instantly one of history’s mass murderers. Even if there is some bizarre special case someone can cite where a computer might kill someone and a person might not, that’s going to be extremely rare.

Sander-nomics

This analysis of Bernie Sanders’s economic plan by Gerald Friedman at University of Massachussetts-Amherst has made quite a splash, suggesting it could lead to massive improvements in economic growth, unemployment, inequality, and productivity, all while investing heavily for the future in infrastructure, education, and climate change readiness. Bill Moyers.com has a long roundup of the criticism and support from all sides, finally concluding that it is actually plausible using standard, even conservative principles of economics. To me, even if it is only partially true, it just shows how unbelievably badly our economy has been managed over the past few decades, and how unready for the future we actually are.

Meanwhile, the Trump economic plan just doesn’t remotely add up using any known principles of arithmetic.

peak oil is still nigh

This Telegraph article suggests that OPEC expects oil prices to come roaring back relatively soon, and when they do there are worries that the drop in investment caused by the current low prices will make it impossible to keep up with demand. And market speculation can supercharge the up swing when it comes.

Mr al-Badri said the world needs an investment blitz of $10 trillion to replace depleting oil fields and to meet extra demand of 17m barrels per day (b/d) by 2040, yet projects are being shelved at an alarming rate. A study by IHS found that investment for the years from 2015 to 2020 has been slashed by $1.8 trillion, compared to what was planned in 2014.

Mr al-Badri warned that the current glut is setting the stage for a future supply shock, with prices lurching from one extreme to another in a deranged market that is in the interests of nobody but speculators…

The paradox of the current slump is that global spare capacity is at wafer-thin levels of 2pc as Saudi Arabia pumps at will, leaving the market acutely vulnerable to any future supply-shock. “In the 1980s it was around 30pc; 10 years ago it was 8pc,” said Mr Descalzi…

By the end of this year there may be a “small deficit”. By then the world will need all of Opec’s 32m b/d supply to meet growing demand, although it will take a long time to whittle down record stocks.

So to put it in stock and flow terms, there is a big stock built up right now, and demand is less than what can physically be supplied (these are flows), so prices are low. When (if?) the global economy picks up at some point, demand may be greater than what can physically be supplied. The stock will gradually get used up, and as investors start to realize it is getting used up and supply will not be able to keep up, prices will rise, maybe fast. High prices will eventually spur investment and the cycle will repeat. This is how it plays out all other things being equal. But some of the other things are renewable energy, maybe nuclear energy, carbon credits/taxes/caps, maybe approaching physical limits on the big Middle East oil reservoirs, food and water economics, public sentiment, and geopolitics, all of which can shift the economics at the same time fossil fuel technologies and markets are going through their gyrations. Interesting times.

The Windup Girl

Another book I’m reading (actually listening to) right now is the The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi. This is biopunk, possibly my favorite genre when it is done well. I won’t spoil the plot below, but I’ll tell you some of the background on what is going on in the society about halfway through the book, so if you prefer to read it and discover this gradually, then stop reading now!

The interesting thing about this society (Southeast Asia, supposedly about 100 years in the future), is that it has very advanced scientific and technological knowledge compared to our current society, and yet it is extremely energy and resource poor compared to our current society. All food seems to be genetically engineered by a few western companies (“calorie companies”). At some point there has been a catastrophic loss of biodiversity. At the point in the book where I am now, there are hints that these companies themselves have engineered the pests and diseases that brought this about. We don’t know why – maybe as a form of competition to attack each others products, or maybe to attack non-genetically engineered organisms. Whatever the original strategy, these plagues have devastated natural ecosystems and come back to attack the company crops themselves, and also to sometimes jump to humans, so that everyone is sick and starving and the companies are trying to hunt down any surviving stashes of biodiversity.

The society is also extremely energy poor. Climate change and sea level rise have been devastating, and fossil fuels seem to be entirely gone with the exception of coal, the latter rare and used only by the government for pumping in a last-ditch effort to keep the ocean at bay. There is some methane available from digesting animal manure, again tightly controlled by the government. For mobile power, they wind “springs” using animal power, including “megadonts” which sound like reconstituted mammoths. I have a couple questions on plausibility here, neither of which detracts from the story which I am really enjoying. First, which such advanced biological technology developed over 100 years, it is surprising not to see solar power, wind power, fuel cells, or even nuclear power. In fact, there seems to be no form of electricity at all. Second, I imagine mammoths would eat a lot. Let’s say you grow food, feed the mammoths, have them wind the springs, then digest their manure to obtain methane all very efficiently. I find it hard to believe that if you took whatever you are feeding the mammoths and digested it directly, you would not obtain more energy. The exception might be if the mammoths go foraging themselves and eat something that grows naturally on land that will not grow anything else, and that particular plant is digestible by mammoths but not by methane-generating bacteria. With a very limited range of plants available, maybe this is not all that implausible in the bizarre universe of this book.

The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm

I’d like to share a passage from The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm by Lewis Dartnell. This is a clever book, because it is basically a book on the history of technology. That could be a dry and boring book that appeals only to a few history nerds, obviously, but what Mr. Dartnell has done is put a clever spin on that and write the book as though it were giving us instructions on how to “reboot” civilization after some disaster like a plague or catastrophic war. This is about two alternative designs for refrigeration.

If history is just one damn thing after another, then the history of technology is just one damn invention after another: a succession of gadgets each beating off inferior rivals. Or is it? Reality is rarely that simple, and we must remember that the history of technology is written by the victors: successful innovations give the illusion of a linear sequence of stepping stones, while the losers fade into obscurity and are forgotten. But what determines the success of an invention is not always necessarily superiority of function.

In our history both compressor and absorption designs for refrigeration were being developed around the same time, but it is the compressor variety that achieved commercial success and now dominates. This is largely due to encouragement by nascent electricity companies keen to ensure growth in demand for their product. Thus the widespread absence of absorber refrigerators today (except for gas-fueled designs for recreation vehicles, where the ability to run without an electrical supply is paramount), is not due to any intrinsic inferiority of the design itself , but far more due to contingencies of social or economic factors. The only products that become available are those the manufacturer believes can be sold at the highest profit margin, and much of that depends on the infrastructure that already happens to be in place. So the reason that the fridge in your kitchen hums – uses an electric compressor rather than a silent absorption design – has less to do with the technological superiority of that mechanism than with the quirks of the socioeconomic environment in the early 1900s, when the solution became “locked in.” A recovering post-apocalyptic society may well take a different trajectory in its development.

what’s whiter than white?

Here’s an article that is interesting for at least a couple reasons. First, the efforts of the Chinese (government? companies?) to steal the “trade secrets” of U.S. companies. For some types of knowledge, like how to program computers, a lot of the potential economic value to be captured exists inside the minds of people who have gained skills only through years of painful education and experience. Stealing a computer program written by one of these people doesn’t really steal that much of the value, because in order to reverse-engineer and use it you basically need someone just as knowledgeable and skilled as the person who created it in the first place. On the other hand, with a substance or material that has a “recipe”, like a chemical or drug, stealing the recipe does mean you have stolen most of the value. So you can understand why companies that develop substances and chemicals go to great lengths to protect their “intellectual property”. I still think there is a legitimate question though whether it is morally wrong to steal something like this. Developing countries can improve the lives of their people by quickly “catching up” to countries with more advanced technology. Is this wrong? Should they have to buy the knowledge? You can argue that if there are no protections for knowledge, there is less incentive for firms to take the risk of looking for new knowledge, and therefore progress will be held back. But I would ask whether if a country like China did not “steal” the knowledge, would it otherwise buy it or would it just go without. If it is the latter nobody benefits – neither the companies with the knowledge or the people that could benefit from it.

The second reason I find this interesting is that it is an example of an incredibly advanced industrial technology that really has no practical purpose, and yet seems to have immense economic value anyway. The value we place on useless and even harmful things could be a practical measure of our flaws as a species. I was shocked to hear that the filling of Oreos contains titanium dioxide just to make it appear more brilliant white. And whether the product is safe or not, the process involves toxic chemicals that have to be manufactured and trucked or trained around at some risk to the public. I really don’t think I want to be eating that. When a product is useful and there is no readily available substitute, you can justify taking some risk to bring it to market. When it is not useful, there is no risk justified in my opinion. Long-term we should be looking for 100% safe alternatives to toxic chemicals.

There’s white, and then there’s the immaculate ultrawhite behind the French doors of a new GE Café Series refrigerator. There’s white, and then there’s the luminous-from-every-angle white hood of a 50th anniversary Ford Mustang GT. There’s white, and then there’s the how-white-my-shirts-can-be white that’s used to brighten myriad products, from the pages of new Bibles to the hulls of superyachts to the snowy filling inside Oreo cookies…

The basics are public knowledge. First, the ore is fed into a large ceramic-lined vessel—the chlorinator. There it’s mixed with coke (pure carbon) and chlorine and heated to at least 1,800F. “The material inside here resembles lava. This is like running a big volcano,” Daniel Dayton, a former top executive at DuPont, told jurors about the chlorinator in 2014. (Chemours and DuPont declined to comment for this story.)

Hot gas in the chlorinator gets piped out and condensed into a new compound called titanium tetrachloride, or “tickle,” as engineers call it. The tickle is heated again, subjected to various purifying chemical reactions, and cooled. Now a yellowish liquid, the tickle is inserted into a second vessel, called the oxidizer. It’s again heated to very high temperatures and mixed with oxygen; the reaction knocks the chlorine molecule off the titanium, and two oxygen molecules attach to the titanium in its place. The resulting particles are so fine that the white stuff has the consistency of talcum powder.

 

The Time Machine

Here’s the epilogue from The Time Machine by H.G. Wells (1898):

One cannot choose but wonder. Will he ever return? It may be that he swept back into the past, and fell among the blood-drinking, hairy savages of the Age of Unpolished Stone; into the abysses of the Cretaceous Sea; or among the grotesque saurians, the huge reptilian brutes of the Jurassic times. He may even now—if I may use the phrase—be wandering on some plesiosaurus-haunted Oolitic coral reef, or beside the lonely saline lakes of the Triassic Age. Or did he go forward, into one of the nearer ages, in which men are still men, but with the riddles of our own time answered and its wearisome problems solved? Into the manhood of the race: for I, for my own part, cannot think that these latter days of weak experiment, fragmentary theory, and mutual discord are indeed man’s culminating time! I say, for my own part. He, I know—for the question had been discussed among us long before the Time Machine was made—thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so. But to me the future is still black and blank—is a vast ignorance, lit at a few casual places by the memory of his story. And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers—shrivelled now, and brown and flat and brittle—to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.

drought in the Mekong basin

Here’s a Straits Times story on drought in the Mekong basin, focusing on increased pumping of river water for agriculture in Thailand.

The Mekong, which originates in the Tibetan plateau, travels for more than 4,000km through China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam before draining into the South China Sea. It supports the world’s largest inland fishery, and is a vital source of water for agricultural communities in that area.

Yet it is also a contested resource. China’s hydroelectric dams to the north, as well as those being built in Laos, have been fingered for hampering the migration of fish and blocking the movement of nutrient-rich silt downstream.

Riverside communities suffering sudden, drastic fluctuations in water level they attribute to dam operations upstream fear Thailand’s plans will only make their lives more difficult.

So it’s fed by snowmelt in an age of climate change, then goes through several countries that are considering or in the process of building dams, then provides food and economic livelihood for a whole lot of people. It sounds like a dangerous recipe. Hopefully this year’s drought is El Nino related and will not recur for awhile.

By the way, shame on you Straits Times for using a picture of a drainage channel in Nakhon Sawan province, which is in the Chao Praya basin and nowhere near the Mekong. It doesn’t change the story but it just seems like lazy journalism, and when a journalist is lazy about one detail you happen to know about, you wonder what other details they might be lazy about that you don’t.

Sanders’s socialism

According to the New York Times, “left leaning economists” say Sanders can’t pay for his proposed programs. (For an alternative viewpoint, see BillMoyers.com which says the NYT irresponsibly cherry-picked experts with ties to the Obama/Clinton administration).

Mr. Sanders’s plan includes a new, across-the-board 2.2 percent income tax to help pay for his single-payer, government-run health plan for all. But progressive economists and business groups say middle-class taxpayers would pay more for the European-style social welfare state that Mr. Sanders envisions.

They dispute his contention that all but the richest Americans would be better off, on balance, with higher wages and benefits like expanded Social Security, free public colleges and, most of all, free health care. His policy director, Warren Gunnels, dismissed the critics in an interview, saying, “They’ve picked sides with Hillary Clinton.” The campaign has a list of 130 endorsees, including some economists.

“If, at the end of the day, people don’t believe that we can achieve the same savings as Canada, Britain, France, Japan, South Korea, Australia are achieving on health care, then we have a fundamental disagreement,” Mr. Gunnels said, naming countries with single-payer systems.

There’s that cynicism again. It works everywhere else but it can’t work here because…why exactly? Because we choose to be cynical, for one. And because we let the medical and insurance industry buy politicians and write laws in its favor and at everyone else’s expense.

I will say, though, that I am attracted to the idea of a well-functioning market setting prices rather than the government setting them. We live in a world of finite resources, so if you truly have no price signal – no premiums, no co-pays, no bills of any kind – then people can’t be allowed to choose any amount of health care they want, because our collective wants will always exceed what we can collectively afford. Then you have to have government rationing and price controls. That is what single-payer is. It is an efficient system to deliver some amount of health care the experts think is affordable and cost-effective. It’s equitable because it can deliver the same rationed amount to everyone, rich or poor. It is not a market-based system.

What could a hypothetical pure market-based system look like? First, the U.S. political system would have to not depend on contributions from the medical, insurance, and finance industries, so politicians would have no incentive to favor the profits of these companies over the interests of voters. Then people would have the option, or perhaps the requirement, to save a portion of their incomes in a health savings account. Then they would use their own money to purchase health care. Government would make copious amounts of education and information available on what medical services are available and how much they cost and what outcomes are being achieved, in terms simple enough for anyone to understand, so that true apples-to-apples comparison shopping would be possible for anyone, even under the stress of serious or sudden illness. Prices would settle at a level where supply and demand are in harmony given what the society can afford in aggregate and what other goods and services people are willing to give up in exchange for health care. Companies would have to compete based on price and outcome, and would have to innovate over time or else lose their edge.

The above might be an economist’s utopia, but it would not be remotely equitable, because the rich could afford much more than the poor. Government could do a few things to help. The savings accounts could be tax-advantaged, obviously. The savings could be matched by government, and the match could be larger for the poor and gradually phased out for the rich. Basic preventive care and maintenance care for chronic conditions could be provided for free (i.e. by taxes), because we know that is cost-effective. Catastrophic insurance could be provided for the big expenses, because we know those are back-breaking for all but the super rich, and when the poor show up in emergency rooms we end up treating them (poorly) at enormous taxpayer expense. With these policies in place, people are now using their savings only to make those decisions in between preventive and catastrophic, the things you could argue they want but don’t necessarily need. The rich would still be able to afford more, but hey, that is the nature of a market economy unless you want a true socialist utopia. I assume we still want some incentive to work or start a business.