Category: Rants

Posts where I spout off on one topic or another

Whaling and sustainability

I have been reading Andrew Darby’s Harpoon: Into the Heart of Whaling and, while it tells an interesting story in and of itself, it also seems to say a lot about the relationship between humanity and the natural world. The story of whaling is a common one: people developed technology that allowed them to make big short-term gains at the expense of long-term sustainability. Even while it was happening, there were those who pointed out how senseless it was to do things like kill the most successful breeding females and leave their calves to die. And yet, the impetus for short-term gain overwhelmed the case for conservation, and whale populations around the world were brutally cut back.

Now, despite the lack of need for whale meat, and everything we know about the rarity and intelligence of the creatures, states led by Japan continue to allow their special interests to operate at the expense of humanity and the natural world at large, continuing commercial whaling under the guise of scientific research.

All this seems to relate to a common theme: human beings are smart in an abstract sense, but frequently behave in ways that are profoundly dumb and unethical. While, in a certain sense, climate change is a narrow technical problem subject to technical solutions, it is arguable that in order to build up the energy and motivation necessary to make those changes, humanity needs its mindset to evolve. With a few local exceptions, like urban air quality rules, we are burning through the biosphere like there’s no tomorrow. As soon as an environmental problem gets large enough, the will to deal with it becomes terribly weak. Then, only the most technical and minimal problems – those that can be addressed with little or no real societal change – can actually be addressed. Arguably, ozone depleting substances and persistent organic pollutants are evidence of this hypothesis.

Citizens arrest

There are good reasons why we restrict powers like arrest to trained agents of the government. While there are certainly many problems with the conduct of police and oversight over them, at least they have training and experience and there are mechanisms in place to evaluate their actions. By contrast, empowering every shopkeeper and random citizen to physically detain people who they think are criminals seems dangerous and unnecessary. In a few cases, it may be the least bad option available, but I think the onus should be on the person performing the arrest to justify it later.

In the grand scheme of things, shoplifting seems a lot less significant than physically detaining somebody against their will. Saying that as soon as somebody steals from you, you have the right to effectively kidnap them seems liable to create harm and abuse. Kidnapping is rightly considered a more serious offense than shoplifting, and I don’t think the fact that someone committed a crime before being thus apprehended has all that much legal or moral significance. It smacks of the sort of crude revenge-based legal systems where people get their hands lopped off (or get thrown into the terrible conditions of prison, but that is another discussion).

That’s why I think it is wrongheaded when people argue that David Chen – the Toronto shopkeeper who physically detained a shoplifter – should never have been criminally charged. When you opt to take the law into your own hands, you are effectively claiming that the situation is so important and so urgent that you should take over from the actual authorities. It seems to me that such cases are rare and involve things like real risks of injury or death – not the danger of losing a few dollars worth of merchandise.

If you feel that you need to usurp the powers of the police, it just seems sensible to expect that you may need to justify that choice in a court of law. They may well find that you behaved reasonably. But the fact that there will be some after-the-fact oversight could in itself act as a minor deterrent to abuses of power.

Bell, usage based billing, and TekSavvy

It seems the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has let the dominant internet service provider (ISP) Bell largely ruin the smaller ISP Teksavvy:

From March 1 on, users of the up to 5 Mbps packages in Ontario can expect a usage cap of 25GB (60GB in Quebec), substantially down from the 200GB or unlimited deals TekSavvy was able to offer before the CRTC’s decision to impose usage based billing…

We encourage you to monitor your usage carefully, as the CRTC has imposed a very high overage rate, above your new monthly limit, of $1.90 per gigabyte ($2.35 per gigabyte in Quebec).

Forcing big companies like Bell to lease capacity to companies like Teksavvy seems very smart, as it helps prevent dominant monopolies from forming. Unfortunately, such arrangements don’t have much meaning if you also allow the big company to force their own policies on the smaller companies that are leasing from them.

Consider the case of a customer using 100 GB a month – half of Teksavvy’s previous low cap. Before, they would have paid $44.30 with tax. Under the new rules, they would pay that plus another $142.50 in additional data usage fees.

Obama’s 2011 State of the Union

While it did say a fair bit about cleaner forms of energy, climate change wasn’t mentioned at all in yesterday’s State of the Union address.

The absence of any reference was almost certainly politically driven, and based at least partly on an awareness of official Republican hostility to pretty much any government policy that would restrict greenhouse gas pollution. When people read this speech in retrospect – twenty or thirty years from now – perhaps they will reflect on how broken the politics of the time were, and how incapable they were of identifying and acting upon the biggest issue of the day. We are far too distracted by day-to-day and week-to-week blips; as a consequence, we are failing to properly recognize how we are making choices that will establish the conditions in which a huge number of future humans will live.

The segment on green energy does feature some specific proposals. Obama suggests that America could have one million electric vehicles deployed by 2015; he calls for 80% of American’s electricity to come from ‘clean’ sources (including natural gas) by 2035. While these objectives may be laudable, it would be a stretch to call them commitments. The last few years have amply demonstrated President Obama’s limited power, when it comes to determining what course the U.S. government will actually take.

We have to hope that a quick change will somehow take place in American politics and that climate change – this terrifically important fact about the world – ceases to be a hyper-partisan matter to which minimal real effort is devoted. How such a change could be accomplished, in a world where people seem to choose their facts to fit their ideologies, I cannot really say. I cannot help but thinking that my general optimism about humanity’s potential for making the transition to carbon neutrality in time might be excessive. Perhaps the real future we face is one filled with geoengineering, massive chaos, and suffering.

P.S. Kudos to the BBC, incidentally, for setting up a really excellent internet-embedded version of the speech. They have it divided by subject, and clicking at any point in the written transcript makes the quick-loading video jump to the section in question.

Regulating health claims

Arguably, the existence of truth in advertising laws has a perverse effect when they are not rigorously enforced.

For example, all kinds of highly dubious claims get made about herbal supplements. Not only do manufacturers not need to provide high-quality evidence to back them up, but they can print things that are contradicted by high quality studies that have been done.

In Trick or Treament? The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine, Simon Singh lists some of these:

  • The evidence that chamomile or lavender helps with insomnia is poor.
  • There is poor evidence that either asian or siberian ginseng helps with impotence, cancer, diabetes, performance enhancement, or herpes. There is also poor evidence that it serves as a ‘cure all’.
  • The evidence that aloe vera helps with herpes, psoriasis, wound healing, or skin injuries is poor.
  • There is poor evidence that evening primrose helps with eczema, menopausal problems, PMS, asthma, or psoriases, or that it is a ‘cure all’.

Singh also lists some side effects of herbal medicines that are often not described on the packages. For instance, hops can interfere with oral contraceptives, and many herbal supplements can interfere with anticoagulant and antidiabetes drugs. St John’s Wort can inhibit the normal operation of over half of prescription drugs, including anti-HIV and anti-cancer drugs, as well as oral contraceptives.

I have personally seen really absurd claims made on products in health food stores, often featuring real scientific terms used in meaningless ways.

What I worry is that people have an inflated expectation about how closely health claims are scrutinized. That could give people a false sense that the claims made on herbal supplement bottles, by dieting companies, and so on deserve to be taken seriously, when they could well be pure hogwash.

I was surprised and disappointed recently to listen to a conversation in which the participants asserted that (a) most or all of the claims made by doctors and pharmaceutical companies are false and made in bad faith and (b) that the claims made by companies selling ‘alternative’ treatments were credible. While the system for reviewing the former may be lacking, there seems to be no system at all for reviewing the latter. As a consequence, there is a lot of dangerous nonsense out there.

Perhaps there should be some sort of mandatory warning included in advertising that contains unverified medical claims. Something along the lines of: “The health claims made in this advertisement have not been evaluated for accuracy”.

Roberta Johnson and Erin Gustafson

This week’s episode of This American Life features a discussion between Roberta Johnson, the Executive Director of the National Earth Science Teachers Association, and Erin Gustafson, a high school age climate change denier and appreciator of Glenn Beck.

The pattern of the discussion is a familiar one to me. Dr. Johnson lays out the evidence that humans are changing the climate dangerously, based on things like ice core samples and isotopic ratios. Ms. Gustafson brings up some common denier talking points, like the Medieval Warm Period and the leaked climate science emails. Dr. Johnson responds to these criticisms, but Ms. Gustafson remains unconvinced.

The host then asks Dr. Johnson if there is any hope of getting through to people with evidence, once they become skeptical. Her answer is not terribly satisfying, and the whole interview is testimony to the difficulty of the task.

Of course, the word ‘skeptical’ is being misused here. To continue to disagree with a claim, regardless of how weak your arguments are or how strong those backing it have become, is not skepticism. Rather, it is a kind of dogmatism. There are many genuine difficulties in making sense of our complex world, but it seems to me that the modes of thinking about thinking are what are really broken in climate change deniers. They will cling to any scrap of evidence that supports what they want to believe, while subscribing to conspiracy theories that discredit those who argue otherwise.

As I have mentioned before, I was a lot less concerned about climate change a few years ago. I bought the argument from The Economist that we didn’t know whether it would be cheaper to stop or to simply adapt to. Since then, virtually all the new evidence and analysis has given us greater cause for concern. Unfortunately, the last few years have seen a kind of exhaustion among both advocates of action on climate change and society at large. The deniers are winning, at least insofar as they are giving politicians more than enough cover to continue to do far too little about what is probably the world’s most important problem.

People who are concerned about climate change might be wrong. There could be something about the planet we have overlooked, which means humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions don’t need to be curbed. That being said, it seems decreasingly likely that this is the case. More and more lines of evidence demonstrate what is happening and why. There is also the question of risk management. If we believe the deniers and they are wrong, the world is in a lot of trouble. If we believe the activists, move to a zero carbon economy, and then discover the threat was overblown, we will have accomplished a lot of useful things. We will have lost out on a bit of the prosperity that continued use of fossil fuels would have given us, but we would have built a cleaner and sustainable global society. At worst, we would create a better world ‘for nothing.’

* One important exception to this argument concerns extreme poverty. If there is any area where we should let another moral objective trump climate change mitigation, it is in improving the lot of those who are desperately impoverished. Since their emissions are a tiny part of the global total anyhow, this goal can be sought at the same time as the excessive emissions of those in rich countries are aggressively reduced.

Sovereign debt crises in the EU

I find all the economic anxiety in the European Union (EU) to be rather worrisome, from a long-term historical perspective. I think the last 500 years of history demonstrate pretty convincingly that the most benign possible way for European states to spend their time is arguing over agricultural subsidies and cheese standards. It’s definitely a lot more congenial than building tanks and smashing through Poland and Belgium over and over.

As such, I rather hope the EU is able to sort things out and set up systems that prevent these problems in the future. There definitely need to be ways in which the actions of less responsible governments can be prevented from requiring frequent bailouts from more responsible governments, but I don’t think the risk of that happening from time to time is so severe that it is worth derailing the whole European project over.

The wastrel child effect

Talking with Lauren the other day, it occurred to me that the strongest force redistributing wealth across human history has quite possibly not been progressive taxation of income or estate taxes. Rather, it may be the tendency of the children of the wealthy and powerful to be hopeless wastrels. One generation builds up a gigantic fortune and the next one (or two, or three) disperses it again with some combination of bad decisions and lavish living.

It seems plausible to say that really gigantic fortunes only build up when some new factor unbalances the existing economic system. For instance, companies realize that it will only be possible to train staff in the use of one computer operating system. In the process, Microsoft and Bill Gates make colossal fortunes. Similar explanations can be used when it comes to railroad barons, the current wealth of Gulf oil states, and so on.

The people who build up these fortunes probably always need a combination of talent and good luck. They need to have the giant fortune opportunity in the first place, and then they need to act effectively to realize it. The sort of people who are able to do that are probably pretty unusual, for the most part. By contrast, their offspring are more likely to be normal in traits like intelligence (regression to the mean). It is also entirely possible that they will live seriously distorted lives, as the result of parental success. This is as true of the heir to a major fortune or family business as it is to the heir to a particularly successful hereditary monarch. Once in a while, they may be able to build on the success of their predecessor. More often – I would wager – they either start or perpetuate the decline of that success.

All told, it is probably an extremely good thing that the children of people like Elizabeth I or Bill Gates don’t generally rise to the level of success of their parents. Given how limited most states are – when it comes to putting checks on income inequality – it seems plausible to me that a world with a high probability of hereditary success would probably be one ruled by powerful families reminiscent of the Middle Ages. The fact that there is at least the occasional mad or incompetent person who ends up in a position to squander the family’s wealth and influence is probably a significant reason why we don’t all live like peasants, ruled over by feudal lords.

If it hasn’t already been done, somebody should undertake a statistical analysis of the relative financial success of the children of highly wealthy individuals. It could cover as long a span as we have good records for (which would vary by country) and would help to establish the significance of this hypothesized wastrel effect. As I said, I would not personally be surprised if the total economic effect has been redistribution on a greater scale than that achieved by taxation.

Moving from GoDaddy to DreamHost

For the last few years, sindark.com has been hosted with GoDaddy – a firm I chose because they were inexpensive and seemed to have a decent reputation. Since then, I have had a number of problems with them. As a result, I decided not to extend my hosting contract with them, and to shift this site over to DreamHost, another hosting provider.

Non-technical people thinking of moving sites, be warned. It is not a painless process. In my case, it involved an awful lot of messing around in command prompts and hair pulling.

The trickiest thing is moving the MySQL databases that actually store WordPress posts and comments. For databases that are small, you can use a web interface to upload them to DreamHost. For larger databases, you need to export the old MySQL file, download it, upload it to your root folder on DreamHost via FTP, login to their server using ssh, create an empty database using their web interface, and then execute a command like this:

mysql -h mysql.examplesite.com -u exampleusername -pexamplepassword newdatabasename < olddatabasefile.sql

While I am sure that is all no big deal for some savvier tech types out there, the whole process was frustrating and a bit scary for me.

Please let me know if you are encountering any problems with the new setup. I know that – for some mysterious reason – photos of the day won’t load in Opera Mobile.