Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Month: May 2015

Tesla’s Home Battery System Is Not the Best Solution

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On May 11, 2015

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Why? Because it’s a lithium battery. The advantage of lithium batteries is that they’re relatively small. The disadvantage is that they’re lithium. Salt water batteries, though larger, are generally a better idea because:

  • At the end of their lifetimes, you just drain them. Lithium batteries have to be disposed of properly.
  • Salt water is in plentiful supply. If lithium batteries really take off, we may see supply and price issues.
  • While smaller is better in some situations, larger is better in others. You can throw a Powerwall into your pickup truck, but a salt water battery is too large for that.

I generally admire Elon Musk; he’s one of the only people to come out of the dotcom boom who is doing good work that needs to be done, but lithium household batteries really aren’t the best solution from an ecological viewpoint. Though, yes, combined with renewable energy they’re certainly better than most of the status quo systems.

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Conservatives Appear to Have Won in the UK: What the Left Should Do

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On May 7, 2015

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Or so the exit polls are showing.  A likely bare majority government.

The consequences of this are likely to be severe; I would expect most of the remains of the post-war welfare state to be swept away.

I am torn between two reactions:

  • Although this is only a bare majority government, people did vote for Conservatives enough for them to get in and it’s not like they didn’t know the consequences. They have had years of Tory austerity. As H.L. Mencken once said: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it, good and hard.”
  • On the other hand, Labour under Miliband ran as Tory Lite; as the lesser evil. Voters tend not to be inspired by the “not quite as bad as the other bloke, but they’ll get in eventually and do what they were going to do anyway.” And that was his platform.

I’m seeing a lot of despair from my British friends on the left. And my British friends on the sane, for that matter. Here’s what to do: Either take over the Labour Party, or, if you think that’s impossible, pile into the Greens. Or, heck, create a new party.

I will point to Alberta, where the left-most party in Canada won on a platform of, among other things, raising taxes.  They came, essentially, from nowhere.

Want to win from the left? Be left-wing. Offer a real alternative to neo-liberalism.

I note, also, that Scots may really be regretting not voting for independence. Most of the wonderful social policies Scots value more than the English will now be taken away from them.

Failure of courage when there is a real alternative will reap the expected results.

This is all very sad, but the post-war welfare state has been under assault in England since Maggie Thatcher’s election in the 1970s. The true magnitude of Thatcher’s victory was not her policies, it was that Labour became Tory Lite; she changed the acceptable policy matrix for not just the Conservatives, but for the main opposition party as well.

Until that “acceptable policy window” changes, the trend will continue right–it cannot do anything else. Each Labour interregnum will be just that, a period in which neo-liberal policies are pursued at a slower rate than during Conservative governments, but in which the trend is not reversed.

This is true in almost every country in the West of which I can think (Iceland and perhaps Finland being the lone exceptions).

Offer a real alternative, with real left wing policies. If you can’t capture an existing major party, pile into a minor party or create a new one.

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Alberta Elects the New Democratic Party (NDP)

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On May 6, 2015

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This is fairly extraordinary: For non-Canadians, the NDP is the most left-wing party in Canada and Alberta is the most right-wing province in Canada. It’d be like an Elizabeth Warren-inspired party winning Texas. (As a Canadian let me say that this is amazing and almost unthinkable even a few years ago.)

Following were NDP’s key promises:

  • An increase in the corporate tax rate from ten to twelve percent;
  • A $15/hr minimum wage;
  • A review of the royalties that petrocarbon producers pay (which have plummeted in recent years);
  • A ban on corporate donations for elections;
  • A phase out of coal power.

Alberta is the heart of the modern conservative revolution in Canada and was the fastest growing economy during the last fifteen years, thanks to massive increases in oil prices. Alberta also saw a rise in immigration from other parts of Canada, which I suspect had played a huge part in this surprise vote.

I am more interested in whether this means Alberta might be in play during a federal election, however. Traditionally, Alberta has gone right-wing in super majorities, federally. If it’s willing to vote NDP at the national election (which, so far, polls don’t show), the next election may be far more interesting than this one.

Canadian elections can be volatile; there have been a lot of upsets recently and the polls have gotten it wrong repeatedly. Federally, the Liberal Party seems most likely to win, but it’s leader, Justin Trudeau, has been caught flat-footed a number of times, tending to support the same policies as the Conservative Party.

I’m hoping, and now have slightly more hope, that the NDP wins instead.

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Regular Posting to Resume Soon

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On May 5, 2015

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Yesterday was a travel day and one of those cases where a four and a half hour itinerary turned into a 16 hour trip, to be topped off by someone doing some sort of machine work outside the window of my new place during the day. I’m operating on about seven hours sleep for the past three days.

Airbus sure knew what they were doing. Air travel really has become like traveling on a Greyhound, but with the extra joy of intrusive security checks.

Hope y’all are having a better beginning to your weeks!

Noam Chomsky Owns Sam Harris and Indicts Bill Clinton

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On May 2, 2015

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Picture of Noam Chomsky

Picture of Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky had a private email session with Sam Harris about Clinton’s bombing of a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory which Clinton allegedly believed was also manufacturing a nerve agent. I really recommend reading the entire exchange, which is hilarious and horrifying on multiple levels. First, because Harris just doesn’t get that Chomsky is smashing him flat and asks for permission to publish it. Second, because the sort of ethical reasoning Chomsky uses is so alien to so many people in the world (and, sadly, especially to Americans).

To put it simply, Clinton’s destruction of that factory meant that many people didn’t get the drugs they needed to survive. So they died. The number of people who died was much larger than the number of people who died in 9/11. Harris just doesn’t seem to get it, he thinks “intent” matters more and that Clinton deserves the benefit of the doubt. Chomsky points out that any intelligent person would have predicted the effects of bombing that factory and Clinton did it anyway.

If he did it without malice, well, that means he felt nothing even though he had to know he was killing all those people. Feeling nothing about mass murder–and that’s what it was–is arguably worse than murdering someone you acknowledge as human, as having worth.

(There is also a a brief discussion of the Iraq sanctions of the 1990s, which were a terrible crime, as well.)

The point I want to emphasize is this: If you knowingly do something which a reasonable person knows will lead to large numbers of deaths, you are on the hook for those deaths. It may be the “least worst option” in some cases (though not, I think, in either of these cases), but you are still responsible.

A reasonable man (and Clinton is a brilliant man, famed for staying up all night doing research, right down to reading all the appendices and footnotes, unlike many executives), is responsible for the effects of his actions that a reasonable man forsee.

This is Ethics 101—it is also Democracy 101. If you cannot understand this, you cannot hold your legislators and executives responsible.

Chomsky also dismisses questions of motives as irrelevant; virtually everyone says they have great motives, including the Japanese during their mid-20th century wars. At the end of the day, you can only judge with reasonable expectations and by results. Everything else is BS.

I will finally note something a lot of people don’t seem to understand, because they have been exposed more to propaganda about Chomsky rather than his own writings or his seminal work in Linguistics and Cognitive Science. Like him or hate him, Chomsky is one of the great geniuses of the 20th century. Even at age 86 and slowing down, getting into the intellectual ring with him is like trying to bear hug a grizzly. It is unlikely to end well for you

It sure didn’t for Sam Harris.

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