The beginning of wisdom here is to note that pollution isn’t “bad for the planet.” The planet is a gigantic roughly spherical chunk of rocks that can easily survive whatever level of greenhouse gas emissions or whatever else we care to pump into the atmosphere. The big picture ecological threat is a threat to human beings [...] Radical population reduction would sharply reduce the quantity of anthropogenic ecological impacts, but to what end? The goal needs to be to reconfigure human activity in order to make it sustainable over a longer time horizon.

I won’t get into how I feel about the conservative notion that it’s the government’s job to encourage people to live the standard American lifestyle – suburbs, cars and kids – or, indeed, any lifestyle* beyond to say that I’m not exactly a fan and that he neglects that lower population is a saner alternative to lifestyle adjustments alone for ecological issues. I’ll just address the specieism his post espouses and the oversimplification of what exactly our planet is and does.

If you take a raccoon from the woods, take it into your home and then drown it, you will rightly face animal cruelty charges (among others)**. If you purchase property that is habitat to a hundred raccoons and flood it to provide a reservoir, somehow the mass cruelty flies under the radar. This of course makes no sense. If cruelty to one animal is indefensible, then cruelty to many is more so.

Biodiversity itself may only be of instrumental value. Just like there isn’t much of a difference morally between a mass murder of 1000 individuals and genocide consisting of 1000 individuals, there isn’t that much of a reason to get worked up about minor biodiversity loss itself so long as it is eventually recovered and there remains enough in the present time. However, habitat destruction and the reduction of numbers means that individual sentient organisms are starving to death or otherwise dying in a bad way or living a more impoverished existence. For this reason, any environmentalism that doesn’t make the welfare/rights of all beings, not just humans, central isn’t worth discussing. Matt Yglesias seems to be suggesting we all need to do our part to use less resources to make room for more people. This fails because as we can see it disregards the welfare of wildlife and it also fails because it takes a total view of happiness. Two people living okay existences aren’t really better than one person living a fabulous existence. In a true eco-utopia, everyone will have plenty of unharmed wilderness to explore and achieve oneness.

Another minor point is his assertion that the planet is just “a spherical chunk of rocks.” Clearly, when people say planet, they are not referring to its geology, though the bulk of the mass is, indeed, lifeless silica and minerals. They are referring, of course, to the ecosphere, which supports us and all the other life on the planet. It is perhaps of only instrumental value but very great value indeed. If we fix up Señor Yglesias’ comments accordingly, we still don’t see a powerful argument to reduce humanity to the stone age nor to view children as little packets of evil (however annoying they may be), but you also certainly don’t come to the conclusion that child rearing, something people gladly voluntarily do anyway, needs to be subsidized so as to encourage it anymore than our biology and existing social pressures already do.

* I don’t want zen fascists telling me to live in an apartment, ride the bus and not have kids either.
** Actually, this depends on the jurisdiction. If you at least feed the raccoon first, it will then be your [illegal] pet that you are being cruel to. If you at least agree that someone ought to get in trouble for kidnapping, then drowning a raccoon, then you should agree with my logic, even if the law isn’t quite like I make it sound.

What most bothers me about the whole concept isn’t the empty symbolism; I’m used to that and expect such from facebookistan. It is that it is yet another example of this cognitive dissonance I too often see in our movement – conflating the very different concerns of the health of the planet on one hand with very separate egalitarian goals, however laudable, on the other. The protest is about gas prices. If the prices are high, great. Maybe alternatives will finally be viable in the market. Don’t get me wrong; there is reason for environmentalists to protest gas prices – for being too low. It’s time to end the gas subsidies, end our oil diplomacy (and “diplomacy”) and end the socialization of costs where otherwise Americans’ stinginess (a force that knows no parallel) might otherwise prevent unwise use of scarce resources.

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=158856697501684

Am I on crazy pills? Everyone I know misses that he's obviously a sea sponge made out to look like a household sponge. It's called artistic license!

Many people say that the best salve for environmental issues is strict enforcement of property rights with activists legally assisting those affected by pollution, etc. It’s worth a try as state environmentalism causes people who otherwise would want to do their part to protect the planet to instead resent the whole movement and feel as if it were forced upon them*. If our system was just, it should be possible for everyone along the gulf coast (and not just in America, but even in other islands sufficiently close to be affected) to do a class-action lawsuit against BP and actually get compensated for the damages. If BP truly believed this was possible, they would have made sure no one cut any corners in meeting safety regulations or, in the absence of safety regulations, would probably have paid to develop their own. Experience tells us that instead of this happening, the rabid pragmatists in our legal system won’t allow for a company that’s an important part of the economy to be utterly destroyed by mere tort. Exxon managed to delay and delay having to pay and managed to get only a slap on the wrist in the end, despite decimating an entire community and doing untold damages to wildlife. Even the ship is alive and well, living on as the the Dong Fang Ocean. This, however isn’t the bigger problem since it’s “simply” a matter of not having a state that claims to act in the interests of the people, but instead acts in the interests of the bureaucrats’ friends. No, the bigger problem is that cases like this amount to such a tiny fraction of the depreciation of natural resources. Wetlands, for example, that make up the invisible bedrock to our economy by performing services we’d pay as much as necessary to get if it wasn’t free, are being nickel and dimed to oblivion by numerous polluters and it’s affects are divided equally by everyone in the vicinity.

You may own a piece of property and essentially do with it as you wish, but on what grounds can you be said to own the air above it or the water below it? These things are passing through and as you use and abuse these things, you automatically damage everyone else’s property. Everyone’s part of the burden is sufficiently small that it’s not worth it for them to seek damages. If that alone were the problem, I think we would have a problem that everyone can live with. Of course the market is going to have negative externalities and if it’s sufficiently minor, there’s no need to bother addressing it. However, not just what I do on my property to the air, but what every single manufacturer contributes to the air adds up to something that harms peoples’ health and destroys the beauty of un”improved” land. Though I said I’ll defer the issue, let’s not forget what we do to creatures who no doubt can suffer, but lack the ability to legally defend themselves. To such situations, I propose an alternative.

Earlier, I blogged about my idea of EcoTax, which turns out to be very similar to Henry George’s idea, though with important differences. I’ll post later with an updated version of my idea, but to summarize, I propose as a practical alternative to numerous mini-torts the government** having an alternate plan for companies (or individuals – a company is just a bunch of individuals) that must pollute as part of their operations. For such companies, they can opt to, instead of being subject to numerous torts, which they will then be forced to actually pay up on, they can simply pay in proportion to how much they pollute, and the funds shared with everyone. This will make it cost to pollute and it will make products that carry a heavier eco-burden to reflect more accurately their ecological costs. The market, which is to say, the creativity of everyone working together, will then work towards solving ecological problems in a bottom-up way, instead of us hoping that the commands from a distant bureaucracy, funded and controlled by elites is the right one, as it would be the one we’ll all be stuck with. Furthermore, it will let people have their freedom to live as they choose rather than a specific brand of green living forced on them.

** The government or whatever legal order(s) there may be. My basic idea is perfectly compatible with a libertarian society. It doesn’t need an army to prop it up!

http://www.city-data.com/top2/h39.html

Lately, I’m increasingly thinking, especially after reading this article, that evolutionary computing would benefit greatly from using a more bacterial type of evolution, where genes are shared between often unrelated organisms, rather than brute inheritance. Another way of looking at it, is it might be good to deal with the complexities of subroutine sharing (which functional programming would make easier) than the complexities of sexual reproduction which make my eyes glaze over to read the solutions offered for. Maybe I’m just not clever enough (my earlier post on genetic programming had a little ruby script and it only uses asexual reproduction).

I am skeptical of the article’s claim that the shared genetic code of all organisms must mean that genes were shared between organisms like bacterium do today. Firstly, bacterium don’t all share some common genes due to the passing of genes between species as it is. Secondly, clade evolution – where clades that are just better at evolving edge out others over time could be sufficient explanation. Surely DNA-based life had immense advantages over life with less fault-tolerant code. Just the same, the article makes a good point that biologists are, being human macro-centric – they focus on multi-cellular organisms even though most of the biomass, even more of the variety, along with the vast, vast majority of the history of life on this planet, is prokaryotic.

spoiler alert ** do not continue if you don’t want the plot revealed (this is really intended reading for people who watched the movie anyway, not a proper review; I don’t do movie reviews)

I’m not a movie critic, but an appreciator of Sci-Fi, so I’ll focus mostly on the alien biology and “anthropology” of the aliens themselves. The movie had all the things that make American movies frustrating – the overused noble savage against technology plot (think Dances With Wolves or Ferngully… anyone remember Ferngully?) and the handlebar mustache-twisting (figuratively) villain that you can never find in real life. Yes, people are greedy, incompetent or just plain wrong about the world around them, but people aren’t motivated by evil (‘What about Hitler?,’ you ask? Yes, file Hitler under wrong about the world around him – deeply wrong about what is right but he fought for what he believed to be right). The movie also had what makes American movies great and particularly well suited to their often blue-collar audience – wish fulfillment. Who doesn’t want to be 10 feet tall, blue and run around an idyllic wilderness half-naked and ride alien Pterodactyls? Oh, and the guy lands himself a hot alien chick. Double-score. There’s also the interconnectedness – with nature and with the tribe, that modern Americans lack severely. People secretly yearn for that as they spend more and more money to be further and further from dirt and from their relatives.

I could go on and on about inaccuracies, but what’s the point? Sci-fi is about changing reality, holding certain fantastic things for granted and, outside of that, have an internally consistent universe. I could just grant all sorts of sillinesses and that, by wild coincidence, the aliens on Pandora happen to be astonishingly humanoid (maybe they are of Terrestrial origin or vice versa – panspermia) and I think I will. What interests me, though, is the biology of the planet. How and why the synergy between all life forms on Pandora happened is an interesting question. I find myself wondering if the Navi began having that bio communication port in their ponytails and bred various animals and plants to interact with it, in much the same way dogs, though slightly dumber than wolves can understand human language better (I am told). It’s hard to imagine life evolving towards standardizing on a way of exchanging information, but then again bacteria have just that (with plasmids) and benefit greatly. The Gaea Hypothesis holds that natural selection has applied not just to individuals, but to the ecosphere herself. Indeed, we metazoans are symbiosis of countless eukaryotic cells (and, for that matter, prokaryotic cells) which earlier in evolutionary history would have only existed singly and for their own purposes. For this synergy to have happened, however, all the cells must come from the same genes. That is key. So, for the world of Pandora to exist, the rest of the ecosphere and at least the Navi themselves must share DNA to some degree. Maybe there is rogue genes or viruses that infect all of life with cooperation genes. Maybe that connection port is a sort of zoological plasmid they share?

Also of interest and an area where the movie lets me down is the religion of the people. Indeed, very seldom is religion treated fairly and realistically in sci-fi or fantasy. It’s often superficially glazed over without people putting their minds into the believers themselves. If you ask me, it’s one of the more fascinating aspects of a culture and playing with hypothetical religions (and asking why they don’t exist) is probably one of the next great frontiers in the world of sci-fi. What you see in the movie is essentially a Christian attempt at Paganism, crossed with Earth (or Pandora)-worshipping deep green religion. When you die, you go to heaven, but heaven exists in the ecosphere’s data storage. There’s a God, but she’s a woman who doesn’t take sides (except in the epic battle in the movie). It’s even interesting how what they believe in is fully naturalistic, but I’m afraid the movie captures the typical liberal naive idealizations about tribal peoples’ spirituality. Yes, people who live in nature love and worship nature, but it is a very different kind of biophilia than what is found among us cosmopolitans. Nature isn’t a relaxing vacation – it is everything. It is all the good and all the bad in the world. To understand how their beliefs really would have been, one need only look back in time and keep in mind “God fearing Christian” – Pagans are Nature fearing Pagans! Jór provided for her worshipers and protected them from outsiders, but she also greedily demanded human sacrifice – as countless well-preserved bog bodies will attest – on threat of more famine and harsher storms. It makes sense that the “Great Mother” protected the Navi, knowing that Humans would do to her what they did to their “mother” but this also means that she is prepared to keep the Navi in check by disease and famine, should they live beyond her means. If you want to see how more beautiful it is with the dark side left intact, see any of Miyazaki’s movies. He makes nature out to be what she really is – both beautiful and scary. He adds the supernatural element for entertainment and effect, but there’s something real about his surreal worlds.

My wife was irritated at the ending. Why did he choose to live with the aliens? He’s from such a different world. My thinking is it’s going to be an adjustment, but what would have made me feel better is if they exposed wrongs and injustices within the tribe. Their extreme idealization of these noble savages actually makes their culture less appealing. If I could see the ways in which we know cultures that emphasize connectedness and tribal solidarity also squelch the individual or that the Navi too are capable of wrongheadedness, their culture would appeal so much more to me by seeming real. That’s what I wanted to see. Their world would be more beautiful if it was less like a paradise and more like something that almost could be, with even its pitfalls laid out before me. That’s what I wanted to see. This movie is Earth-worship without the soul. But the graphics were awesome. I definitely recommend seeing it.

There are a number of tax reforms, mostly proposed by the Right, to make things “fair” (same law applies to everyone) and simple. Some of them are quite ingenious and appealing, but I’ll explain why they all suck and mine is better (even though I’m not an economist… I hope a real economist gets a hold of the idea and fills in the cracks). I for one am not a right-winger (quite the opposite) but rather I think like a programmer. Where I see spaghetti code, I want to untie it and I see more spaghetti in our legal system than in an Italian restaurant (zing!)

FairTax

This taxes products at the end of the value chain – when purchased by the end-user. This replaces all the complicated mess of even paying taxes with a tax on final goods sold. The beautiful part is ordinary people don’t have to fill out paperwork. If you own a business, you simply have to pay the sales tax on what you sell. Genius. One problem with this is that, naturally, as you get richer, the proportion of your money you use to buy things decreases (the likes of MC Hammer and Steve Martin’s character in The Jerk notwithstanding). In this way, it disproportionately taxes the poor. FairTax partially gets around this through (p)rebates to families based on income.

On the Wikipedia article, you’ll see this picture. Yeah, that’s what I mean by untying spaghetti code. All those books are our current tax code, and that man is holding FairTax. Awesome.

Negative Income Tax

I believe this was Milton Friedman’s brainchild or at least he’s commonly associated with it. I think it sort of fell out of fashion among Libertarians in to FairTax, but it is also a good system. You pay the government a fixed percentage of your income, minus a fixed amount, the percentage and amount being the same for _everyone_. If it happens to be a negative amount (which happens if your income divided by the percentage is less than the fixed amount), the government pays you. Your tax is a linear equation. If you took math in middle school you are halfway to being a CPA. Awesome.

The system is, however, likely to be a lightning rod for fraud. Tax evasion now is simply a loss of income for the government (and therefor taxpayers), but if you could convince the government you make nothing, you automatically receive welfare. This also still has the disadvantage of making every citizen go through the trouble of filling their taxes. Okay, next.

EcoTax

Now to my proposal, EcoTax. Turn FairTax on its head. Instead of only taxing things at the end-product level, we only tax raw materials as they are taken out of the Earth. We’re not talking about any tariffs right now, since that’s complicated and really another subject. As far as product created within America is concerned, the tax is at the beginning and it’s up to these primary producers (homotrophes, to use an analogy to ecology) to increase their prices to offset their costs. In this way, the costs of things to a greater degree reflect their true ecological costs. This would naturally mean no subsidies for farmers (rather, they would be taxed for the water and soil they use).

The way EcoTax would work is this: the EPA would be given a new job assess the degrees to which various natural resources are renewable, the degree to which various activities are harmful to human health, etc. They will make no fiscal decision, but rather calculate a schedule of ratios. The income needed by the government to meet its operations and economic predictions will be factored in to create a multiplier. The taxes for the different activities will simply be the ratio in question times the grand multiplier. It’s so simple. The only thing an accountant needs is the latest copy of this (which the government should supply as a free PDF, too). Perhaps the government could supply free software with source code for this purpose to make it even simpler. The important thing is for the ratios to not be politically determined or for other concerns to be taken into account (that’s the job of politicians setting fiscal policy on how to use revenue and what to set the multiplier to).

Note this is related to the idea of Ecotax (or Pigovian taxes in general), but it’s different (you can tell because I capitalize the T). The best way to summarize the difference is this: I propose the only tax being Ecotaxes and the rationale is slightly different. The capital in the free market is derived from two main sources – labor and natural resources. I say you own that which your labor created, but that which is derived from our common natural heritage or which clearly has a negative externality you don’t truly own. Certainly, no one owns the atmosphere, though a section of it will be on your land at any given time and a part of the water table, which you also don’t own, may happen to be under your property. I don’t want to get into the specifics of well rights, etc, but just to point out the obvious fact that, as aging hippie douche would say “you can’t own the ocean, man!”

EcoTax isn’t meant to be the panacea of environmental protection. Rather, we’re removing the artificial economic incentive to destroy that which you do not own. Protecting our species’ viability, wild places, natural habitats and so on cannot rely entirely on the government. Indeed, to the degree people value these things (which they should), they shall donate to private charities that buy up land, such as the Nature Conservancy. The government must not force people to be eco-conscious (it’s not the government’s job to make people do the right thing all the time), but to protect that which is everyone’s property from the few.

The biggest drawback I can see with this is there may be a drop in revenue unless the multiplier is set high enough to put some good companies out of business. There should be a transition period where the old scheme is slowly replaced with the new to give people a chance to switch to other industries. There could temporarily be harsher tariffs against countries that use too much farming subsidies to give our companies enough time to compensate, then the tariffs must be dropped again. This may also make things hard on small farmers, but that could be remedied by in the short term paying for Dutch farmers to teach Americans better efficient farming techniques. A purist Libertarian may scoff at the idea that government intervention is needed to counter the ill effects of government intervention, but it is a fact. “Government intervention” refers to too broad a category for that scoff to be taken at face value.

Creationists and their ilk make this claim that Darwinism is a liberal conspiracy almost in the same breath as saying that it justified social Darwinism, a nebulous term except in that it refers exclusively to Right-wing ideologies. I have to ask – which is it? Liberals are all kinds of things but we’re certainly not social Darwinists. The answer is it is not a liberal conspiracy, but there were individuals who committed the naturalistic fallacy (deriving an ought from an is) and advocated modeling society after evolution – a mindless process that produces mostly extinctions and a lot of misery and pain. Take a breath. A bunch of animals throughout the world just met their bloody end to the claw. The theory of natural selection tells us how things got the way they are, but it’s certainly no model on how things ought to be – it’s the reason why Darwin’s rottweiler, Dawkins, says, “I am a passionate Darwinian when it comes to the science of how life has actually evolved, but a passionate ANTI-Darwinian when it comes to the politics of how humans ought to behave.” Indeed. Remember – a fact can never be good or evil, but almost always useful. At worst, a fact is of little use. That is the underlying philosophy behind science. It would only ever break down if we were living in a Lovecraftian universe where the truth drives men mad.

“Fair enough,” you might say, “well-meaning liberals are planting the seeds of social Darwinism because they’re a bunch of Godless atheists and their atheism is the reason they want to teach Darwinism.” Yes, the headwaters of this notion that there is something liberal about Darwinism must be the association with atheism. I don’t know if anyone told these guys, but most liberals (in America, anyway) are not atheists. In being an atheist, I am unusual among liberals (though that’s the least of my divergence with mainstream liberals). Don’t confuse “secular” with “atheist”. Secular is a rather broad term that includes non-religious people as well as religious people who don’t believe society should be centered around religion. Liberals don’t want to hurt people’s feelings; this is the essence of what “politically correct” means. They don’t want to tell people that their own culture’s beliefs are wrong. This leads me to my last point here – the biggest threat to students getting a good education in “sensitive” subjects, beyond the barriers that might otherwise exist for any subject, isn’t creationists, but overly careful, well-meaning, politically-correct liberal teachers.

僕は大きい子供です。趣味が物を作ることです。プログラミングを習う理由はテレビゲームを作りたかったからです。仕事がプログラマーなのにまだプログラムを作るのが楽しいです。だから、発明家になりたいです。色んな能力を集めたら、いい有名な発明家になれると思います。実はプログラミング力と生物工学が合うと思います。特にメディカルデバイスには特に便利です。虫よりもちっちゃいロボットを人間の体に通って何か直すロボットなどを作りたいです。

暗い未来を防ぎたい理由もあります。だんだん地球の人口が増えています。それで、餓死が増えています。森とかが経ています。それが悪いことは悪いけど、科学技術の新法によって防げます。料理オタクだから、よく貧乏のアフリカの村を何か発明した生物工学で救済するイメージを見ます。人間が必要なビタミン１００％のトウモロコシを作りたいです。などなどなど。

最後に生物が確かに好きです。僕には水草が気持ち悪くないです。１週間に３回ぐらい、朝に森の中にジョッギングします。太っているアメリカ人にならないためだけじゃなくて、自然に親しむためです。僕は宗教的じゃないです。逆に無神論だけど、自然の経験がよく僕には宗教的です。教会より大きい杉、天使より多い鳥、神様よりずっと理解すれば理解するほど理解できない宇宙。

One of the first things I thought upon seeing this is, oh shit, OJ probably went crazy from too many concussions. People often forget the obvious fact that murder isn’t something done by mentally healthy people. Sure, if you go to jail, you are legally sane, which is to say sane enough to know what you did is wrong, but almost always there is a pathology at the headwaters of the deed. I can’t help but wonder if a tackle too many knocked something loose upstairs.