Post-ish Scarcity, Energy, and learning from Failure

Today I'll do something a bit different for this blog and talk about ideas I have been considering from literature, specifically SF. I've been reading a fair bit of Iain M. Banks of late, and have been thinking about his setting of The Culture and how it relates to what we have now and are likely to get to based on our present trajectory.

First off, The Culture is a Utopia, so instantly suspicious to realists such as myself. It is not made out to be perfect, but in terms of everyday life it's as close as no matter. The phrase "post-scarcity" came up at a party I was at a while ago, albeit in the context of today's world. The Culture takes that concept to its' logical conclusion, with the caveat that the frame of reference has been shifted significantly.

Communism and (to a lesser extent) Anarchy have been tried out and found severely wanting; this is in comparison to a well-run liberal democracy which is merely wanting. The best possible government you can get is an enlightened despot, but they are exceedingly rare. The key constant in all of these systems is people. As long as you have people, you will have human emotions and drives gumming up the works. Banks gets around this by putting seriously powerful AIs in charge of everything, leaving people to do anything they want as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else.

We don't live there and as far as I can see we never will. What we need to deal with though is the people who think this is achievable. One of the things which pushed me toward this was a protest which students were having in Montreal about hikes in their tuition rates, still the lowest in the country. They are emblematic of people who forget that this is not a completely Post-Scarcity world.

Things need to be paid for; there are no magical gnomes or super advanced technology resembling magic which will build your house or grow your food. Obvious, I know, but there are a surprising number of people who don't understand it. We live in the most fortunate age civilization has seen, with all but the very poorest having luxuries (proper heating, electricity, hot running water) which the Kings and Emperors of all previous ages could not have had for any sum.

Perfection? No. As close as we'll get? Doesn't have to be. The key is cheap clean energy and advanced technology, and either one will get you the other, therefore both. I'll start with Energy.

Energy at its' most basic is the ability of something to do work, and I recommend the link as a refresher (if you need one) about how energy and matter relate. As "doing work" is how things get done, energy is obviously the key to everything else. Hell, with enough energy you can re-arrange matter at the atomic level (e.g. making elements in a linear accelerator). I am not a physicist by any means, so I won't get too far into this, except to say that the cost of energy effects the cost of everything else.

I thought that was obvious too, but apparently not. Taking the simplest connection, if the price of petrol goes up it costs you (and everyone and everything else) more to get around. This has the compound effect of reducing your discretionary income and increasing the price of things you would drive out to buy. Result: standard of living goes down, economy contracts. We're living it right now.

Enter the Entitlement Generation. I am working hard to NOT raise my children like that, but the results are all around us and it started at the tail end of (my) Generation X. I am by nature a rather lazy person, but I am also a responsible one. I accept (or at least understand) the kicking that I often take from the Type-A types who rise to the top of my organization. I do the best with what I have, but I know that some other people will be better than me at certain things.

This I consider to be a realistic and healthy (albeit somewhat depressing at times) appraisal of the world and how it works. So, I will work and accept that I will never rise to the top, as they are looking for things I don't have. This is as it should be, but there are a LOT of people (mostly young) who don't get it. You cannot (with rare but notable exceptions) do whatever you want just because you put your mind to it. Trust me, I've tried a lot of things that way and it ain't how things work for most people.

They'd love Banks' "Culture"; so would I but we're nowhere close. We need rules and we need Rule of Law to keep the decision makers in line. While I was in the gym this morning I saw a business school guy talking about the cost of education and making choices. People are talking about free education, but he wasn't having any of it, and with good reason.

Enter "Opportunity Cost": The cost of an alternative that must be forgone in order to pursue a certain action. Put another way, the benefits you could have received by taking an alternative action. So, you want someone else to pay your opportunity cost for you (e.g. free tuition)? Proponents of free education call it "an investment in society" but if so it's a bad one. Again, not an economist, but off the top of my head I don't see the extra tax income from graduates offsetting the investment in them in any kind of a hurry. What it amounts to is everyone else paying more taxes so that YOU can get ahead: in other words, an entitlement.

There are all sorts of people in universities who shouldn't be there in the first place, simply on academic achievement and potential. I went to class with a lot of them and often wondered how they got out of high school let alone into university. This isn't your top-end universities, but it is most of them.

Vocational and trades training need to be brought back, and I see that some attempts are being made. I have done a lot of really messy jobs to make ends meet before I sorted myself out career-wise, but too many kids won't clean bathrooms or move garbage because it's "below them". Thank you, Princess culture et al. Which brings us back to...

...where does all of our "stuff" come from? Somebody designs it, somebody designs the tools that make it, somebody builds those tools while other people build the building this all goes in. Others extract the raw materials, process them and ship them to the factory. Notice: nary a super-intelligent AI with unbounded energy resources and manipulation to be seen in the process.

My point? Stuff doesn't make itself, ship itself or (oh horrors!) clean up after itself (or you). I don't like cleaning bathrooms any more than anyone else, but I do it (at home) because it needs to be done. In all of this I blame lazy parents. Teaching kids responsibility and accountability is hard and tiring, a.k.a. Work. Kids learn what they're taught; if expectations are low at home, and low at school, they'll never learn anything useful.

Just like our ancestors broke their backs and their health to clear land and build farms and cities, the current and upcoming generations need to work to make better things in order to make things better. It's a lot less of a slog than it was for our predecessors, but we can't coast now. I don't know about you, but I want my (figurative) flying car. Thorium reactors would be a good start though, so let's work on that.

As Ronald Reagan said: If not us, who? If not now, when?

Paying the bus you throw your allies under

The Obama administration intends to resume funding for Egypt’s military, despite congressional restrictions and objections from human rights and democracy advocates.

For months, the money for Egypt — more than $1.5 billion, with the bulk earmarked for the military — has been withheld amid that country’s crackdown on pro-democracy groups, including several U.S.-based organizations with close ties to political parties in Washington.

A law passed by Congress in December forbids funding unless the State Department certifies that Egypt is making progress on basic freedoms and human rights.

But Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is close to announcing plans to bypass those restrictions on national security grounds, according to senior administration officials and others who have been briefed on the deliberations but were not authorized to speak publicly. The administration believes failure to provide the funds would risk worsening already fraying ties with Egypt’s leaders, most notably the Egyptian military, which still controls the country.

At least I'm far from being alone in thinking that this is a bad idea. Warts and all, Mubarak was the Americans' only reason to fund the Egyptian military, as he took Sadat's baton of peace with Israel and carried it for 30 years. Once again the USA has abandoned an immediately politically inconvenient (and admittedly at least partially despotic) ally to forces inimical to America's national interests.

This is the trajectory of last year's "Arab Spring", and the 1979 Iran (Islamic) revolution should provide a model for what is likely to come in most of these countries. The Egyptians won't start another war with Israel (outcome is certain anyway) but they can be miserable and descend into a factional Islamist terrorist-supporting state.

The idea that the US will maintain any useful influence with the Egyptian power structure is wishful thinking at best, putting arms into the hands of people who will use them against you and your interests at worst. Oh well, it's not like they haven't done it before; there is that old saw about doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results...

Yes, I've not been up to too much here and at times I feel badly about that. However (and I know I've said this before) it often feels that I've nothing new to say. Anyway, I'm less busy than I have been for the last couple of months so there will likely be more from me here. You have been warned...