Belgian coma man

Hearing the story of a Belgian coma victim who has 'woken' after 23 years on the radio made me wonder if we are not going to have another re-run of the Terri Schiavo circus.

According to James Randi's JREF, there is nothing there. The alleged awakening is hardly of Lazarus proportions. The patient is still immobile and the communication consists of 'facilitated communication' with an assistant doing the actual typing.

As always, once the credulous media have publicized a false claim it will be impossible to persuade wishful thinkers otherwise. The story of the Belgian man who awoke from a coma after 23 years will be transmuted into fact.

But, but, but....

How can the GOP defend this?

I guess it must mean that he never got a blow-job.

What passes for news

At one time what started in the tabloids stayed in the tabloid, since the OJ Simpson trial everything is a soap opera and everyone is always the injured party.

So Tiger's mistress is upset that he was 'unfaithful' to her? On what grounds?

It would be really nice if just one little part of the mainstream media could occasionally try to serve a more useful purpose than providing Jon Stewart with material. Can it really be that hard? If you know you are going out with a cheater then you should pretty much expect him to cheat on you as well and have no grounds for a complaint at all if you are also cheating on them.

Or in other words: It is no sin for a cheating cheater to cheat on their cheatee.

The fifth man

Oh dear, Tiger's mistress count reaches four.

One wonders what the US press would have made of the fact that it took the UK media two decades to uncover the identity of the fifth man.

Don't go to Moe's speakeasy on 4th street.

The Climate Summit in Copenhagen has created an interesting clash between the City council and the local prostitutes.

The clash began when the city council decided to send notices to city hotels asking guests not to patronize the local prostitutes during the conference. In response the prostitutes are offering free sex to anyone who shows both a warning notice and their conference ID badge. Prostitution is legal in Copenhagen and the sex workers are objecting to the city council interfering with their trade.

But what was the Mayor thinking? The warnings sound like the newspaper editorials that some of the craftier bootleggers would run in their newspapers loudly protesting the evils of the demon drink. Prohibitionists would read the article and agree with it, the rest would think about going to Moe's for a drink, the location of which would be clearly stated in the article.

More Faux News Reporting

S. Robert Lichter writes an article titled Fox News: Fair And Balanced? in Forbes.com

As you might guess from the title, S. Robert Lichter's conclusion is 'yes'.

So who is S. Robert Lichter?

First hit on Google

"S. Robert Lichter is president of the Washington-based Center for Media and Public Affairs and a paid consultant to the Fox News Channel" [1]

So the only guy they can find to describe them as 'fair and balanced' is the same guy who they were paying as a consultant only last year? Surely a relevant disclosure to make in the circumstances?

Filibuster tactics

I was rather interested to read the latest tactical maneuvering on the health care bill.

It is now clear that the initial GOP threat to force a reading of the whole bill has been neutralized. The best possible outcome for the Democrats at this point would be for Coburn to go through with his threat. The Democrats would then bring in a team of speedreaders to complete the reading over the thanksgiving recess while Coburn and some Democrat presiding miss their dinner, thus providing a highly visible proof of GOP obstruction.

But the more interesting feature is a consequence of the possibility of multiple filibuster threats. In theory any Senate motion is subject to filibuster. But in practice use of the filibuster tends to be limited to final passage rather than the intermediate stages. There is a reason for that, it is really bad tactics for the minority to attempt to filibuster early in the process.

As we saw earlier with discussion of the 'nuclear option', there are ways and means to get round Senate rules. A cloture motion sets out a time limit for debate on a motion. But there is no reason that the Democrats could not introduce a motion to change the rules of the Senate to introduce a time limit for debate on all future procedural motions for a bill. Such a motion would be subject to filibuster, but that is a one time event and a filibuster is not without benefit for those participating in breaking it. Whatever hardship the majority endures will be highly visible via local TV news and newspapers. Most would much rather spend a week sleeping in my office than on the campaign trail.

Under such circumstances the dynamics of the health care debate become very different. All the concessions that the majority made to the minority earlier are lost and then some.

And once there is one bill on the floor that is filibuster proof, it can be used as a vehicle for any purpose that garners a 50 Senate votes.

The dillema of intelligence

The seizure of a consignment of Iranian arms destined for Hezbollah demonstrates a particularly difficult problem of intelligence: it may not make any difference at all.

While any action that reduces the amount of arms available to either the Iranian regime or their Hezbollah franchisees is good, this is clearly only a tactical victory at best. The arms factories will continue to churn out more weapons in Iran and some means will be found of delivering significant quantities to Hezbollah.

Clearly Israel was acting on intelligence sources. So it is equally clear that Iran and Hezbollah will be moving to close the breach. Not knowing is bad, but even if you know you are unable to act on it without a significant risk of not knowing in future.

Which makes me wonder quite why this particular interdiction took place. One possibility is that the Israelis knew that they would be loosing their source in any case, the source might be a defector.

Another is that the timing is determined by Israeli politics. Netanyahu is in a pretty weak diplomatic position, Israel has only one major ally and under Obama the US is not prepared to underwrite the Likud line. I doubt that this is the case, while Netanyahu is certainly capable of that type of calculation, the Mossad people know this and would be expected to control access to information accordingly.

Another possibility is that Israel would prefer to cause the Iranian regime to occupy itself with a mole hunt at the moment. Hunts for traitors can do an immense amount of damage in themselves. They can even cause defections of those previously loyal. If so, this would be rather interesting as Mossad is one of the few intelligence services that appears to have any useful internal knowledge of the Iranian regime. If they are prepared to risk losing sources it is likely because they consider the regime to be particularly vulnerable at this point in time.

NBC Universal to be floated?

Probably the most under-reported politics storyline is the news that Vivendi may IPO its stake in NBC Universal. This is been seen as part of a larger move that is expected to see NBC spin out of GE which currently has majority control.

The political impact of this is likely to be significant. At the moment MSNBC has a bizarre status as a tabloid that changes political complexion from Conservative in the morning to Liberal at night. From a business standpoint this makes no sense, the audience for Joe Scarborough is not going to watch Rachel Maddow in the evening or vice versa.

MSNBC would surely have addressed this incongruity years ago if it had been an independent company or owned by a media combine (Comcast may acquire the majority stake). The reason it has not is that GE is an industrial combine whose management is clearly more comfortable with conservative commentators. In the wake of 9/11 the channel attempted to refashion itself as 'Fox News Lite'. The spectrum of political debate was deemed to run from John McCain on the left through Dick Cheney in the center and off into the far right. The Democratic Party, the party that had captured more votes in the 2000 Presidential election and only a few percent less in the 2004 election was to be considered an irrelevance, a party of perpetual opposition whose opinions were now irrelevant and were not worth air time.

Things look rather different now. The Democrats hold the White House, Senate and House and appear to have every chance of keeping them for the indefinite future. MSNBC has recognized this trend and has switched their programming so that they are now backing left and right approximately the same amount of time. This is what passes for 'balance', favoring the GOP when it is the dominant party and switching to 'balance' when it is not.

I expect that MSNBC will jettison its Conservative hosts soon after it changes ownership and afterward attempt to establish itself as the unabashed liberal equivalent to 'Faux' News.

That is really not good for liberals. The reason that the GOP is in the electoral hole that it is today is that it has been marinading itself in the ideological foment of Fox 24 hours a day. That is really unhealthy to say the least.

Instead of coming to terms with the fact that the Bush administration approach of executive policy made through gut level instinct was a total failure, Fox keeps telling the GOP to double down on the gut.

Historically the progressive party is the party of ideology and the conservative party the party of pragmatism. The idea being that most people will be better off with a pragmatic conservative than well intentioned liberal following some ideological program designed before the invention of the internal combustion engine. Thanks to Fox News in particular, and the Murdoch press ion general, the conservative and liberal parties throughout the English speaking world have switched roles. The liberal parties are now the party of pragmatism and the conservatives are the ones peddling the ideological drivel written by charlatans and frauds channeling pre-industrial economic sages.

Liberals have been well served by not having a Faux News of their own. Hopefully MSNBC will not become one.

What happens if we automate everything

According to legend, if you can boil a frog if you put it in cold water and raise the temperature to boiling slowly enough.

Strangely enough, there is even empirical evidence for the claim. One physiologist, a Freidrich Goltz noted that if you remove the brain from a frog, it will no longer hop out of the water. Small detail that, the brain had been removed. In another source which I was unable to track down immediately, a researcher noted that frogs with intact brains will tolerate higher temperatures if the water temperature is raised slowly. In several hundred observations, every frog jumped out except for the one which became the 'proof' of the anecdote.

The reason I raise the question is that I have been thinking about the question of what happens if computers and robots start working so well that they effectively replace most forms of human labor? The idea is not so far fetched as it was even a decade ago. Twenty years ago practically all leisure time was spent either sleeping or watching television. Today people while away the hours on the Internet.

As one of the instigators of this brave new world we have inflicted on you all, one of the most frequent objections made against proposals I make is that they will 'kill jobs'. To which I answer that eliminating unnecessary jobs is a good thing. One of the biggest challenges we face in the industrialized world is the fact of an aging population. People are living longer and spending a lot more time in retirement. So the people in work are having to work for the people who are retired. To date we have answered this issue by importing labor from the rest of the world. But those countries are also starting to face the same trends and those sources will dry up, if not reverse the emigration trend as ex-patriots start returning.

But what if every job turns out to be replaceable?

Economists are not much help on questions of this type. The best they can provide is an explanation of the circumstances that caused the last event. At worst they attempt to bully 'unqualified' commentators into silence with specious claims of expertise.

Only about 15% of the wholesale price of a book is paid as royalties to the author. If we add together all the costs associated with producing the content of a book they represent less than 10% of the retail price paid by the end customer. The other 90% represents the cost of paper, printing, distribution and retailing. Costs and jobs that will be eliminated entirely as the industry moves from paper to digital.

The story is not new, the introduction of industrial robots has led to a similar transformation in manufacturing industry. Employment in agriculture, already negligible, continues a steady decline. What is different this time is that the job losses are affecting the part of the economy that grew under the previous transformation. The 'knowledge workers' whose skills were meant to guarantee employment turn out to be as replaceable as the Victorian farm workers were.

Perhaps the biggest shock of the current recession was the realization that the feckless idiots funding extravagant lifestyles by borrowing against their house were previously the foundation of our apparent prosperity. Sales dry up when there is nobody with money to buy.

In retrospect, it appears that the introduction of containerized shipping transport is a much more likely cause of the recession in the mid 1970s than the oil price shocks on which it is usually blamed. The patient was already sick, the oil price shock was simply the trigger that sent him to the hospital. If the Wall Street crash had been the sole cause of the great depression it should have ended with the recovery that followed FDR's initial recovery act. Instead the country faced a second dip that I suspect was more likely caused by the displacement of agricultural workers displaced by rural electrification.

It is perhaps the worst legacy of Keynes that economists insist on ignoring the impact of technology on the economy in favor of mathematical and fiscal explanations for economic trends. It is not surprising why they prefer this, you can't plot a smooth curve through the invention of the shipping container, the barcode or the World Wide Web. More importantly, predicting economic trends from technology trends would require intellectual skills that modern economists have largely abandoned in favor of abstract algebra.

So we are caught in something of a trap. The aging population will cause our living standards to collapse if we do not eliminate jobs fast enough. But if we eliminate too many jobs we risk a depression or a slump. There may not even be a 'Goldilocks solution', merely eliminating the unnecessary jobs means that the economy has the additional capacity to meet the increased needs, it does not guarantee that the resources can be moved from one place to another.

We are caught in a trap, but here is where the frog comes in. If the water gets too hot, we can jump out.

As technologists, our only responsibility is to make sure that the economy has sufficient capacity to meet necessary needs. We cannot and should not worry about doing that job too well. If there is a temporary shortage of demand then it is the responsibility of government to address the issue. If we reach the automation limit then society is going to have to invent a new basis for allocating resources.