Dakryn's Batshit Theory of the Week

[Einherjar86]

I think it's likely that there is more going on than carbon emissions, but I still feel that even if carbon emissions only account for 30-40% of global climate change it's still worth taking efforts to reduce them.

Also, these measurements don't take atmospheric conditions/factors into consideration that have a potentially significant impact on the distribution of global temperatures: jet streams, ocean currents, climatological phenomena, etc. all can have an effect on the distribution of heat in the atmosphere.

 

[Dak]

I had multiple points to that post, but the data given here only supported a couple. One, that all those in the US most likely to deny global warming (as opposed to climate change) had a legitimate reason for doing so based on experience, contra accusations of the mistaking a "cold day for the average", and that carbon emissions don't immediately effect the local climate (unlike some "green measures" like wind turbines). Now I understand that oceans act as a carbon sink, but it also acts as a heat sink in dead areas - such as some of those warm areas - for radiation. How do we know certainly that it's carbon - vs maybe some other sort of pollution? Or maybe it's something else all together? Or maybe carbon from one particular location is worse than others? Etc. Maybe I'd take the "science" more seriously if the "solutions" weren't so obviously self servingly "political."

But all that aside, I have yet to see any argument against climate change other than "things would be different!". So? Warming periods in Earth's history have historically been a good thing. So what if New Orleans or Miami is underwater eventually? What makes those places objectively good?

 

[rms]

I think the problem is that humans think we should live forever and that change is bad. I'm really excited(scared) to see what happens in Greeland/Arctic Circle in like 15-20 years.

 

[Einherjar86]

Maybe I'd take the "science" more seriously if the "solutions" weren't so obviously self servingly "political."

This gets us to the problem of the organization of institutions for scientific research. In the recent documentary Particle Fever, an economist asked a theoretical physicist what the economic applications are for discovering the Higgs-Boson. The physicist answered, refreshingly honest, that there are none. That such discoveries usually do not yield their technological or economic benefits until after their discovery, and thus there is little to no justification for making these discoveries before they're made.

I believe firmly in the maxim that "facts become perspectives once observed." It's impossible to separate the "fact" from the act of observing it. The manipulation of the natural world serves a purpose, and our global culture - which is based on an economy of needs and demands - desires a purpose immediately. The politicization of facts happens de facto; there's no getting around it. The proposed solutions will always be amenable to certain politico-economic concerns.

If we want science to be less so, then we need to foster an environment for it in which it isn't pressured by the quid pro quo of institutional or philanthropic funding. The problem with science carried out within an economic model of immediate practical applications is that it privileges science that only produces results correspondent to the brute facts, or truths, of material reality. Such science is both illusory and detrimental. This is not to say that science can't tell us things about the world, but that truly effective science cannot justify itself purely on the basis of yielding such results. The justification lies in the process being untethered from monetary issues and political programs.

Ultimately, there is no such thing as pure science. Fortunately, that's where the Humanities come in.

But all that aside, I have yet to see any argument against climate change other than "things would be different!". So? Warming periods in Earth's history have historically been a good thing. So what if New Orleans or Miami is underwater eventually? What makes those places objectively good?

I think the problem is that humans think we should live forever and that change is bad. I'm really excited(scared) to see what happens in Greeland/Arctic Circle in like 15-20 years.

I personally have the same response to advanced technological capitalism, as it exists today, which is why I don't count myself a communist or anything like that. I want to see where technology goes.

As far as climate change, I'd like to see measures that force us to be aware of the effects industry has on the environment. This isn't to construct an artificial versus natural dichotomy, because this breaks down rather quickly. But our processes and observations are always having an impact on the world, and it behooves us to consider what may be contributing to certain climatological or environmental phenomena.

 

[rms]

I was kind of pondering this the other day, do you guys think that with the price of oil declining would do more for green energy than anything else? I saw that some important Saudi Oil tycoon was like "It'll never go up again!", so I wonder if now the Exxon's of the world have the same expectations and thus would try and capture the next market (if that market is not natural gas)

No proof or any research done to support my question, but seems like it is going to curve the direction of energy for America, at least

 

[Dak]

Don't buy for a moment that oil is "never going up again". Even if demand flatlined or continued to dip, countries like Saudi Arabia can turn off the faucet. As far as different types of energy, oil price declines hurt alternative energy, as ROEI is (currently) higher for alternative energy. If you remember, we had an explosion in subsidies and investment into alternative energy in response to 4-5$ per gallon gas.

Edit: I love the whole ridiculous mess surrounding "inflation/deflation". The first premise submitted is that deflation is a bad thing and that is followed usually by declarations we don't have enough inflation (if any!). Both of these are false. Not only is general inflation far above current official levels, the official level combines prices of a lot of non-essentials with some essential things - not exactly giving an accurate picture no matter how you slice it.

http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-01-17/there-no-inflation-unless-you-eat-food-use-water-live-house-get-sick-go-school-or-do

I buy the same foods all the time, and as we buy a fair amount of meat, eggs, milk, butter, and fruit/veggies, it's been pretty obvious watching the price increases. Then you look at eating out, where now to get a decently sized combo is usually pushing closer to 10$ than 5$, or at mid level dining, where the tab for a family (with kids, not with teens) is inching closer and closer to 50$ once the tip is added.

 

[Einherjar86]

I'm not qualified to comment on this issue, but I can't imagine that it would have an impact on green energy sources. I have to think that the cost of shifting wholesale toward cleaner energy far exceeds the price of certain measures that oil companies can take toward forcing the prices back up.

 

[Dak]

I'm not qualified to comment on this issue, but I can't imagine that it would have an impact on green energy sources. I have to think that the cost of shifting wholesale toward cleaner energy far exceeds the price of certain measures that oil companies can take toward forcing the prices back up.

Well it doesn't happen overnight. Also, I don't think you are considering the outsized effects changes at the margins can have.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-01-20/whiplash-death-last-industrialist

The stuff specifically regarding oil prices, the geopolitical play and the effects and the market aspect, are pretty much spot on with my thoughts on the whole thing (except for that "last industrialist" bit of hyperbole at the very end).

 

[zabu of nΩd]

Moving this over from the "what are you doing" thread:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-01-16/about-strong-dollar

I think debt to GDP is important to consider:

From that perspective we've seen worse, and come back from it. It's not that hard to grow our way out of a ~100%-of-GDP debt. Also, a big part of the debt is health care spending, which has recently been absurdly high in the US relative to other developed countries. Give Obamacare a few years for the effects to surface, and we'll see how debt is trending by then.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-12-12/200-years-dollar-debasement

I actually just listened to an NPR podcast series on the gold standard. We went off of it because it led to massive outflows of gold from the banking system, which reduced the supply of money that could be paid to workers.

Here's a timeline of countries leaving the gold standard vs. when their per capita income started to improve:

It annoys me that people get shocked by graphs of the value of the dollar over 100 years, while completely ignoring things like productivity gains and increases in life expectancy over the same period. Inflation hasn't "bankrupted" America.

 

[Dak]

I don't think debt-to-GDP is a very good metric when you consider GDP factors in debt spending by the government. Currently it is somewhere between 30%-40% iirc. Another way to look at this, is that every additional dollar in debt also bumps up the GDP. Due to interest, this is not sustainable, but has been pursued because of a misbegotten faith in an elusive "multiplier", which has not surfaced despite all this QE. Secondly, the only reason WWII looks like a spike rather than a mountain is because of
A. A return to a nominal gold standard (Bretton Woods)
B. The industrial capacity of the developed world had been bombed to bits, except the US.
C. The US took advantage of its position in the Bretton Woods agreement to break it and export inflation. The game was up via the Nixon shock.

PCI in general isn't much good either. It doesn't take into effect massive wealth disparities, does not have to take inflation into account, etc.

I do think it's interesting that the effects even by this metrix are pretty mixed outside of the US and GB, and the world was pretty happy to go back to at least a nominal gold standard for a while.

"Real wages" metrics are a much better indicator of the effects of monetary policy, and real wages have been stagnant pretty much since the Nixon shock - even with consistently "massaged" inflation statistics. If we use more legitimate measures of inflation, real wages for ~95% of America is negative.

 

[Einherjar86]

Well it doesn't happen overnight. Also, I don't think you are considering the outsized effects changes at the margins can have.

Well, the comment seemed to be considering the short-term, which was what I was responding to. To be totally honest, I thought I was actually agreeing with you.

Another way to look at this, is that every additional dollar in debt also bumps up the GDP. Due to interest, this is not sustainable, but has been pursued because of a misbegotten faith in an elusive "multiplier", which has not surfaced despite all this QE.

Can you say more about this?

 

[Dak]

Well, the comment seemed to be considering the short-term, which was what I was responding to. To be totally honest, I thought I was actually agreeing with you.

Gotcha. Yeah, I don't think this drop is going to last long enough to have a specific significant downward pressure on alternative energy. However, customers had adapted to some degree to ~$3pgal prices and together with "subprime auto loans" etc, were buying trucks and large SUVs again.

I think this is a terrible move, and even Honda executives have decried the "infinite" loan lengths being made to move cars - loans which are increasingly in default.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-01-20/honda-us-sales-chief-fears-stupid-auto-loans-vicious-cycle

Just wait until gas spikes again and all those people rush to trade in for more fuel efficient vehicles - and have negative equity.

Can you say more about this?

Which part? The multiplier motivation behind QE (not the only one, but a large part), or that adding debt increases GDP figures? Or both?

 

[Einherjar86]

Both, I guess. There didn't seem to be a good place, contextually, to break up that sequence; so I quoted the whole thing.

 

[Dak]

Well the more debt = higher GDP (at least on the government spending end) is pretty simple. The government borrows to spend. Government spending is part of the calculation for gdp. However, there are diminishing returns as interest begins to consume larger chunks of the budget.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_domestic_product

While I think the Austrian criticism is on point in one aspect, I think this quote actually gets more to the point. "Running down assets" works as a nice euphemism for money printing btw:

The UK's Natural Capital Committee highlighted the shortcomings of GDP in its advice to the UK Government in 2013, pointing out that GDP "focusses on flows, not stocks. As a result an economy can run down its assets yet, at the same time, record high levels of GDP growth, until a point is reached where the depleted assets act as a check on future growth". They then went on to say that "it is apparent that the recorded GDP growth rate overstates the sustainable growth rate. Broader measures of wellbeing and wealth are needed for this and there is a danger that short-term decisions based solely on what is currently measured by national accounts may prove to be costly in the long-term".

Addressing the "multiplier":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_economics

First, there is the "Keynesian multiplier", first developed by Richard F. Kahn in 1931. Exogenous increases in spending, such as an increase in government outlays, increases total spending by a multiple of that increase. A government could stimulate a great deal of new production with a modest outlay if:

The people who receive this money then spend most on consumption goods and save the rest.
This extra spending allows businesses to hire more people and pay them, which in turn allows a further increase in consumer spending.
This process continues. At each step, the increase in spending is smaller than in the previous step, so that the multiplier process tapers off and allows the attainment of an equilibrium. This story is modified and moderated if we move beyond a "closed economy" and bring in the role of taxation: The rise in imports and tax payments at each step reduces the amount of induced consumer spending and the size of the multiplier effect.

I guess I can see where something like a multiplier effect could exist in a "real" money scenario. But as far as I can tell, debt-funding "infusions" cancels out the theoretical multiplier either entirely, or at some point after the diminishing returns have been exhausted.

 

[Dak]

http://aeon.co/magazine/culture/welcome-to-the-scarcity-games/

Going to leave this here, don't have time to comment on it at the moment, but I do have thoughts.

Jesper Juul, associate professor in the School of Design at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, calls ‘the paradox of failure’, arguably the central mystery at the heart of computer games as a medium. The paradox has three parts:
1. We generally avoid failure.
2. We experience failure when playing games.
3. We seek out games, although we will experience something that we normally avoid.

This paradox doesn’t apply just to games: many kinds of art, particularly tragic literature and drama, expose us to painful emotions that we seek to avoid in everyday life. ‘The paradox is not simply that games or tragedies contain something unpleasant,’ Juul writes in The Art of Failure (2013), ‘but that we appear to want this unpleasantness to be there, even if we seem to dislike it.’

Indeed, this unpleasantness must be present in games: players want games to be challenging and will not return to one that is too easy. And in games we are not just vicariously experiencing the failures of a fictional protagonist – a Hamlet or an Anna Karenina – but our very own failures. It is, after all, our own skills that come up short. On these grounds, Juul calls video games ‘the art of failure’ – the singular art form that sets us up for failure and allows us to experience and experiment with it.

So it’s not constant failure on the part of the player that sets Banished apart. What is different about it is its persistent atmosphere of scarcity, and the sweat and toil that must continuously go into avoiding shortages – shortages that can never be entirely eliminated.

This is particularly unusual for a god game. While the genre often involves minor shortages of this or that, these are usually present simply in order to give playable variation to an overall environment of plenty. Scarcity, in the classic god game, is merely a temporary condition to be overcome; the game is resource management, not desperately eking out resources, or watching them dwindle without replenishment. And yet Banished is far from being the only new game that seems to make a virtue of such hard necessity. In fact, across a range of new titles, austerity abounds. Why?

 

[Einherjar86]

I read this earlier today too, and this was the passage that I zeroed in on. I taught Jesper Juul last semester in my course on simulation. He wrote a book called Half-Real on the way video games effectively simulate various real-life functions without imitating those functions; instead, such functions are encoded within a specific sequence of buttons (e.g. to power attack, click "B" and push the joystick forward).

The self-evident explanation is that failure in a video game effects no consequences other than failing the game - i.e. dying in a video game is not actually dying, getting shot isn't actually getting shot, etc. However, this doesn't attend to the nuance of "failure." One might say that one hasn't actually failed a mission since one is only playing a game; but then one cannot fail a mission because one isn't actually going on a mission, in which case the possibility of failure disappears entirely. But obviously this isn't the case, since failure does occur at the level of gameplay.

Juul is correct that players want failure to be there; the game constructs an atmosphere that encourages us to make a cognitive leap that allows us to perceive the failure as corresponding to something beyond the game. There's an excitement to be hunted or dying in a video game, although this can eventually lead to frustration. The obscurity lies somewhere in between the diegetic action (or what happens in the game) and the player's perception of the action. I'd go so far as to say that games even invite their players to repeatedly fail since games create a "safe space" within which one can do so without consequence.

This points to another issue; as Žižek says about The Matrix, we have to try and observe the reality within illusion itself. The way we play games tells us less about what we're afraid we might be and more about what we actually are: organisms always directed toward failure, and aware of it. All we can do is "try again, fail again, fail better."

 

[Dak]

Although I do/have played video games, I prefer to see things from the perspective of board games, particularly since there is a certain non-distanced social aspect to the failure that video games can only approach in maybe head to head play on the same screen.

That is, unless I am playing some sort of solitaire variant to a board or card game, my failure is socially relative. Even if it is a cooperative game, and the players lose as a group, the failure is still social even if not relative.

There is a niche of board games that play towards scarcity to a sense where many find them not fun at all, and even the people who like them will admit to frequent frustration, even when you win. In the board game Agricola, you have a sort of analogue of this video game Banished. You have some sort of rude structure for housing and some cleared land to start with, and some people. You only have a handful of turns to balance increasing your people, growing/harvesting food, increasing the size of your structure, and building fences to add animals. Oh, and most of what you grow/add will be eaten to sustain the people. More people give you more productivity, but then they consume more also.

This game and others add on an additional crunch to the scarcity in setting a hard limit to the game. You will *always* run out of time before you can do as much as you want - everyone will. So then it's a matter of who managed to do the best job in the time allotted. But even the winner is sitting there going "man, one more turn and I could have upgraded the house" or "one more turn and I would have been able to get cows" etc.

Despite the common failure and or frustration, Agricola was still a top 5-10 game for years, and I think has only recently fallen out of favor due to the sheer number of newer games out - and maybe the frustration with that finally getting to be too much when there are more similar but less frustrating games out. But it isn't failure that people don't like, but rather frustration at not "being able to finish".

Turning to the scarcity and starkness aspect of games with rising popularity, I think this may speak to either an underlying desire for some sort of "anchoring" in the face of modern perceived abundance and disconnect from the "sources" of things/reducing the complexity of modernity back down to the simple plant-grow-eat days, and/or potentially an attempt to educate ourselves in an entertaining way as it were in preparation for a feared future.

 

[Dak]

This is more at zabu:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-01-22/now-begins-greatest-heist-bernanke-bailed-out-wall-street-september-2008

This is just headshakingly hypocritical. We're talking Al Goreish:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-01-22/billionaire-lectures-serfs-davos-americas-lifestyle-expectations-are-far-too-high

 

[zabu of nΩd]

It makes me sad that you still read so many zerohedge rants, but I probably won't have the energy to deal with you for another few weeks - sorry.

 

[Dak]

David Stockman is a "zerohedge ranter".

I read everything from CNN to Foreign Policy. But FP is behind a paywall and mostly everything else just pushes the same old bullshit. Ya'll go out and buy an extended Chevy Tahoe, the IMF says low gas is here to stay!

After some thought, I don't think you can apply Hanlon's razor to those with decision making power. Even if they are inept/ignorant, they are malicious for grabbing power - particularly if inept.