ken

What drives technological progress?

Customers do. They pay the bills in exchange for the gizmos. Government science doesn’t produce technology (except in very limited cases where the technology is a weapon or a showpiece) – it produces basic science, which is of use mainly to other scientists until some private operation sees a way to use it to make new gizmos that people will pay good money for.

So what determines which gizmos get developed and which gizmos get improved, and what improvements are made to them? The potential market for the gizmos and improvements to existing gizmos.

If you want the best chance for some physically possible gizmo, or improvement to an existing gizmo, to come into existence, it should have a large potential market. This enables it to be made at a lower unit cost than if it had a small potential market, and increases the odds that, at a given overall level of technology, it can be made cheaply enough to be sold at a profit.

If you want the best chance for the gizmo to end up being relatively easy to use, then the potential market should include plenty of people that are not highly trained in its use and not willing to invest lots of time and money to get that way. This means that ease-of-use translates directly into size-of-market which brings profit.

The general public has both of these nice properties, so any gizmo that’s useful to the general public will, in the fullness of time and technological development, become relatively cheap and easy to use. As long, of course, as the general public is permitted to use it.

If, for example, a high training requirement is imposed on anyone who would use the product, both of these nice properties go away. The potential market drastically shrinks. Unit costs go way up and stay there. And, any effort to make the gizmo easier for an untrained user to use is money flushed down the toilet, since that untrained user is forbidden to use it and is therefore not even a potential customer, which means that the difficulty of safe use which was used to justify the regulation never goes away. Especially since the high unit cost means that demand for the unit’s complement, training, stays low.

This Catch-22 produces an impressive stall in the gizmo’s improvement and proliferation for generations. If you want to see an example of this mechanism in action, just go in your yard and look up at the sky at all the traffic that isn’t passing overhead. You might see a single private plane, along with a couple of flying cattle-cars. Then go for a drive, and look at all the groundcars bottlenecked on thin strips of concrete.

Or you can go to the hospital. You’ll see a large array of gizmos, drugs, and other useful things that are unbelievably difficult to use safely and outrageously expensive, even if they’ve been in use for decades. The potential market for the whole mess is practically microscopic, and the training requirement is among the highest in the known world. And if your life depends on hiring someone to use this stuff on you, well, you’ll see the true cost of this for yourself. You might even be driven to suicidal despair by the prospect of such expensive, primitive, and uncomfortable means employed to keep you alive, and hire a lawyer to help you write a “living will”.

And you’ll see the true cost of four little words: “for your own good”. These products could have been made easier to use, so that many more people could use them, yielding a much larger potential market, leading to much cheaper products, leading to more demand for both the training that’s actually needed and a demand for a version that requires less training even if it’s more expensive, leading to more development, leading to more ease of use and more advanced functionality, etc., etc. But that would have meant accepting a small amount of natural selection at the outset of this process. Society’s consensus is that this is unconscionable. So several kinds of gizmos are locked in stasis, including one class that could be saving far more lives than could ever have been lost through natural selection if they and people capable of using them and the capital for further developing them were as abundant as they could have been.

But no one could make a convincing case for untrained users being able to hurt themselves with computer, nor for the possibility of evil corporations to hurt innocent little 40 year old children by selling them crappy computers that they don’t know better than to buy. So that gizmo developed in cheapness, ease-of-use, and functionality with lightning speed, and remains one of the brightest spots in our generally depressing technological landscape.

Social conservatives have a good point. They note that the laws and social conventions of a society have far-reaching effects across the society, and ultimately determine whether that society thrives, stagnates, or crumbles.

Unfortunately, they usually spend nearly all of their time talking about sexual rules and customs. While sex is endlessly fascinating, there are other rules of our culture that are at least as important and more urgently in need of repair.

One of the most unfortunate cultural rules we’re burdened with is this one: it is absolutely unconscionable in our compassionate society to allow someone to hurt himself. This rule has enormous costs – the continued existence of Social Security to the present day can be traced to it (you can’t let people neglect to save and then be unable to retire or pay their bills after they can’t work), as well as our problems with the cost and quality of medical care (since people mustn’t be allowed to hurt themselves with medical treatment or devices, a large and expensive infrastructure has been built for the express purpose of preventing people from being treated without permission and close supervision), as well as the continued use of the groundcar, the War on Drugs, grade inflation (if we can’t stop people from earning failing grades, we’ll just have to stop flunking them instead), the shakedown of the cigarette makers and the associated advertising ban, a large and growing body of product liability judgements, and much, much more.

If you rule out the possibility of letting people hurt themselves, your only alternatives are to use force to stop them (and use force against other people who help them or even fail to stop them) or to bail them out (with money provided at taxpayer expense, or unearned credentials at the expense of those who can actually earn them but can no longer prove it). The former causes restrictions to multiply out of control, while the latter guarantees the continuation of self-destructive behavior and causes costs to multiply out of control. While restrictions may prevent one form of avoidable suffering, they also restrict the ability of people to solve their own problems and avoid other forms of avoidable suffering; for instance, when doctors are given 25 year sentences for insufficiently restricting the use of pain medication, people with severe pain are deprived of the best available tool for solving it, and must either live with the pain or commit suicide or become criminals to get rid of it. But according to our rules, these people’s suffering is an acceptable price to pay to prevent other people from enduring entirely self-inflicted suffering.

As long as this rule is ingrained in our culture, effective solutions to our worst problems will be politically infeasible, and politically feasible solutions will be ineffective or destructive. The free market is a wonderful tool for solving problems, but it only works well when people are left to use their own judgement and their own resources to acquire the best available solutions to their own problems, and reap the benefits and bear the costs.

My preferred solution to Peak Oil is to embrace other known, proven high-energy technologies and keep our sputtering drive to the stars from stalling out completely.

Others advocate a different approach.

Apparently for some, an energy shortage is the perfect opportunity to force us to embrace the lifestyle they’ve been preaching all along, which can be summed up as “get those damned serfs back on the manor where they belong!”

You think I exaggerate? Let’s go down his list:

Read more

What difference does it make if Yucca Mountain leaks waste in 1000 years, or even 100 years?

Seriously. Not that it’s at all likely to, but so what if it does?

There are two possible scenarios. Either we’ll continue advancing, and this planet’s entire population (much less the Yucca Mountain area) will be a minority of the human race in 3005, or we’ll stagnate, and then revert to savagery when our fuel runs out, in which case there won’t be very many people living in the desert and the human population as a whole will have much, much bigger problems than a bit of radioactive waste in an environment that most of them won’t be able to go anywhere near without dying of thirst.

Anything that maximizes the odds of the first scenario coming to pass, and minimizes the odds of the second, is worth doing at just about any cost. Including radioactive waste in Yucca Mountain, and even including leaking radioactive waste in Yucca Mountain.

After Peak Oil, nuclear power is our only hope of not reverting to the worst aspects of the 19th Century (you know, the horse-and-buggy level of energy and industry and technology that caused all the misery that the spectacularly successful laissez-faire economic policy keeps getting the blame for). With a sensible (i.e., much lower and stable, particularly with respect to plants already under construction!) level of regulation on the nuclear power industry, the risk associated with possible meltdown is still impressively low; our plants would have to be many, many orders of magnitude more shoddily built to duplicate the Chernobyl plant, and even with that sort of disaster happening occasionally, which it wouldn’t with any nuclear plants we’re ever going to build, we’re still bearing far less overall risk than we would be running out of oil with no large-scale replacement available.

Of course, any high-density terrestrial energy source is only a stopgap to get us to space so we can use the abundant energy found there. If we screw around until every form of stored energy here is used up, then we’ll be stuck forevermore using energy at a lower rate than it arrives from the sun, which as far as I can tell would leave us stranded on this damned rock until the Sun swallows it whole, or until someone manages to produce antimatter or a fusion generator using only the infrastructure that can be built and operated in such a low energy environment, which may amount to the same thing.

There is no such thing as perfectly safe. Every course we take has risks, and the one with the lowest overall risk involves nuclear power, and lots of it.

What about automotive fuel and fertilizer? How are we going to replace that with nuclear power?

Chemical synthesis, powered by nuclear reactors. There are several schemes for getting fuel from corn, organic waste, and so forth, that show little energy profit. Hook up a nuke plant, and even fuel processes that show a loss would, in effect, ship nuclear power to cars and cargo vehicles. Nuclear plants dedicated to this process can run at constant load as cheaply as physically possible, without dealing with continuously variable load. Given cheap enough energy and high enough demand, nuclear powered synthesis of everything we’re getting from oil should do the trick.

Remember when “abortion rights” advocates used the slogan “Keep your laws off my body”?

Makes a lot of sense to me, although I’ve sometimes wondered why these advocates of “reproductive freedom”, while warning us incessantly about the shackles their opponents were waiting to place on us the minute Roe v. Wade got reversed, had absolutely zero interest in the drug laws, the FDA, or indeed any restrictions whatsoever on the use of our own bodies other than removing babies from them.

Well, now, anytime anyone mentions “reproductive rights” or raves about the right’s conspiracy to enslave half the human race, I’ll recall this little gem and laugh, and note that the pro-abortion crowd is perfectly willing and even eager to outlaw any use of our own body that might convince us not to get an abortion.

(You know, when I first heard the charge that the “pro-abortion” lobby wasn’t interested in choice, but rather maximizing the total number of abortions, I thought that was a little overwrought. Who could possibly work toward getting other people to have as many abortions as possible, and what could such a person possibly gain by that? Well, now it’s time to reconsider that, and look for a real answer to that surprisingly non-rhetorical question)

Yes, these guys have pushed the Illinois House of Representatives to pass a bill restricting the use of ultrasound, and requiring doctor’s permission for any and all ultrasound, ostensibly because ultrasound may have unknown effects on the developing fetus.

“Mulligan said that the Federal Drug Administration had warned that muscle and nerve development could be affected by long exposure.”

Of course, why anyone with or without a doctor’s permission would submit to “long exposure” to an ultrasound machine without a damned good reason doesn’t seem to be a question that anyone involved asked. But supporters of the bill, in addition to citing hyperparanoid speculation about what “might” happen if someone were to do such a silly thing, said “an ultrasound should not be done for political reasons to make anyone change their minds about any particular purpose.”

Ah yes, letting people have a look at what they’re considering removing and discarding just isn’t right, and is a misuse of technology designed to, well, let people have a look at that very creature. I know we have a hundred-year tradition of placing most aspects of our own care and treatment off-limits to all but the select few that our masters have decided to allow into the priesthood, but surely looking at your baby with technology that may be harmful if used for several hours a day every day throughout your pregnancy but is definitely far less harmful than all manner of things that pregnant women are still allowed by law to do (not that they shouldn’t be! A ban on such things as eating junk food by pregnant women, especially when the greatest harm from some activities comes before anyone can tell that she’s pregnant, would be problematic to say the least) shouldn’t be one of those privileges.

So to recap – pro-abortion advocates are interested in no aspect whatsoever of reproductive freedom or any other freedom that doesn’t involve terminating a pregnancy, and are solidly in favor of restrictions designed to prevent anyone from showing you anything that might convince you not to terminate your pregnancy. With the hyper-paranoid crowd in alliance, along with those who think that keeping anything health-related restricted to the MD priesthood is a good way to keep us safe (as if an intentional shortage of people permitted to employ a long and growing list of means to save your life somehow improves your safety), this abomination has very favorable prospects of passing.

(Links via The Dawn Patrol)