Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Nato's LiveJournal:

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Tuesday, June 9th, 2009
1:48 pm	Ethical worries Most people reading this probably know that I have every expectation that we will build true human-type artificial intelligences in the next 2-4 decades. Those who have suffered through my longer monologues on the matter know that I worry about what are we to do with the inevitable mistakes we'll make. Evolution produces many, many creatures that live short, horrible lives for every one with favorable mutations, and I expect that humans attempting the same engineering task will do the same. How are we to treat entities - people, arguably - with all manner of developmental disabilities, emotional problems and so on? Will we regard them as experimental failures and terminate them? If we decide they have full rights a biological human would have in the same circumstances (as would be my inclination) then who is responsible for their care throughout their arbitrarily-long lifespans? Another related issue: If rogue (or not so rogue) states start making intellectually-crippled robotic warriors and workers, are we morally obliged to preserve them? Will there be some cutoff point below which we'll consider entities to be machines rather than disabled people? We don't have to have answers to these questions yet, of course, but it will help to start trying to engage our intuitions on the matter beforehand, when there aren't any high-stakes controversies encouraging tendentious conclusions. For example, if the US military is the source of intellectually-crippled robot soldiers, then we Americans might be strongly inclined to ease the sense of cognitive dissonance by setting the bar for humanity just high enough so that we don't have to condemn our own government. Further, if we establish some sort of consensus beforehand, then governments have some guidelines of which to avail themselves when deciding what kinds of projects to pursue. Already democratic governments perform polls on the ethics of robotic weapons systems, so if the people being polled had definite opinions on the matter then we can avoid moral horrors in much of the world. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, June 5th, 2009
8:41 am	Surprise! As Chris Bradford notes, the Texas Department of Transportation recently did a study to determine which roads pay for themselves in gas taxes. Not a single road or highway met that bar; a few paid close to half and most paid far less. The shortfall, of course, comes from discretionary funds. We don't generally pay the real cost of mass transit, but neither do we pay the real cost of driving. My daily rail commute would cost approximately $14.20 unsubsidized. If I drove, however, I would use about 3 gallons of gas, or about $14.50 unsubsidized (i.e. with gas tax rates sufficient to pay for the roadway). Add to this the insurance costs of adding those miles to my car as well as the increased likelihood of personal injury/death, and rail starts to look a lot cheaper. If one adds the savings from not having to have an additional car (let's say $12 for an inexpensive late model car), then rail starts looking like it might be a lot cheaper after all. And that's before we even start talking about network effects or land scarcity. (Comment on this)
Thursday, May 21st, 2009
10:12 am	With apologies to my mother I'm glad to see this video. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 12th, 2009
10:46 am	Identity in an age of cognitive enhancement We have been accustomed to treating humans as a special ontological class - or perhaps the archetype of the class - because of differences in the manners in which we have identities. Two folding chairs don't have the same identities, usually, but neither do we care very much. If one made a chair that constantly cycled its constituent atoms, we'd have no trouble transitioning to treating its identity like that of a river, which we reify in terms of its persistence rather than substance. If two such chairs plashed together and reformed, many observers wouldn't mind saying that there's no fact of the matter as to which chair became which. Humans, however, have always had a very discrete, non-fungible character that has formed the building block of moral reasoning. That we do not exchange properties overmuch and retain our narrative persistence has been critical to grounding our basic concepts of identity and cause attribution. In coming decades, however, we will find more and more ways to augment the minds that evolution gave us, until we of the future will be vastly different than we are today. If I and my brother, for example, both get the same implant that dramatically increases our intuitive grasp of, say, econometric calculations, have we become in some way the same person? What if we had a great number of identical enhancements at the same time, covering everything from dance coordination to art visualization? Unlike the chair, it can be quite unsettling to have to find a place to stand once we have to contemplate persons in a manner more like rivers. But we always have been rivers, and only now is the looming future forcing us to see that fact, like studying geology made us realize rivers are only so permanent and identifiable. Do we fight to hold back those realizations, or do we face the fact that we are all of us changing all the time, subject to the contouring pressures of chemistry or accident or even consistent self-discipline? She who can tread those waters need never worry about finding a place to stand again. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 7th, 2009
3:30 pm	Thank You, Vermont. Now they can't say it hasn't been passed democratically. Now for California to get on to repealing Prop 8. And the feds to repealing DOMA. And DADT, for that matter. (Comment on this)
Friday, March 13th, 2009
1:47 pm	Another note on water usage I recently ran into a post on a rural agricultural newsletter website regarding the need to educate 'city folk' on the need for water conservation. Per capita average indoor water use - including leaks - in the US is about 70 gallons in fairly high-range estimates. Another 100 gallons goes to watering the lawn, washing the car and so on. Per-capita total water usage is about 1,350 gallons/day. The unaccounted for 1,180 gallons per day are industrial, commercial and, by a large majority, agricultural. This map of water usage per capita by county excludes industrial and agricultural usage*. The City and County of San Francisco, which has negligible industry or agriculture but plenty of commercial, uses about 102 gallons/day per capita, which includes indoor, outdoor, commercial, etc. If S.F. cut its water usage by 55 gallons per person (i.e. more than half), it would save approximately 135 acre-feet per day or about 50,000 acre-feet annually. This is no more than a sixth of one percent of California's agricultural use. Meanwhile, if agribusiness found a way to save 1% of the water that it currently uses in irrigation, it would save enough water for another 2.5-3 million City folk. *Note that California's total per-capita water usage is more than 1,000 gallons/day, so if they didn't exclude industrial and agricultural usage, some of those counties would show thousands of gallons per head. (Comment on this)
Thursday, March 12th, 2009
6:21 pm	Hormones and babies In order to evaluate the common claim that women of a certain age experience a hormonally-driven desire for babies, it is necessary to 1) unpack the possible meanings of the assertion and 2) decide what the truth of those meanings would imply. Rarely does the casual observation come with a great deal of explicit detail, the communicator relying instead on common experience to both substantiate and elaborate. In an audience listening to the inevitable stand-up comic’s reference to such conventional wisdom, there are certainly as many different understanding of the joke’s content as there are different people listening, but to two friends of long standing the gap between intent and reception is presumably much smaller. Rather than giving up interpretation for lost, however, one can stereotype certain interpretations by tracing the route from frequently-perceived patterns, through different understandings how hormones and people work, and to the different parsings of the assertion if question. The classic hostile (either to the claim, or to female agency, depending on one’s perspective) reading is that desire for babies is elemental to being a women on account of female biology, full stop. This has the appeal of defining gender in an immutable way that obviates the need to address complexities in womens’ relationship to childrearing, thereby stabilizing culture and simplifying a number of social questions*. Probably no one very thoughtful holds this view in its simple form, but it remains a perhaps unconscious contributor to other interpretations. A more common source of the observation is that as women age, they become more likely to want children, and that this desire becomes more pressing and visceral at times. This is fairly uncontroversial as a statistical claim**, but the attribution of these trends to hormones is more dubious. It does help explain why there is so frequently a feeling of personal compulsion attendant on the desire*** for babies, and it’s well known that hormone levels change with age, leading to a hormone-as-scapegoat interpretation. At the same time, the attribution is probably somewhat of a screen: by attributing the desire to something external to the self – hormones – one is saved from saying that women of a certain age just are some certain way. At the end of the day, why exactly women tend to start desiring babies at a certain age isn’t the important part of the observation; the interesting part is the remarkable consistency with which age changes womens’ manner of viewing children. Call this the hormone-as-rubric version. At the opposite end of the interpretive spectrum from the hostile version is when a speaker is obliquely referring to individual womens’ increasing awareness of the time limit for child bearing and even child rearing. This need not be explicit; even fairly young women must include the fact of hormonal time limits when they begin to make long term plans. In this version, the hormones have very little influence except through gender-neutral practical considerations. What if hormones really were a primary cause, as in the hormone-as-scapegoat hypothesis? Well, hormones are just chemicals; rather blunt instruments that can’t drive a mind into a certain state. Could they excite a part of the brain associated with nurturing impulses? Likely, they could, but the object of those impulses would necessarily be a product of the individual woman’s mind. It seems difficult to imagine a hormone driving its host to nurture a baby but not, say, a pet or a potted plant. To create greater specificity, another hormone might create a coincident escalation in libido, connecting a greater desire for intercourse with a desire to nurture. This seems plausible, but once again it’s easy to see how the individual woman could respond to both urges without human infants coming into play. The missing connective tissue, of course, is culture. It is culturally “normal” for womens’ desire for babies to increase with age, increasing the likelihood that any given woman will interpret the several changes in her drives as being a growing desire for babies. This blends into hormone-as-rubric explanations in which the individual’s life situation becomes more amenable to having children as she ages. Women in their thirties are generally more established financially and socially, have the confidence of greater knowledge of the world, and know that their cutoff date for bearing children is approaching. Further, their friends and family of the same age are having their own children, creating a sense of community in childrearing. And, of course, there may be explicit social pressure to become a mother. Obviously, individuals all have different experiences with this time. Some mothers are no better off financially, or cannot expect any child rearing aid, or don’t have friends who are having children, and so on. However, most women experience do experience many, and few could fail to note the regularity with which women of a certain age evolve a desire to have kids. Hormones could certainly figure in this intersection of causes, amplifying the effect just a bit more, and then when people refer to hormones making women want to have babies, they’re speaking a variety of truth. The hormones are neither necessary nor sufficient, but they at least have a statistical part to play and so are a useful stand-in for the whole ball of wax. Which leaves us with the totally practical version, in which the referent is entirely the practical effects of hormonal changes that end reproductive years. This would apply to men as well, of course, if they’re committed to a single woman. To the extent that this is true, society does at least give a nod to men of a certain age evolving a desire for children. However, it is also culturally normal for men to be rather footloose, and anyway men-with-hormones is not a standard trope. Men are, according to the standard construal of the gender, unaffected by any hormonal drive except lust, which would only drive the standard man to seek a younger wife when the current one approaches menopause. In fact, any instinct toward nurturing is so strongly associated with femininity that a man living to standard gender norms would likely regard making concrete a desire for childrearing somewhat emasculating. It’s most often framed as a concession or a mishap at the hands of a (scheming) woman. One could hypothesize that the apparent increase in female desire for children is a product of practical changes in a woman’s apprehension of her ability to undertake motherhood combined with the suppressive effects of male gender roles on the concomitant increase in men’s ability to undertake fatherhood. One need not avail oneself of any appeal to hormones or even female gender roles**** at all. That doesn’t mean there’s no intuitive reason to suspect a role for hormones , just that there isn’t a prima-facie case for the conventional wisdom that hormones make women want babies, except in the most prosaic, uninteresting sense. Given that a primary cause of the old saw’s popularity is subscription to - and approval of - unhelpful prescriptions about gender roles, it would be best to retire it. Women who want and are ready to have children will keep becoming mothers without being told it’s normal for their age and gender, and some of the men worried about their masculinity might even come to covet the natural respect due a good parent. *One does not, after all, waste a lot of time considering if being held to the ground all the time is constricting because gravity just is, whether we want it or not. If biology renders certain facts of life similarly irresistible then we can stop worrying about whether they’re good or not. **Though it would be interesting to see what the actual numbers are ***”Desire” here meaning only a contemplation of the attractions of something, not an incipient intent to acquire it. ****Properly regarded, the female/male gender role binary isn’t separable, so I’m engaging in a bit of rhetorical excess here. That said, the binary only need exist in the minds of men to cause the cited effects, so it’s true enough. (Comment on this)
Monday, March 9th, 2009
2:31 pm	Water prices Because of the deepening drought crisis, California has tripled water prices to farmers who need to buy water from their "water bank", bringing the cost of an acre-foot up to $500. Meanwhile, our wasteful residential users leave their faucets running because it only costs them a third of a cent per gallon*. Of course, once translate the volume, it would seem that the farmers still pay less than a sixth of a penny per gallon. That is to say, after tripling what they were paying for water, those farmers who didn't get their water for free are still paying less than half what residential users pay. Of course, that's still driving them to try to save water in all sorts of ways that had never been worth their while before. Hmm, I wonder why there's a water crisis? *Actually, single-family homes get a little bit better rates, being just over .3 cents/gal for the first ~4500 gallons. Multi-family homes pay about 25% extra. Just one of the many ways the government penalizes high-density living. (Comment on this)
Friday, February 27th, 2009
8:09 am	Update Kat actually did the impossible and found a job in less than two weeks; she's completing her first week today. Fortunately for those of us who wish her to get back into school faster rather than slower, I don't think she's thoroughly enamored of the work so far, but to have found such a job at all in this economy is quite a feat. In other news, the 1.6% Q4 2008 contraction is pretty impressive - enough for Bush 43 to take away from his father the crown for worst economy in a presidential term for the last 50 years. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, February 26th, 2009
9:20 am	Thank goodness Also: While farmers face a leaner year, President Barack Obama proposed a $500,000 a year cap on farm subsidies and a phase-out of the direct payments to the largest U.S. farmers in his new budget released on Thursday. Obama also asked for elimination of cotton storage payments, reduction in the federal subsidy for crop insurance and reform of a cost-sharing program that builds overseas markets for U.S. goods. Obama's proposals reflect pledges made on the campaign trail to target farm programs toward small- and medium-size growers. At that time, he promoted a $250,000 payment cap to farmers; there is no effective limit on payments now. "The president supports the implementation of a $500,000 commodity program limit, which will help ensure that payments are made only to those that most need them," said a White House budget document. The cap would save $126 million through fiscal 2019. It's about time. Farm subsidies have done awful damage to just about everything: public health, the environment, third world farmers, the budget... This cap means that only smaller operations (i.e. "family farms") will receive the subsidies, and the tremendous overproduction of certain politically-powerful crops will be curtailed. If it gets passed, anyway (1 Comment |Comment on this)
8:11 am	Economic notes From an article by Charles Mahtesian and Patrick O'Connor of Politico: "Cantor warned his fellow Republicans on Tuesday not to “allow a $500,000 earmark or pet project to be used as a bribe for your vote on this reckless $500 billion omnibus bill,” according to the notes of someone who attended the closed-door meeting at the Capitol Hill Club." First off, the whole point of the current stimulus spending is to spend money on projects that are ready to go. That means that Congress is essentially soliciting for earmarks. A poor way to allocate funding to infrastructure, research and etc? Yes. Do we have other options at the federal level? Not really. There are other options, of course. The federal government could make block grants to states and municipalities, and there's some of that going on. Also, they could just cut taxes, and there's some of that going on. The former does not create money for national-level projects and the latter does not really help with the credit crunch because it doesn't necessarily generate spending*. People ask me what I think of the stimulus, and I tell them that it's a crap sandwich. My interlocutors, who are usually anti-stimulus conservatives, laugh and think I'm agreeing with them, but I'm not. I'm acknowledging that we're wasting a ton of money. It's just the truth. It's also inevitable, under the circumstances. But waste isn't really the concern here. It's almost immaterial what's in the stimulus as long as it designates a large chunk of spending to take place in the near (1-2 years) future. That is what we need to get out of the liquidity trap into which we've spiraled. Is it going to work? I don't know, but it's much better than doing nothing. Why am I so sure it's better than doing nothing? Because I think the organic real-estate price level is still incredibly high, and if we don't do anything, they will continue to drop, probably past their equilibrium level. That would deal another horrible blow to the financial markets, as great as everything to date. The main reason post-war housing prices have been higher has been because of the stability and robustness of the financial markets that made it relatively easy to borrow money for long-term investments like houses. If the worldwide financial system is crushed, the equilibrium value of houses would likely decline to below the post-war average. I have a hard time imagining the fallout from this, but essentially, this would erase a tremendous percentage of book wealth from the economy, and create strong deflationary pressures. Deflation discourages investment and consumption... It's a very bad cycle. So, we need to stop the implosion of credit from ruining the economy in a way not seen since, well, the common comparison is the Great Depression but the Panic of 1873** (leading to more than five years of steady contraction) is perhaps more apropos. In fact, I suspect it would be worse, because the economy of the late 19th century was surely less credit dependent than that of the early 21st century. Production as well as prices would be sure to fall, and we'd all become poorer simply because people wouldn't be working and there'd be less stuff to go around. Now, if we do spend this big crap sandwich and arrest the fall in asset prices, then that doesn't mean the economy will suddenly be awesome again. There's still the underlying recession to face, and wasteful spending is likely to prolong that, since unproductive projects don't pay for themselves. But there's a big difference between 1)the economy limping along with poor growth for a few years and 2)a continued contraction lasting into, say, 2013. I'm willing to accept an increased chance of 1) to reduce the chance of 2). Which is really the whole point of the stimulus. *Expectations of low demand is a critical element of the credit crunch, and if lenders anticipate consumers saving rather than spending their tax reduction, their expectations of low demand don't change. Now, if consumers do decide to spend that tax reduction, then lenders will change their mind, eventually. However, this looks unlikely because all those consumers will be too busy losing their jobs and houses to spend their tax reductions and change banks' minds. Put another way, banks have to anticipate increased demand and begin lending again for there to be a real chance of that increased demand eventuating. **Note that in 1873, governments did not have large hands in the economy, yet the "Long Depression" of poor economic performance lasted more than two decades until 1896. That doesn't mean that government help automatically helps, but neither is government interference in the free market necessary for extended economic disaster. Current Mood: pedantic (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, February 20th, 2009
10:20 am	The irony, it burns! A large SUV in the visitors parking lot sports a big white sticker with the legend: "These colors don't run. Never have, never will." I thought this was rather unusual, until I looked closer and saw that the white space had once held a flag, but it was almost entirely washed out. (Comment on this)
Thursday, February 5th, 2009
3:33 pm	By popular demand Kat did indeed sign out the Army for good on Inauguration Day, and now she's "enjoying" her job search in these salubrious economic times. Of course, because her unit forced her to go on vacation then process out of the Army, she missed spring quarter registration. At least they haven't stolen very much of her money. And she's out for good. So, life is pretty good. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, January 9th, 2009
12:54 pm	Happy side note She's almost certain to be out of the army 20 Jan. What a day - the end of two simultaneous, interrelated nightmares. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
12:46 pm	A reminder 1 being best case and 3 being the worst case scenario: 1) The product does everything for me correctly 2) The product makes me do it myself 3) The product does everything for me incorrectly If you can't do #1, just do #2. Trust me that it's better than trying to do #1 and achieving #3. I will not, as a consumer/customer/citizen/whatever, give you points for trying. I will just want to smack you for interfering. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, November 22nd, 2008
9:51 pm	Bush: the first name in economic awesomeness! So I encountered a trained economist extolling Bush's virtues, talking about how the economy grew at a good pace for most of his administration, so I pulled a dataset off the Bureau of Economic Analysis' website to look at this claim, ultimately resulting in the following graph of all presidential terms going back to Kennedy: Well, I'm convinced. I drew lines over from the worst non-Bush term (Nixon/Ford) for reference. If it weren't for his dad, G W Bush would have both of the worst terms in the last half century, with Bush's better term (so far - the awful Q IV 2008 is likely to draw it down significantly) being just about a third of Carter's economic growth per person, and just under 60% as much total growth. My interlocutor references productivity growth, but of course this makes a positive out of reduced workforce participation. Basically, Bush has been a disastrous president in essentially every metric. As if anyone reading this didn't already know that. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 4th, 2008
10:43 pm	Prop 8 looks like it will pass. My heart breaks for all the hearts that would be broken. I'm ashamed for the shameless, who would deny the love of our fellow humans. But neither have I lost hope. Even if our collective compassion and capacity for empathy fails tonight, if our humanity is yet too weak a reed, we will keep struggling and growing until we right ourselves. But we'll still owe an apology to all those whose closest relationships must endure official elision in the meantime, with all the uncertainty, doubt and alienation it inflicts. We will become better, because that's what being human is about. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, October 17th, 2008
5:32 pm	Palin's real America As comes as no surprise to me, It would appear that Sarah Palin thinks rural America is better and more real than suburban or (heaven forbid) urban America. Key quote, as reported by Juliet Eilperin of WaPo: "We believe that the best of America is not all in Washington, D.C. We believe" -- here the audience interrupted Palin with applause and cheers -- "We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation." I'm sure anyone who knows me knows just how much I agree with Mrs. Palin on this issue. I'm sure if someone took all the banal evils of the world and rolled them up into a ball, it might wear Tina Fey glasses and join the McCain presidential ticket. (Comment on this)
Thursday, October 16th, 2008
3:01 pm	Red State is hilarious So Brad Smith of Red State is connected enough to reality to recognize that the show's pretty much over and McCain lost. Red State denizens, however, don't share the sanity that afflicts Smith. A fairly typical response thread below:(pardon the terrible formatting, but I'm in a hurry) Thanks Brad, you have completed my withdrawal c17wife October 16th, 2008 at 8:52 a.m. CDT (link) from Redstate. This obviously isn't the place for me if they are going to allow defeatists on the front page 19 days before the election. As for me, I'm commiting to continuing my support of McCain Palin. I'm changing my tactics and altering how I spend my money, but I'm not about to give up. Lastly, I have commited to spending an hour in prayer each day for this election. I suggest others do the same. We had divine intervention in 2000, we can have it again. Duty is ours, outcomes belong to God.~Mike Pence 1. Absolutely, c17. This is the most disgusting janis October 16th, 2008 at 8:59 a.m. CDT (link) defeatist thing I could have imagined here today. People like Brad are in some other zone than the rest of us, a zone that thinks, apparently, that it is just too juvenile to keep working, hoping, and praying that our side will win. And so they consign us to defeat in their effort to look kewl with their other high-brow friends. Hillbuzz.com does a better job of rallying the troops than do diaries like this. 2. Prayer, amazing thing that prayer stuff. wennejunk October 16th, 2008 at 9:01 a.m. CDT (link) Firstly - that is a wonderful idea. Thanks for saying it and suggesting it. You know what's funny? So many see prayer as an act of desperation and for most, perhaps, it is an infrequent desperate act. I see it as the single most important act that believers can do to impact events and have been meaning to put up a commentary on prayer and the election. Thanks The greatest single cause of Atheism today is Christians who profess Jesus with their lips & then go and deny him by their lifestyle. That's what an unbelieving world simply finds..unbelievable -Brennan Manning 1. Lovely remark, wennejunk. I, too, have sent prayers janis October 16th, 2008 at 9:07 a.m. CDT (link) up daily that God would raise up the right leader to protect and guard America from destruction both from without and especially from within. Didn't think I would also have to ask Him for help in guarding us from our own supposed "supporters." Will add them to the list. 3. Also very well said ocleverone October 16th, 2008 at 9:05 a.m. CDT (link) I fully intend to follow your plan to the letter. Never give up and never surrender. 4. Don't pwest October 16th, 2008 at 9:05 a.m. CDT (link) you dare let Brad run you off! The rest of us need you here; STAY With friends like these, McCain never needed any enemies. There was essentially no one defending Smith, though a few agreed with his position. It's times like these that you see most clearly what kinds of people dominate certain movements. (Comment on this)
Thursday, October 9th, 2008
8:35 pm	Classic One really only needs the title of the AP article: "Palin pre-empts state report, clears self in probe." The first line does make it even better, though: ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Trying to head off a potentially embarrassing state ethics report on GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, campaign officials released their own report Thursday that clears her of any wrongdoing. Oh, well, that's the last word, then! Current Mood: delighted (Comment on this)