Convergences

Massachusetts v. EPA: Establishing Religion

At The American: "Supreme Climate Folly," on the Supreme Court decision telling EPA to list CO2 as an air pollutant. Conclusion:

The irony is that the Supreme Court, which jealously guards against any hint of a religious symbol on public property lest a religion be established, has gone a long way toward making the Earth Cult the official religion of the United States.

To a one-time expert in administrative law -- I was Research DIrector of the Administrative Conference of the United States -- the most shocking part of the decision is that it's elementary legal craftsmanship is so shoddy. To get to its desired result, the majority was willing to simply ignore the absolutely elementary canons of statutory interpretation and administrative law.

The decision is also an example of the institutional wreckage wrought by the climate change issue, in which every body that touches it gets de-legitimized, including the EPA, the presidency, the scientific community, the mainstream media, and the Supreme Court itself.

My fantasy is a scene in which the five guilty justices sit at the Supreme Court bench and perform ritual yubitsume to demonstrate their mortification.

Market Society Is a Good Thing! (Keep Repeating)

A blogger on Tigerhawk, whose day job is executive in a medical device company, takes  exception to yesterday's Senate speech by socialist Bernie Sanders which "ripped into insurance companies, drugmakers, medical device manufacturers and others."

The TH reaction:

I don't begrudge a man his beliefs. The demagoguery, on the other hand, is a bit much. If he would take a week next summer when the Senate is not in session and work at a medical device company, he might gain an appreciation for just how difficult it actually is to bring a product out of the lab, through clinical studies, submit it to FDA and get it to market. It is many years and a great deal of money invested in the project, after which the company might get yelled at by elected representatives for "profiteering."

Sorry TH, but I do begrudge a man his beliefs, when they cross the line into utter nonsense. The speech said:

The day will come, although I recognize it is not today, when the Congress will have the courage to stand up to the private insurance companies and the drug companies and the medical equipment suppliers and all of those who profit and make billions of dollars every single year off of human sickness.

I was under the impression that all these actors made money from alleviating human sickness or spreading risk, and that these are good things. Now that I have been educated, I can see many applications for the philosophy, as Congress gets the courage to stand up to:

all those farmers, food processors, and distributors who make billions off of human hunger;

all those construction workers, equipment makers, and financiers who make billions off of human shelter;

all those gas drillers, coal miners, and generating companies who make billions off of human shivering (whoops! that one is already a cliche);

all those computer makers, software designers, game creators, and ISPs who make billions off of human boredom.

The list could be extended indefinitely. 

And even in a socialist paradise, people would have to be paid (and thus profit) to produce medical care, food, shelter, etc., so I simply cannot track the thought processes at work here.

So get a grip, everyone. Market society is a good thing. A decade-and-a-half ago, high tech guru Esther Dyson said:

Having seen a non-market economy, I suddenly understood much better what I liked about a market economy. . . .  Number one, that it works. Number two, that it's moral. Not always, and not everybody in it is moral, but the system is, I think, a moral one. . . . In the sense that people who produce things and work get rewarded, statistically. You don't get rewarded precisely for your effort, but in Russia you got rewarded for being alive, but not very well rewarded. A worker's paradise is a consumer's hell. People were beaten down. Everybody drank too much. Everything was hostile and dysfunctional. It was a good education about why the U.S. was a better place.

Producers of all kinds better understand that it not just pharmaceutical companies and medical device makers that are under assault; the contempt for the efforts of these worthy citizens is sort of all-purpose, ready to be retargeted at any useful enterprise that wanders within range.

Meanwhile, in Copenhagen, Hugo Chavez gets a rousing ovation for attacking capitalism.

UPGRADE: More from Tigerhawk, channeling Col. Jessup from A Few Good Men: 

[A] medical device executive addresses the Senate Democrats (and, if necessary, Senator Snowe):

Senator, we live in a world that has patients, and those patients have to be treated with technology. Whose gonna invent, develop it, and build it? You, Senator Sanders? You, Senator Reid? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for high health care costs, and you curse new medical technology. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That new medical technology, while expensive, saves lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about in front of cameras or in committee hearings, you want me on that production line, you need me on that production line. We use words like innovation, quality, and safety. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent helping injured people. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and walks by virtue of the very medical technology that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a biomedical engineering degree, and get to work inventing better medical devices. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you are entitled to.

FTC & Intel: Disco Isn't Dead

The Federal Trade Commission has filed a complaint against Intel charging it with maintaining a monopoly in computer Central Processing Units (CPUs) and trying to obtain a monopoly in Graphics Processing Units (GPUs).

A couple of points are immediately interesting.

One is that Intel is charged with bullying some of the world's most sophisticated tech companies into acting against their own long-term interest, a proposition that seems unlikely.

Second - the Commission relies primarily on Section 5 of the FTC Act, which gives it power over vague "unfair" acts or practices and "unfair" methods of competition, divorced from the doctrinal limits of the Sherman and Clayton Acts. Antitrust law as a whole is a mess; "unfairness" is a mess on stilts. 

In the 1970s, the Commission was burned when it tried to push too aggressively the authority over unfairness given it by the S&H case in 1972. The agency pulled back to more sensible limits after 1980, but now -- Disco is not dead!  Tom Rosch, who is now a Commissioner, was head of the Bureau of Consumer Protection during the 1970s, and was perhaps the most prominent proponent of the  attaque à outrance, so he may be motivated by the spirit of revanchism.  

Several decades ago, when I was an Assistant Director in the FTC, and during the sobering up process, I was part of a group that considered how to put some meaning and limits into the agency's unfairness powers. I do not recall that we got very far, though there were some papers and reports, copies of which reside in boxes in my basement.  Reading the FTC documents on the Intel matter is true deja vu.

Here is the standard by which Intel will be judged, per the Supreme Court:

Thus, legislative and judicial authorities alike convince us that the Federal Trade Commission does not arrogate excessive power to itself if, in measuring a practice against the elusive, but congressionally mandated standard of fairness, it, like a court of equity, considers public values beyond simply those enshrined in the letter or encompassed in the spirit of the antitrust laws.

Morgan Stanley's Mobile Internet Report

Investment bank Morgan Stanley has released a report on the mobile internet -- actually, three reports. You can pick any or all of:

1) “The Mobile Internet Report Setup”– a 92-slide presentation that excerpts highlights of the key themes from the report.

2) “The Mobile Internet Report Key Themes” – a 659-slide presentation that drills down on thoughts covered in “The Mobile Internet Report.”

3)“The Mobile Internet Report” – a 424 page report which explores 8 major themes in depth and includes the two aforementioned slide presentations + related overview text.

Net neutrality gets little discussion, mentioned (in the 424-pager) only at pp. 397, 399-402, 413, with a casual assumption that "If mobile operators are not allowed to block or degrade bandwidth-intensive applications – so-called 'net neutrality' – innovation and investment in new applications, services, and content are likely to follow." (p. 413)  The carriers' view is presented at p. 402.

It is always interesting to see a Washington issue through the prism of the financial analysts. 

The Special Interest State: "Fair" Means One for You and Five for Me

In October, the Social Security Administration announced that there would be no COLA adjustment in 2010 because there had been no inflation for which to adjust. This seemed reasonable enough, but of course the politicians immediately moved a special payment of $250 to each recipient out of stimulus money. $250 equals 2% of the average annual social security payment.

Now it is time to decide on raises for federal employees, and, despite the fact that there has been no inflation, they are going to get a raise of this same 2%. However, since the average fed worker earns $71K, a 2% raise equals $1420, a rather better deal.  (An average wage in the private sector is $40K.)

The feds also get much better benefits than the private sector, and for many of them work is optional. It is so hard to discharge anyone that it far easier for supervisors simply to ignore the non-productive, especially if the supervisor is a short-term political type. He/she will be gone long before he could complete any personnel action. 

This raise seems tone deaf politically to me. With unemployment at 10%, and many other people having taken hard hits in both income and assets, the fact that federal pay is growing like a weed will not -- and certainly should not -- sit well.

Increasingly, it appears that the government perceives itself as the most important part of society, and this strange pay raise indicates that the government class has lost even the ability to pretend to think otherwise. It also shows the infinite nature of people's capacity to exaggerate their own deserts.

Dominant Information & Climate Change

Many years ago, I worked for the Program Analysis Office of the U.S. Bureau of the Budget (yes, this was before the M was added to OMB; it was just BoB).

One of the things we learned was the extreme difficulty of analyzing government programs. The variables are too many and too uncertain, and one quickly winds up following chains of abstract conjecture that have little relation to reality. So we learned to look for Dominant Information -- facts determinative of outcomes under wide varieties of assumptions -- call it DI.

For climate change, such DI is now available, and it is not good for Al Gore.

CO2 is indeed a Greenhouse Gas (GHG). It absorbs outgoing radiation on particular wave lengths, with a resultant warming effect. On this, there is no scientific dispute. The question is whether this effect matters. Looking at CO2 alone, it does not. The effect would be quite small. To get to the predictions of doom, and thus to justify the destruction of industrial civilization, requires computer models based on the assumption that the small initial effect of CO2 is somehow amplified by positive feedback mechanisms.

Some 20 climate change models exist, and every one of them assumes that such positive feedback exists, and thus that a minor uptick in CO2-induced warming will cause a major upward movement in temperature. Note the "assumes"; there is no empirical evidence of this.  If the assumption is wrong, if there is no positive feedback, then the problem becomes negligible.

(Why does every model make the same positive feedback assumption, you might ask? Probably because any model that assumes anything else would not show a problem, and that is no way to get the government to renew the builder's grant for next year.)

Recent empirical work indicates that this assumption of positive feedback is in fact wrong, that the actual feedback mechanisms are negative. See Lindzen (p.4); Carlin (pp.13-27). This means that the models of disaster not only have no empirical support, but that they are contradicted by the only empirical evidence that has been found.

This, my old BoB bosses would have said, is DI, in a pretty pure form.

As Lindzen says:

In a normal field, these results would pretty much wrap things up, but global warming/climate change has developed so much momentum that it has a life of its own – quite removed from science. One can reasonably expect that opportunism of the weak will lead to efforts to alter the data (though the results presented here have survived several alterations of the data already). Perhaps most important, these results will of necessity ‘offend the sensibilities of the of the educated classes and the entire East and West Coasts,’ and who would want to do that.

The tech world should be interested in this, because it is incredibly energy dependent. Tech as we know it cannot survive an energy drought. 

For more on the implications, see more Alan Carlin comments.

The Special Interest State

Law Prof Tom Smith at the Right Coast (who is consistently one of my favorite commentators) muses on the relevance of Ayn Rand's novels to the current political scene. Sample:

In my view, Rand has something very important going for her, and that is, she seems to be right about a very big thing.  There just is something about the state that causes it to surround and attach itself to productive and creative activity and to parasitize it.  This activity seems to emit, the way a squid emits ink, a kind of gas of moral arguments to obfuscate what it is really doing.  Many sincere people are pulled along thinking they are doing good, but there are also plenty of people, and I've met them in DC, who know or should know that they are not really helping anybody but themselves.  . . .

I don't think it's surprizing that Rand should be making a comeback at a time when the federal government is trying to, for want of a better phrase, take over health care, and that's just for starters.  . . .  What Rand seems to have gotten her head around is the opposition between the people who want to run things from above, the Will to Supervise, and those who oppose them, who believe in freedom and creation.  This is a very fundamental opposition and I don't think political philosophy understands it all that well.  Schumpeter obviously understood capitalism as creative destruction and the importance of entrepreneurs, but I'm not sure he grasped the importance of the anti-entrepreneurs.  But Rand alerts us to the danger to freedom posed by Progressives, which is probably as good a name as any for those who oppose freedom in the interests of their own power with the rationale of making things better for various clients groups that are supposed to have some moral claim or other on all of us. [Emphasis added.]

The people seem to be catching on, which is why both parties have low approval ratings, and quite a few supposed sophisticates are likely to get incinerated if the smoldering populist fire gets hotter, especially those businesses that chose to join anti-entrepreneurs.

Climategate & Judicial Review

At The American's Enterprise Blog, an entry notes the importance of Climategate to judicial review of EPA's forthcoming decision to list CO2 as  harmful pollutant. 

Long ago, in defining the level of inquiry a court should make in the course of determining whether an agency action is "arbitrary and capricious," the D.C. Court of Appeals said that the inquiry cannot be performed without some attention to the factual basis for an action, because an agency decision premised on a particular state of facts is, obviously enough, highly capricious if those facts do not exist.

From this seed has grown the doctrine that an agency must be very forthcoming in revealing any technical and scientific studies, and the basis of any models, that underpin a decision. The American entry contains a recent quotation from the court summing up this Law of Openness.

Given the state of the data and the models revealed by Climategate, EPA is going to have a hard time meeting this standard. 

Open Government, Climate Change & Science

At The American: Opening a Can of Worms: Government and Climate Change Data, which examines the Administration's drive for Open Government in the context of the recent climate change science exposes. 

Questions are also being raised about data underlying climate change work in the U.S. See, e.g. 

Daniel Henninger has a fine column in the WSJ today making the point that the crisis is not just of climate change policy but of Science as an institution. For years, the proponents of drastic and economically painful actions have wrapped themselves in the toga of "science says," with little contradiction by the scientific community as a whole. Indeed, those scientists who have disagreed have been attacked vehemently. 

I don't think most scientists appreciate what has hit them. This isn't only about the credibility of global warming. For years, global warming and its advocates have been the public face of hard science. Most people could not name three other subjects they would associate with the work of serious scientists. This was it. The public was told repeatedly that something called "the scientific community" had affirmed the science beneath this inquiry. A Nobel Prize was bestowed (on a politician).

Global warming enlisted the collective reputation of science. Because "science" said so, all the world was about to undertake a vast reordering of human behavior at almost unimaginable financial cost.

So it appears that important data was lost, analytic methodologies corrupted, and the enterprise turned to political ends -- without a peep from all but a few members of the scientific community.

That community better push hard for the U.S. government to open everything up so it can self-correct.

The WSJ also ran a poll asking readers if they believe in human-caused climate change. The vote was 9-1 against. Granted, WSJ's readers are a conservative lot, but they are also well-informed, and that split is incredible.

 

Strange Days

The tech sector of the economy needs energy like an organism needs air, the cheaper and more reliable the better. So tech's indifference (or endorsement) of various schemes to make energy more expensive and less reliable have never made sense, especially given the growing scientific doubts about the validity of the climate change hypothesis.

To complete the upside-down quality of the debate, for truth one can now go to -- Pravda, and "The American Self-Immolation,Truly a Sight To See":

That brings us to Cap and Trade. Never in the history of humanity has a more idiotic plan been put forward and sold with bigger lies. Energy is the key stone to any and every economy, be it man power, animal power, wood or coal or nuclear. How else does one power industry that makes human life better (unless of course its making the bombs that end that human life, but that's a different topic). Never in history, with the exception of the Japanese self imposed isolation in the 1600s, did a government actively force its people away from economic activity and industry.

Even the Soviets never created such idiocy.