Sudden Confusion

We eat plants, and the critters that eat plants. The current CO2 levels are absurdly low by long-term standards, and the biosphere has been sequestering CO2 for millions of years, to the detriment of life on the planet.

Good times are ahead!

There aren't

Exactly. They are compromised by CO2 starvation, and can improve other functions, like water usage, if given adequate CO2.

You have no way of knowing where the rain will fall.

The poor of the world want heat, light, food, housing, transportation, education. And they are going to get it. That will involve providing them more energy, and that will make more CO2. Get used to it.

--

John Larkin                  Highland Technology Inc
www.highlandtechnology.com   jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com   

Precision electronic instrumentation
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators
Custom timing and laser controllers
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links
VME  analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators

No, it's just a blind man, painting scenery.

Not.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

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But government doesn't shrink. It grows. So, you're mistaken.

If there were economies of scale, it should shrink as a % of national expense. Instead, it grows.

Every incentive and reward is for government to grow itself and hide the costs, right up until that batch gets canned, and a new team continues.

That's a consequence of allowing them to do things they weren't supposed to.

"Never ask a barber if you need a haircut."

-- Cheers, James Arthur

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Probably not. Society gets more complicated, and government gets to tackle a wider range of problems, which takes more people.

The old bits do get more efficient, but there are always new tasks being added. At the moment computerisation and better communications aren't shrinking the administration as fast as new problems and new possibilities are expanding it. One of the "problems" of persistently increasing productivity is that you can afford to use a progressively larger proportion of your population to provide non-productive services - like terminal health care - which doesn't look good on "efficiency" statistics, no matter how much more civilised it makes your civilisation.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Life has adapted. Raising CO2 levels back to what they were in the Carboniferous isn't going to create any kind of optimum environment for organisms htat have spent a few millions years adapting to the current environment.

Ill-informed optimism.

That's one way of looking at it. In practice it means that providing extra CO2 isn't going to make the average plant grow any faster or make the average farm any more productive.

Neither do you. The climate modellers are somewhat better off. They can't say exactly where the rain is going to end up, but they can be very confident that it's going to move around.

We will have to provide them with more energy. Producing it by burning fossil carbon will raise the global sea level by about six metres over a couple of centuries - exactly when depends on when the Greenland ice sheet decides to slide off into the ocean - which will decrease the demand for extra energy quite a bit, but not in a way that will make anybody happier or more productive.

Providing it from renewable energy sources - like thermal solar power

- wouldn't have this side-effect, and gearing up to manufacture the relevant hardware on a scale that would let it replace fossil-carbon based generators would generate more than enough economies of scale to make renewable energy cheaper than you could get by burning non- renewable fossil carbon (of which there's only a finite amount left to be dug up, so it isn't going to get cheaper).

Get used to it.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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How about the post offices losing billions due to less use? Shouldn't we close down the obsolete offices we don't need? How would that effect pensions of postal workers? How should we handle that situation where less government is needed?

-Bill

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commission.

Corruption is probably not the worst way to run a government. At least someone benefits.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc

jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

Precision electronic instrumentation
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators
Custom laser drivers and controllers
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links
VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro   acquisition and simulation

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Perhaps I should have said "as long as the legislature isn't particularly corrupt."

As long as government inefficiencies getting reported in the newspapers is embarrassing enough to generate a constructive political response you've got enough feedback to keep the system within reasonable bounds.

Only the well-heeled, and their individual advantage is reduced by the inefficiencies of the society they end up operating in. The rich get richer, but not as fast as they would have done under a less corrupt government.

-- Bill Sloman. Nijmegen

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Okay, let's test that. Who's bigger, FedEx or the Post Office? Who has a monopoly--100% market share--in their field, same choices? Who's self-sufficient (making money)? Who's funded their pension plans? Who gets constant bailouts, necessary for their survival?

If you're Barack Obama you just hand out a trillion dollars in "stimulus," and call it "shovel-ready." Later, even educated engineers who should know better don't even notice or care that only

6% actually went to infrastructure.

So, that's an example of someone making a 6% efficient trillion-dollar decision, and not getting canned. Further, he's not even held accountable--have you seen an annual report describing and admitting that colossal flop, apologizing, with a plan to improve performance in the future? Nope.

In fact he built that into the baseline spending. Now he says we can't cut a penny, or babies will starve.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

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Who was able to go for the persisting business of shifting objects around the world as a business - without society-imposed demands to deliver to everybody for the same price?

Private enterprise gets to choose the markets it serves, and it can neglect small markets, and ask realistic prices for difficult deliveries even when they are prohibitively high. National Post Offices have a society-imposed legal obligation to deliver legally important documents to everybody.

This was fine when these obligatory services were an extra tacked onto regular mail traffic, back when every did everything by mail, but they get embarrassingly expensive when the bread-and-butter business has been taken over by e-mail.

As usual. you are comparing apples and pears for deceitful rhetorical effect.

Spending stimulus money on infrastructure isn't as virtuous as you like to think. It is an investment in future prosperity, but too much of the money spent ends up in the hands of the well-off to make it s good destination for stimulus spending, which should be directed at people who can be relied to spend the money as soon as they get their hands on it. During a recession, the well-off tend to build up their savings in the hope that one of their competitors will go bankrupt, giving them to the chance to buy up their competitors assets for ten cents on the dollar.

This is good business sense, but bad for the economy - it's one of the mechanisms makes recessions self-perpetuating.

From the point of view of society as a whole, it's better if the competitors don't go bankrupt but rather get on with extracting maximum value from their assets (which tend to be under-exploited in a recession).

Since this is Kenysiansim 101, which you never mastered and evidently don't want to master, you won't follow the logic.

Happily, most of the rest of world has a better grasp of reality.

It's only a 6% efficient decision when looked at from your blinkered point of view. The primary aim of the stimulus spending was to build up infra-structure, but to keep the economy out of recession, and it was tolerably effective if evaluated against this aim.

Evaluating it as if a side effect was the only point of the spending is either stupid or dishonest - probably both.

Perhaps because nobody else is silly enough to see it as a colossal flop? The stimulus spending reversed the fall in GDP which was the immediate effect of the sub-prime mortgage crisis and has managed to maintain small but persistent economic growth since then.

Until the economy finally starts running close to full capacity. With the Tea Party idiots threatening to balance the budget, no matter how much damage this would do to the economy, no sensible business person is going to invest a lot in growing their business while the Tea Party has any significant political clout.

Stimulus spending is never a permanent part of any country's budget. People with a better understanding of what stimulus spending is designed to achieve would never make this kind of mistake, but James Arthur's political convictions render him blind to this obvious point.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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90% of the mail we get at home is pure junk. It's loose ads and flyers, not even stamped.

If we send anything that's legally important, we use UPS, a for-profit company. We don't trust the USPS with anything time-critical or important.

If the post office were a non-public entity, they would adapt or die. If there were still a demand for the function, other providers would emerge. As-is, the US Postal Service has a legal monopoly on mail delivery, and even with that they keep losing money.

Our USPS mail deliveries often include stuff addressed to someone else, often the right number but the wrong street, or just totally wrong. FedEx and UPS never do that. Post offices usually have long lines and slow service. FedEx and UPS outlets don't.

The French post offices are worse. You get to stand in multiple lines to get anything done.

Endless "stimulus" spending makes recessions self-perpetuating.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc

jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

Precision electronic instrumentation
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators
Custom laser drivers and controllers
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links
VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro   acquisition and simulation

Yes, but classical control theory is all about linear time-invariant systems; trying to adapt that to things like "the economy" can be challenging, I expect.

The common prediction of positive feedback leading to runaway systems is based on people not considering phase, of course; most people when asked about such systems are probably thinking of step inputs rather than sinusoids anyway.

---Joel

Sure, but some basic feeling for system dynamics would sure help. I suspect that most people/journalists/artists/politicians/OWSers could never understand the fundamentals. They sure don't act like they can.

Economists sure don't understand the economy.

Or, more likely, not considering gain.

most people when asked

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc

jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

Precision electronic instrumentation
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators
Custom laser drivers and controllers
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links
VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro   acquisition and simulation

The post office.

Neither (barring delivery to your "official" USPS mail box -- but you can have more than one mail box if you feel like it). FedEx clearly can't compete with the USPS when it comes to delivering letters; they don't even try. Indeed, FedEx is almost always more expensive than the USPS, doesn't always treat packages as well (it's difficult to find hard data here, but that's my experience)... but does have better tracking and customer service.

Note also that FedEx (like UPS) will in many cases have the USPS deliver to far-flung locations where it wouldn't be profitable for them to do so themselves. In other words, to a small extent the USPS actually subsidizes the cost of business for FedEx!

FedEx, by far. By fundamentally there's no reason the USPS necessarily

*should* make money: I mean, I very much want it to, and think that it probably could with better management, but at a fundamental level as a nation we've decided that being able to send a letter inexpensively is worth something even if the price of the postage doesn't cover the actual cost of delivery.

This is not an uncommon practice in any contemporary society -- taxes on gasoline don't fully pay for road construction, public transportation typically costs more to provide than the price of a ticket, etc.

As alluded to above, the ability of FedEx to pick and choose where and what they deliver to gives them a significant advantage relative to the USPS -- if they were required to deliver packages to every single address the USPS does, their prices would increase. This is similar to public vs. private schools -- obviously when a private school can pick and choose the students they want to enroll (vs. public schools that must take all of them in -- special needs included, which are quite expensive), your costs will be less.

I presume FedEx.

USPS, unfortunately.

Regardless of all this, I think my point remains and is correct: Many (probably even most) people working in government are hard workers who strive to perform a quality job and who attempt to be as efficient as possible. Yes, there is plenty of inefficiency in government and I'm all for addressing this, even though it sometimes means laying off workers -- but we need to be very careful to distinguish between true inefficiency (processes that can be changed to yield identical or improved results with a reduction in cost) vs. "perceived" inefficiency where, sure, there's some private sector example that appears to do roughly the same thing less expensively, but upon closer examination the private sector quality or service level isn't as high.

In the later case, people calling for "efficiency improvements" are just mincing words in that what they really want is "policy change" -- which is fine, but let's call a spade a spade, please.

And of course there are examples where privatization of government services turned out to be more expensive with lower quality as well -- private prisons seem to be the most popular example here (e.g.,

).

Obama could have used a few engineering classes. :-)

Sounds like certain corporate CEOs? :-)

But hey, your vote counts just as much as mine or anyone else's come November...

---Joel

I wouldn't know about the actual numbers, but the structure of the argument is fair. So the question is then... how do we raise the quality level of the government workers? Or do you think most any government is pretty much doomed to always have a marked difference in the percentage of quality workers relative to the private sector?

Yes... although I'm thinking the cost of delivering out to the boonies is what's really driving up the cost these days? I.e., granny who's along some rural highway still gets her bills through the mail (she has for 50 years now) -- along with copious amounts of junk mail --, but many of her younger neighbors have signed up for on-line bill payments and get almost no non-junk mail except for a few Xmas cards or whatever... whereas the people who lived in those same homes 20+ years ago were still getting lots of regular mail.

It's a hard decision to decide to close down a postal route and tell everyone on it they'll have to drive into town to pick up their mail from now on. And it's especially hard that people like Granny who are typically least equipped to deal with the change will be the one hardest hit...

---Joel

I wouldn't know about the actual numbers, but the structure of the argument is fair. So the question is then... how do we raise the quality level of the government workers? Or do you think most any government is pretty much doomed to always have a marked difference in the percentage of quality workers relative to the private sector?

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As Ben Franklin warned us about, and things like the Patriot Act remind us, government attracts those who would trade liberty for security. Jokes about "ROAD status," "short-timers," etc. abound.