I first came across Thomas PM Barnett via his TED talk last year. He’s an engaging speaker (PowerPoint performance artist might be more accurate), and he has interesting ideas about how globalization works, and what the US military’s role has been, is, and should be. I’ve followed his blog on and off ever since. I’m fascinated with him because a huge amount of what he says rings true, and unusually frank, but a little bit of it seems jarring. Last night I watched his full-length brief and took notes, to try and figure out what exactly it was that I disagree with.
Category: journal
Machine Readable Financial Reporting
The SEC will soon require machine readable reporting of all financial data, using an XML based markup language known as XRBL (the eXtensible Business Reporting Language). Holy crap. Yes, this could have been done a decade ago in theory, but apparently it takes some serious mess to get anyone thinking at the SEC. Probably bad for Morningstar‘s financial-data-silo business model, but good for just about everyone else. Will spur a lot of financial transparency, as machines can be easily utilized to find patterns and irregularities in corporate and mutual fund reports, in near real time. I don’t think most people give this kind of development the credit it deserves. Long term, machine readability of all law and legal requirements will change the face of regulation, democracy, and ultimately, law itself.
What is the Fed doing?
Trying to keep track of all the shenanigans innovation going on at the Federal Reserve is difficult. Econbrowser and Interfluidity among others have been trying to help… but every time I read about how our money system works, I find my head spinning in incredulity. And that’s just when I’m reading about how it’s “supposed” to work. It’s been getting more confusing lately.
Ideas for Change in America
Change.org is a kind of public idea tourament. There are a bunch of different subsections: agricultural policy, government reform, energy, etc. Readers vote and comment on the ideas, and the top few ideas in each category advance to the next round. Larry Lessig has submitted Citizen Funding of Congressional Elections whereby only public money and small contributions can be applied toward election campaigns.
Not sure how well this kind of system can work. Many of the highest rated ideas don’t sound very productive…
California Backstory Barcodes
California officials launch ‘Green Chemistry’ initiative – Los Angeles Times.
The idea is certainly good, but there’s a lot of bookkeeping that will need be done within the myriad supply chains that create the products, that isn’t getting done now. Does California have enough clout to force it to be done? Seems unlikely (even if we are the Nth largest economy on earth, where N is small). Really we need to partner with the EU, and other like-minded bodies to come up with a single standard we can all adhere to. This is the kind of thing the WTO should (for instance) be about.
No More Roads to Nowhere
It currently appears likely that the “stimulus” package to be passed as soon as congress reconvenes will dump tens or hundreds of billions of dollars into the budgets of the state transportation departments, because they’re the ones with “shovels in the ground” ready projects capable of mindlessly absorbing that much cash. The problem is, those projects are all about cars, and the feds have virtually no oversight of where the money goes once it’s in the state DoT coffers. This is a recipe for waste, not forward looking investment. It is the worst of spending, for spending’s sake – which is what the “stimulus” is all about, let’s be clear – but if we’re going to spend for the sake of spending, why oh why can’t we also do it in a thoughtful way? Because when there’s a crisis, it’s the ideas that are laying around, most accessible, that get implemented. The plans that are on the books, ready to go. The wishlists of those in power.
Rearranging vs. Reinventing the Global Economy
The US road to recovery runs through Beijing says Asia Times Online, and Thomas Barnett emphatically agrees. Everyone is talking about how to reorganize the global economy, but mostly the discussion is about how to most efficiently export our recently collapsed model of growth to the developing world. Better this time around for sure, we say, but not fundamentally different in any way. The Chinese need (and want, it turns out) more domestic consumption and consumer debt.
Continue reading Rearranging vs. Reinventing the Global Economy
Our Electricity
After being asked rhetorically a couple of times if I knew now much I paid for my electricity, and whether I knew how much power my fridge was using ($0.13/kWh, and I don’t know) I bought a “Kill-A-Watt” power meter to see where our $18/month in electricity usage was going… just out of curiosity. It turns out that watching a movie costs abot $0.08 in electricity. The Cold Box (beer) uses about $3/month worth of power. The fridge itself, usually the largest power hog in a household, is close to half our usage at $8/month. Making a batch of coffee in the french press, using the electric kettle is about a penny. The other big electricity users are the stove and oven, and the washer and dryer (though we hardly use the dryer). They can’t be measured with this thing because they use 220V outlets, which are generally hidden away and inaccessible anyway.
After those miniscule numbers, I was amazed to discover that a day’s worth of computation (24 hours, including some research related number crunching by my laptop, my desk light, my backup disk, and my 30″ cinema display) came in at $0.50! So, at least for me personally, at roughly $15/month my computer is by far my largest expenditure of electricity. Interesting!
I’d love to build (and live in) a condo that tracked the water and power usage of each unit, and within each unit each outlet/faucet/etc, in real time, posted to the web, and displayed in the communal entryway. Visibility goes a long way to influencing behavior.
The High Cost of Parking at Caltech
Like Pasadena as a whole, Caltech’s population is growing, but we cannot expand geographically. This means both Caltech and Pasadena must increase density by building vertically or packing our buildings more closely together. Pasadena, much to the dismay of some long time residents who fondly remember the days when Orange Grove Blvd. actually passed through orange groves, now has six story live-work “transit oriented developments” sprouting up around the major business districts, within walking distance of the light rail. Similarly, Caltech has a new Chemistry building appearing between BBB and Noyes, a new Astronomy building where there used to be a surface parking lot next to Keith Spalding, and a new CS building rising up between Facilities and Avery House. Those new buildings will mean more people, and probably more cars, coming to Caltech every day. They have to go somewhere, and our neighbors have made it clear to the City that parking them on the street is unacceptable. Those new commuters will largely be parking in the recently completed subterranean garage under the athletic field. However, this kind of solution to our parking demand has a cost, and I think we need to understand just how large it is in order to have a reasonable discussion about whether it’s the best solution going forward.
What is Human
The utter primacy of H. sapiens in all the theistic religions is one of the things that bothers me most deeply about them. I believe we are unique and unusually important amongst life on earth (as were the first oxygenic photosynthesizers, and the first eukaryotic organisms, and the first macroscopic multicellular life forms), but I don’t think that the earth without humans would be without value. Diminished, certainly, but still a precious place. By the same token, I think that we diminish the value of the earth by causing the extinction of other species.
I think this may actually be somewhat related to the abortion question, and the difficulty of coming to any kind of common ground on it. I don’t consider non-viable fetuses human, but to me that doesn’t mean they are without value, or undeserving of any kind of legal protections. I just don’t think those protections should be as extensive as our protections of humans. People are resistant to the idea that “humanity” is a continuum. Some might even say repelled by it, but it seems inescapable to me. I also believe that severely mentally disabled people are “less” human, and that a brain-dead human is, for all intents and purposes, a cell culture with no more moral value than a side of beef. This might seem like something we had better not talk about, since it starts off all kinds of slippery slopes to horrible places, but I think eventually, we will have no choice, because some time in the next few decades, or at most the next few centuries, we will be confronted with positive deviations as well as negative.
What will it mean to be human, when there exist super-humans? When some portion of the population is genetically or cybernetically enhanced, will they have super-human rights, privledges, and responsibilities, or will they simply be more powerful through extra-legal means?
A person, even a politician, can stand up for human rights while condoning abortion if they do not consider the fetus human. The core of the abortion argument is what does it mean to be human? Is it a discrete, or continuous classification? Unless we can come to some consensus on these questions, the abortion issue, and many others, will remain vexing indefinitely.