Holy Shit!

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Last week, as reported in the WSJ, he took steps to nationalize the remaining bits of the Venezuelan oil industry that were still in private hands, handing control of them to PDVSA, the state oil company.

The flamboyant leader set the worker’s holiday as a deadline for the companies involved to transfer the facilities to state firm Petroleos de Venezuela SA, or PDVSA. This past week, five of the six companies agreed to hand over the keys: Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp., BP PLC, Total SA, and Statoil ASA. ConocoPhillips was the only holdout, but in the end will have no choice.

And when they said ConocoPhillips would have no choice, they weren’t kidding. From today’s Houston Business Journal:

Venezuelan officials vowed to boot ConocoPhillips Inc. out of their country Thursday if the Houston-based oil giant doesn’t cooperate in nationalizing its multibillion-dollar assets in the Orinoco reserve.

Of the five companies with major oil investments in Venezuela, ConocoPhillips (NYSE: COP) has been the only one to refuse to sign an agreement ceding financial control to Venezuela as part of President Hugo Chávez’s plan to take back his country’s largest economic driver.
{...}
Alongside the other companies, ConocoPhillips participated in an operational transfer Tuesday ordered by Chavez, but it’s the unsigned agreement that has Venezuelan officials steaming.

Reuters reported that Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez told state television that ConocoPhillips has been knocked to the lowest priority in the negotiations, and went on to say that the OPEC nation would not offer cash concessions or assume debt.

Ramirez also said that if talks break down, Venezuela will assume a 100 percent financial stake.

Conoco has already ceded physical control, mind you; they just haven’t signed the agreement Chávez wants indicating that they think it was a great thing to do, and wondering why they hadn’t thought of it earlier, on their own, apparently. The end result could be their expulsion from the country, and the loss of 100% of their assets there. The deal breaker, of course, is that entire “no concessions, no assumption of debt” thing.  As it should be.

The six private companies whose assets have been expropriated have stated their intention to stay in the market, for the time being. Why? Because they don’t want to completely lose their business opportunities and investment in a project that, overall, produces something like 600,000 barrels/day of oil, but perhaps more so because they have no expectation that PDVSA will be able to proceed without their help. From the 4/28/2007 WSJ article in which the nationalizations were originally reported:

PDVSA, saddled by Mr. Chávez’s social spending demands, is already struggling to keep production from falling in other parts of the country. If it bungles the operations at the Orinoco, that could be bad news for the oil market.

A rational observer might ask what this all has to do with insanity, even though the autocracy referenced in the title of this post seems clearly explained.

Chávez, notwithstanding Gott’s complete misreading of his intentions several years ago, isn’t stopping with the oil industry. Having paid off all debts to the World Bank and IMF, he’s pulling out of both organizations, citing his feeling that

...the two organisations are implements of US imperialism, with their lending policies perpetuating poverty across the world.

It’s a symbolic gesture, then, but symbolic of what?  He’s chosen the US as his stalking horse, the imperialist yin to his socialist yang, and he needs to use that imaginary relationship as a prop.  From the other side of the table, the US ignores him assiduously, not commenting very much on anything he does, partly because Venezuela, while providing 15% of US oil supplies, really doesn’t have the capacity to affect the US in any meaningful way.  And partly because I’m sure that the US basically ignoring him must drive him crazy.

And, having already nationalized the telecom and electricity industries and threatened the same in the hospital market, he’s not stopping with the oil industry asset-thievery, or the withdrawal from the IMF and World Bank and a mandated 20% rise in the minimum wage. Next on the list?  The banks and Sidor, a steel company. What’s driving all this, one might wonder?

“Privately owned banks must prioritize low-cost financing for Venezuela’s industry. If they don’t want to do this they can leave, they can give us the banks, we can nationalize them.”

and this, about Sidor:

“If the company Sidor ... does not immediately agree to change this process, they will obligate me to nationalize it,” Chavez said.

“I prefer not to,” Chavez added, as he ordered Mining Minister Jose Khan to immediately head over to Sidor’s headquarters and come back with a recommendation with 24 hours.

“Sidor has to produce and give priority to our national industries ... and at low cost,” he said.

Reminiscent of the old Mafia stereotype, “Nice store you’ve got here - a shame if something were to, uh happen to it”?  Quite a bit. Command economy? Unquestionably. That’s been tried before, of course, and has never led to sustainable success. Its aftermath is poverty, and without regard to Venezuela’s supposedly massive oil reserves, it will do the same in Venezuela.  And it’s already started - see the article “Venezuela — Inflation -> Price Controls -> Shortages” at The Liberty Papers, or this Reuters story pegging inflation through April at nearly 20% per annum. Huge inflation in Venezuela’s not unprecedented, as seen in a 1989 NYTimes piece pegging inflation that year between 65% and 70%. But the country’s exit from the international government lending system seems ill-timed, because they’re going to need help eventually, and perhaps sooner rather than later, with the trajectory they’re on.

The odd thing about this is that Chávez gives every impression of meaning well for his people, and has been rewarded by ultimately credible, if perhaps a bit inflated, majorities in the last several elections (recall and re-election). Meaning well and doing well are of course two completely separate things, and he also gives every impression of taking his country down a road which from he won’t be able to navigate back as it all falls down around his ears.

He’s not implementing one of those fuzzy-soft socialist systems commonly found in Europe - this isn’t socialism, it’s communism. It’s got socialism at its core, but add in the enforced state control and the mandated indoctrination, and the only difference between Venezuela and the USSR is the gulags. Well, the gulags and the oil. And the language. But it will fail, and that will happen without overt involvement from what he presumes to be his greatest enemy, the United States. Chávez’s actual greatest enemies are economic reality and a willful ignorance of history in pursuit of the utopia he seeks.

Utopia is as unattainable as is perpetual motion, and for similar reasons. Notwithstanding the breathless reporting, low-rent activism, and opinionating in the years since Chávez came to power, history won’t be kind to this attempt, either.

(also posted at issuesblog.com)

Too Goddamn Much Perfidy...

You know the Bible 100%!

Wow!  You are awesome!  You are a true Biblical scholar, not just a hearer but a personal reader!  The books, the characters, the events, the verses - you know it all!  You are fantastic! 

Ultimate Bible Quiz
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A summary of the info taken from various websites, linked above:

Gliese 581c orbits a small, red star located 20.5 light years from Earth, in the direction of the constellation Libra.  The star has 1/3 the size, and 1/50 the brightness of our sun.

Due to the dim smallness of Gliese 581, its habitable zone is correspondingly narrower than that of our sun.  The planet, Gliese 581c (“c” for short) is within this zone, orbiting a mere 6 million miles out.  That close orbit gives c a year lasting only 13 days.  The presence of a large, Neptune-sized planet inside c’s orbit could mean that it is unlikely that c is tidally locked to the sun – having one side eternally facing the sun, as our moon does with Earth.

The planet itself is large, five times as massive as Earth and perhaps half again as large, or even bigger if it is made of ice and less dense than here.  This would result in a surface gravity between 1.6 and more twice that of Earth.  The temperature on c would be in the range of 0 to 40 degrees Celsius, or just what we have here.  We have no idea what the composition of the planet is, guessing that it is a rocky world like Earth is not unreasonable.  A big planet like this would have no difficulty holding down an atmosphere, and the presence of water is certainly a possibility as well.

Someone came up with this cheesy graphic, which despite its cheese gives you a good idea how big the sun would be from the surface of the planet.

This pic has some comparative stats for c and Earth:

And of course, Wikipedia has more info as well.

Too Goddamn Much Perfidy...

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The Drake Equation

Before we discuss those two things, a brief discourse on the Drake Equation.  The Drake Equation is not so much an equation as a means of quantifying ignorance, and adding up the probabilities of intelligent life arising in the galaxy.  You start with the number of stars in the galaxy, and multiply that number by quite a few factors.  The result is your own personal estimate, N, of how many ETs are out there.

N is the number of civilizations in the Milky way that have developed systems which produce electromagnetic emissions detectable from Earth.  It is equal, then, to the rate of star formation times the probability that the star will have planets, times the number of habitable planets per star times the number of those planets that will develop life, times the number of those that will develop intelligent life, times the number of those intelligent species that will develop means of communication times (finally) the length of time those signals are detectable.

The first two numbers, we actually know something about.  The rate of star formation is about 1.5 a year, and we are finding planets everywhere we look, so .9 for that.  Number of habitable planets?  For us in the Solar System, one definitely, and two maybes – Europa and Mars.  Let’s say three.  (It doesn’t matter if they’re not all habitable at the same time.) SETI researchers always use “1” for the number of habitable planets that develop life.  How many develop intelligent life?  Taylor suggests 2/3, fair enough.  How many develop detectable civilizations?  Taylor suggests a quarter.  Run the numbers, and the Drake Equation yields an interesting result. 

New, detectable ET civilizations are arising at a rate of one every three years.

Assume we’re off by an order of magnitude.  That’s two civilizations per lifetime.  A hundred thousand over the tenure of man’s existence on Earth.  Half a billion extant in the galaxy right now. 

Put in smaller numbers, and the results are still invariably stunning.  Assume that only one in a hundred habitable planets develops life, and that only one in a hundred of those develops intelligent life.  You still get an intelligent species arriving on the scene every thousand years.  The galaxy is billions of years old.  150,000 extant in the Galaxy, right now. 

Taylor and company also make some interesting additions to the Drake Equation.  They take into account the size of the Milky Way, and calculate the galactic density of ETs.  Using Taylor’s numbers, it is .064 ETs per square light year.  Or, in a 1000 ly bubble centered on earth, there are 50,000 species.  That’s intelligent, technological ETs.  Even using my several orders of magnitude more conservative numbers, there are still 15 techno-ETs in local space.  right now.

They also add two more factors to the Drake Equation: ft, the number of technological civilizations that go a-traveling, and v, the velocity at which those species can move about the galaxy.  Here we get some even more interesting numbers.  If we assume that all technological civilizations eventually travel, and that their velocity is a tenth the speed of light, then there are 200,000 travelers within range of Earth.  Which means that there is a great likelihood of someone, sometime, visiting Earth.  And maybe soon.  Maybe next Tuesday.  (Taylor provides all the math for this, btw.) You’ll have to read the book to see what his numbers suggest, you won’t believe me.  (you can see a good chunk of the book here.)

The sheer number of stars in the galaxy, and the staggeringly long time it’s been around mean that whenever you plug a non-zero number into any element of the Drake Equation, you get lots of ETs, and an uncomfortable number in close proximity.  Using my numbers but the same assumptions as Taylor, the likelihood of one of 60 nearby species paying a call on earth is about one visit every 166 years.  Now there may be other factors that slow down the rate of visitation – varying galactic geography, randomness of placement, or even that there are even less species than we think.  Another primary reason we’ll discuss next.

The chance of first contact is not so remote as we may believe.

The Fermi Paradox

Fermi’s Paradox comes from the question, “Where are they?” that Enrico Fermi asked back in the fifties after some back of the envelope calculations led him to consider that given a constant rate of expansion, it would only take millions of years for an intelligent species to spread throughout the Galaxy.  And the Galaxy is billions of years old – if, at any time, an intelligent species had arisen, one might assume that they would have gotten here and, presumably, prevented us from existing in the first place.

This always seemed a fairly reasonable supposition, but it does fly in the face of the results of plugging even the most conservative numbers into the Drake Equation.  Taylor and company put the eye on this dilemma and come up with a surprising conclusion.  The Fermi Paradox is a crock.

Over the years, the SETI community has come up with several responses to the Fermi Paradox.  We could be the first intelligent species.  Or there could be any number of insurmountable obstacles to interstellar expansion: it’s too difficult, conceptually alien to other intelligences, or it’s not really a good idea and just not done.  Or, it has been done and there is some sort of Prime Directive that restrains ET from screwing with us.  Or ET is screwing with us and we don’t know it.  Or we’ve simply been overlooked.

Now all of these things are reasonable.  Taylor, however, contests the ground under Fermi’s feet.  Fermi, in his calculations, used a simple population growth model.  However, says Taylor, that isn’t really the best model for imagining intelligent species moving out into the big world.  First, no species on Earth ever follows a simple exponential growth curve.  Second, intelligent species will likely have different needs and goals, and thus will either defend niches or compete over them within a greater sentient galactic ecology.

Now this gets meaty. 

“Nature here on Earth offers many examples where the struggle for existence between two similar species fighting over the same niche (food supply, space, etc.) occurs.  Ultimately, one species wins out by causing the complete extinction of the other species.  This phenomenon is known as the “principle of competitive exclusion” and was proposed by Darwin in 1859 in his Origin of Species.

“There are also cases on Earth where the “principle of competitive exclusion” is in direct contradiction with some well-known natural phenomenon.  An example of one of these natural contradictions is called the “plankton paradox” and is focused on the variability of plankton organisms which all seem to occupy the same niche.  All plankton algae use the same niche, which consists of solar energy and minerals dissolved in their native habitat waters.  There are many plankton algae species, many more than the different types of mineral components in the water habitat of the plankton.”

Now this seems very interesting indeed to me.  A direct analogy, which the authors do not explore – is that plankton are in effect in a space like environment where solar energy is the primary source of energy, and minerals of varying concentrations are available more or less for the taking within their environment.  A spaceborne civilization using asteroids, comets, and solar energy to sustain itself and grow could be likened to plankton.  One could imagine multiple intelligent races sharing this niche – with the vastness of space making contact fairly minimal.  Of course, one might imagine that if plankton were a little more sophisticated, they might hate and attack other plankton that they did run into.

And that leads us to the next bit – a simple exponential growth law would not explain a species expanding into the galaxy and then running into competition.  Other population growth laws – in fact, predator-prey models – might explain how well ETs do in the big galactic arena.

“Therefore, the simple Malthusian or exponential population growth as described previously is a drastic oversimplification.  Perhaps Fermi’s Paradox is not as paradoxical as it seems.  One could imagine that the galaxy is much like Earth with multiple species supporting and competing against each other over various niche resources.  Perhaps the society that is a few million years older than us is not preying on us as often as expected because they are defending themselves from predators a few million years older than them.  The possibilities are limitless.  Let’s hope that we are living in a natural environment, as on Earth, where the coexistence of predator, prey, and other competing species is possible.”

A galactic meta-ecology, composed not of competing organisms as on Earth, but rather of competing intelligent species is possibly the answer to the Fermi Paradox.  No species can expand willy-nilly, because of the presence of other species.  Like early algae, the first species may have run wild, but ever more competent species will have, over time, engaged in competition.  This competition will certainly engage the intelligence and resources of an alert species – which means that in the dark corners, new species will always be coming up to try their hand (or tentacle, flipper, pseudopod, or claw) in the big game.

The reason, therefore, that we haven’t been assimilated may be not that we are the first, or only intelligent life in the galaxy, but that other intelligent life is too busy staying alive to visit every star, or deal with every potential threat.  Other species’ lifespans in the meta-ecology of the galaxy might be rather shorter than they would otherwise be, due to competition with other species.  Possible aspects of this galactic meta-ecology are left unexamined in the book, which was frustrating to me, as it certainly bears directly on the main question the book is meant to answer.  Still and all, a lot to think about, and we’ll be getting back to that in a minute.

Or maybe more than a minute.  We will continue in part two.

Too Goddamn Much Perfidy...

More Perfidious Goodness...

The story, having specifically listed the amounts above sought by New Orleans and the state itself, goes on to elaborate:

New Orleans and Louisiana seek broad requests for costs after Katrina but don’t list specific damages.

The great thing about suing for damages, from a defendant’s point of view, is that the damages do have to be enumerated. In addition, any mitigation already provided will have to be taken into account, and surely the federal government’s $110 billion so far approved must have contained some funds which have been applied against such damages.

There’s also the sticky matter of shared responsibility. Particularly in the case of New Orleans, the actions taken and omitted by Mayor Nagin and his government in the aftermath of the hurricane would imply competence at some small fraction of anything the Corps might have exhibited. In any event, it’s going to be a royal mess to sort out.

Luckily, there’s an attorney involved, so don’t you worry; this should all end up right as rain:

Homeowners could seek damages of an additional $200 billion or more, says Jerrold Parker, a lawyer whose firm is trying to organize a class-action suit against the corps.

“Just looking at the place, it’s clear that there’s tremendous damage,” he says. “The fact is, everyone knew the protections were inadequate.”

{...}

The corps must either pay or reject each of the claims. Those whose claims are rejected can take the agency to court. Parker says his firm represents more than 3,000 people who want to sue.

(ellipsis, again, mine) For the record, “Just looking at the place, it’s clear that there’s tremendous damage” doesn’t count as “enumeration of damages”. He also presumes, of course, that his 3,000 clients’ claims and the contingent fees he hopes to glom from them are all in addition to the generous amounts sought by the various government agencies. This doesn’t even pass the ”red face test“, let alone the ”giggle test“.

Left undiscussed in the story is the rationale by which the government and its agencies are liable for failing to provide absolute and flawless protection for flooding in, say, New Orleans.

A city that lies ”5-10 feet below sea level“.  On the same page linked just left, you will see that...

The Army Corps of Engineers verifies that the New Orleans area has 325 miles of Congressionally authorized hurricane protection including: Westbank (66 miles); New Orleans to Venice, La. (87 miles); LaRose, La to Golden Meadow, La. (40 miles); Grande Isle, La. (7 miles); Lake Pontchartrain and vicinity (125 miles).

...but Mother Nature doesn’t pay much attention to the Army Corps, let alone (just like the rest of us) to Congress.

Bad things happen to good cities.  They also happen to New Orleans, which is not now, nor has it been in the past, a “good city”. It’s a truly unique city, and a very interesting one, but neither of those connotes goodness.  While less, or at least differently, so than in the past, due to the effects of the hurricane, it’s still a bit of a cesspool.

It’s cops are notoriously and blatantly corrupt. They’ve had more than their fair share of murderers wearing the uniform, too. And, aside from the murder, that’s just the cops - the elected politicians are no better. William Jefferson, he of the refrigerated cash, is a stellar example of this breed, but hardly the only one.

But it doesn’t stop there. From the Autumn, 2005 issue of the City Journal:

The second job is less obvious. New Orleans’s immutable civic shame, before and after Katrina, is not racism, poverty, or inequality, but murder—a culture of murder so vicious and so pervasive that it terrorizes and numbs the whole city.

In 2003, New Orleans’s murder rate was nearly eight times the national average—and since then, murder has increased. In 2002 and 2003, New Orleans had the highest per capita city homicide rate in the United States, with 59 people killed per year per 100,000 citizens—compared to New York City’s seven. New Orleans is a New York with nearly 5,000 murders a year—an unlivable place. The city’s economy has sputtered over the past generation partly because local and state officials have failed to do the most elementary job of government: to secure the personal safety of citizens.

And then there’s the race card, described in the same article:

In the aftermath of the storm, hand-wringers wondered why they hadn’t noticed before that so many American blacks live in Third World conditions—supposedly only because they’re black. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer voiced white America’s knee-jerk best: “You simply get chills every time you see these poor individuals. . . . So many of these people, almost all of them that we see, are so poor, and they are so black,” he mused on the air.

But Americans didn’t notice this before because it’s not true. Despite the president’s rhetoric, and despite those indelible images from the Superdome and the Convention Center, New Orleans is just as much a black success story as a black failure story.

Yes, New Orleans has a 28 percent poverty rate, and yes, New Orleans is 67 percent black. But nearly two-thirds of New Orleans’s blacks aren’t poor.

Yes, it’s true that nearly 25 percent of New Orleans’s families live on less than $15,000 a year, according to the 2000 Census. But 19 percent of New York’s families live on less than $15,000—and it’s much more expensive for poor people to live in New York, making them poorer.

New Orleans itself, its attorneys, and their clients, even more so than the state of Louisiana, appear to be trying to make their myriad problems those of all their fellow U.S. citizens. Simultaneously claiming poverty and race-based neglect from the federal government along with dismay at how wretched the city is now, ignoring that it’s pretty much always been wretched, they’re going for the gusto.

Or trying to.

It seems unlikely that, once the mess of layered claims, some bogus, some inflated, and some already addressed by insurance or other government single- double- or triple-handouts, is parsed, the extent of damage related to the breach of the levee system might be anywhere near crystal clear. 

Add to that the absurdity of expecting guarantees from anyone, government or not, of protection against the weather, it becomes easier to hazard a guess as to what the outcome of this might be. I expect that the Army Corps, and by extension, all U.S. taxpayers, will be absolved of the imaginary financial responsibility that the plaintiffs in these cases are trying to foist off onto us.

(also posted at issuesblog.com)

Too Goddamn Much Perfidy...

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And don’t forget these important Bruce Schneier Facts:

• Bruce Schneier doesn’t need facts. With one roundhouse-kick he can generate a formal proof for whatever he needs.
• Bruce Schneier only smiles when he finds an unbreakable cryptosystem. Of course, Bruce Schneier never smiles.
• Bruce Schneier doesn’t need to hide data with steganography - data hides from Bruce Schneier
• Bruce Schneier expects the Spanish Inquisition.
• Santa Clause doesn’t know if Bruce Schneier has been good or bad
• There are no prime numbers. Only numbers that Bruce Schneier does not want you to factor.
• If Bruce Schneier wants your plaintext, he’ll just squeeze it out of the ciphertext using his barehands
• Bruce Schneier counts in binary. With his fists.
• Strong cryptography does not exist for Bruce Schneier. There is only weak and less weak cryptography.

Too Goddamn Much Perfidy...