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

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Sunday, December 20th, 2009
10:54 pm	Pagans at the Air Force Academy I haven't seen anyone mention it, but the Air Force Academy and/or its critics has just circulated a report that that the religious freedom situation at the Academy is much improved. IIRC, one cause of the improvement was the replacement of its commander, who was promoting Christian evangelism in the Academy's activities. One interesting element that was mentioned explicitly by the new commander was support of a neo-pagan group, though without using the P-word (probably deliberately): 'The academy superintendent, Lieutenant General Michael Gould, says the improvements are the result of a top-down campaign to foster respect and a commitment to accommodate all cadets, even nonbelievers and an “Earth-centered’’ religious group that needed a place for a stone circle so it could worship outdoors.' (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, November 22nd, 2009
10:31 pm	The artistic outdoors (This happened about three weeks ago.) darlene_ford and I hiked North Pack Monadnock. ("pack" is a Native term for "little".) True to its name, it wasn't an aggressive hike, but it was fun to get out into the woods. Even though the peak is below the treeline, the view from the peak is impressive. The weather wasn't the finest, not the bright and clear fall days you can get, but rather overcast with a hint of haze in the air. The deciduous trees were still in good color, giving the area an air of fading beauty. (I've been reading The Tale of Genji. It was written in a very estheticized culture, and the author worked hard to create an atmosphere with the same autumnal beauty.) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, October 19th, 2009
8:43 pm	The End of the Era of Capital -- What Our Kids Will Be Doing for a Living The economy of every culture has a limiting resource, a resource which is the fundamental source of prosperity. And cultures which obtain and utilize that resource effectively are the ones that will prosper and displace other cultures. Foraging and agrarian economies are based on Land: Production is proportional to the amount of land used. Thus, in these cultures, wars are about obtaining land, and displacing either the rulers or the inhabitants thereof. Once agriculture was invented, it inevitably displaced foraging cultures, not because agriculture provided a better living for people (it didn't) but because it used Land more efficiently, it supported more people (war-fighting capacity) on each unit of land. Industrial economies are based on Capital. Fundamentally, Capital is "capital goods", the machinery that produces things. But since industrial economies have a banking system, capital goods are interchangeable with investable money. Competition between industrial societies is done by amassing investable money, often by reducing the standard of living of their people or other societies. Industrial economies come in two major varieties, market economies and centrally-planned economies, but the two resemble each other in many ways, to the point that the Soviet Union was sometimes considered the world's largest corporation. More to the point, in all varieties, the central economic problem in an industrial economy is generating and allocating Capital. The last few decades have seen the end of the industrial economy, as witnessed by the destruction of General Motors and the Soviet Union. It is also becoming clear that in the current economy, there is no shortage of Capital: Banks and other possessors of Capital have become increasingly profligate in lending money to people who who have no productive use for it, and little ability to pay it back. Consider the names of the various banking crises of the last 20 years: "third-world debt crisis", "subprime mortgage crisis". That last one is particularly informative: Lending more money than a house is worth to a buyer who can't possibly pay it back. And even in the middle of the current crisis, the US government (hardly the most fiscally responsible organization) has been able to borrow trillions of dollars at near-zero interest rates. The end of Capital as the limiting resource eliminates many former political principles, which revolve around acquiring and allocating Land and Capital. So if Capital is no longer the limiting resource, what is? It seems that it is now Human Capital, or productive skills. An increasing fraction of the money that passes through a business' hands is paid to people for their labor. Less pleasantly, the amount of money a person is paid varies enormously depending on their skills and how those skills help an employer. The political consequences are that the country will prosper or not depending on its stock of Human Capital. And Human Capital is always contained in the head of a particular person, so the only way to generate it is through education (either formal or on-the-job). Unfortunately, although the United States has plenty of Land and Capital, the education of its people is only middling for the developed countries. This contrasts with the situation from 1940 onward for several decades, where the education level in the US was significantly ahead of the rest of the world. Not surprisingly, the US was significantly ahead of the rest of the world economically as well. How do we increase the production of Human Capital in the United States? An obvious course of action is the current work being done on high-school education, to increase the fraction of children who graduate, and to make sure that those who graduate have learned a high-school curriculum. But succeeding at that mission would only bring us up to the level of our best competitors. We need a further improvement in the educational level of our children. Currently it is fashionable to consider college as the natural successor to high-school, but it's not clear that college really improves the usable skill level of most students. We already have too many low-grade liberal arts degrees, and giving our more of them would probably not be productive. A better line of attack is probably to expand the vocational programs offered by the community colleges. From the reports I've seen, community colleges have gotten quite good at producing two-year curricula to train people to work in various industries. If we send the best 25% of students to get college degrees, we could send another 50% of students to intensive two-year vocational programs. That would put the educational level of the US ahead of all our competitors. In order to make this work, we will have to think of this vocational training as public education, to be paid for by the state. Improving education would probably reduce income inequality as well. The economists are starting to determine that income inequality is determined by two countervailing factors: Increasing the level of technology in the economy increases inequality by raising the pay for job skills, but increasing the level of education in the population decreases inequality by spreading job skills more widely. (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, October 12th, 2009
11:34 pm	The Death of Senator Kennedy A few days after the death of Senator Kennedy, I was savoring part of his legacy. I was flying AirTran, a discount airline, walking through its section of Atlanta airport. The ambiance was approximately that of a well-appointed bus station. The fruit of airline deregulation has been described as "those who used to fly coach now fly first class, those who used to take the bus now fly coach". And the prices bear that out: Correcting for inflation, a coach flight between where I live (Boston) and where my parents live (Des Moines) has dropped by about 2/3 in the last 30 years, and I could now (but do not) fly first class for what I used to pay for coach. The masses now partake of what used to be the province of the "jet set". The late Senator Kennedy was one of the leading powers of airline deregulation, but despite its immense benefits to ordinary schmucks, deregulation is only briefly mentioned in his obituaries, and seems to have never been mentioned on his Wikipedia page. I take this as a sign that his staffers have not wanted it to appear there. The trouble, I suspect, is that airline deregulation is a microcosm of the changes in the economy since 1970. From about 1920 till 1975, the economy was organized into industries, each of which was dominated by a small number of very large companies, which were all organized by the same unions. The companies carefully avoided competing with each other very much, and government policy favored this structure and defended the companies from external threats (such as immigrants, imports, and upstart competitors). (See chapter 3 of Robert Reich's The Next American Frontier for more information about the extraordinary stability of this era.) An extreme example was the airline industry, whose prices were set by the government to be high enough to ensure that even the least efficient airline would always be profitable. The result was that if you could get a job in one of the major industries, you were set for life: You worked for a large, stable company with a near-monopoly and a strong, reliable cash flow. The limitation of this system was that these jobs were generally reserved for native-born white males (though similar females could share the benefits via marriage), and even then, most of the beneficiaries were in the industrial zone of the Northeast. In the airline industry, every job group was unionized and well-paid, although the flight attendant category was reserved for women. The disadvantage of this system was that as a customer, you paid a lot more than you really needed to for almost everything. This wasn't such a problem if you worked for one of these companies, but it impoverished everybody else. Nobody flew unless they were rich or it was paid for by a large employer. That order is now gone with the wind: The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 allowed in workers who would compete with the native-born. Imported Japanese manufactured goods required American companies to produce quality merchandise at competitive prices. The deregulation acts of the 1980s set loose price competition in a number of industries. The financial innovations of the 1980s enabled stockholders to demand that companies place their interests above those of employees. The benefits have been more or less what should have been expected: People in groups that were firmly excluded can now get paid much closer to what their skills are worth because companies can't afford to overlook any source of talent. And people -- especially people outside of the privileged mainstream -- can now buy much more and much better products and services than they could before. People who used to take the bus now fly routinely. (And almost every component of the Internet through which you read this screed is a due to the new order, as the old order would have suppressed such a "disruptive innovation".) But the costs have also been what should have been expected: Employment in the major industries is no longer as stable or well-paid because both employees and companies are no longer protected from competitors, either in the US or overseas. We have become a nation of free agents, or rather, small businessmen selling our skills on a short-term basis to the best employer of the moment. And the employers see no more stability than the employees: Almost every company is just a couple of bad years from bankruptcy, and one no longer expects one's employer to survive long enough to fulfill the promise of a pension. The airline industry has gone through waves of bankruptcy, consolidation, and attack by low-cost upstarts. The companies lost more money in the decade after deregulation than they had made in their entire previous history. And neither the unions nor the companies are able to hold up their incomes against competition. The change has been the hardest on less-educated white males. A few decades ago, they were part of the demographic group that had privileged access to "good" jobs, especially in mass-production manufacturing. Now, their sons have to compete with many others (many of them in much poorer countries) in a strictly competitive labor market that places the most value on productivity, usually based on education-based skills. (Not that their lot is so very bad; the average blue-collar worker today can afford a better car, more living space, better television, a better computer(!), and (in terms of results) better medical care than his father or grandfather. But his place on the American income totem pole is much lower.) Many people of liberal sentiments are ambivalent about these changes. This transition has moved the economy from enhancing people's roles as producers to enhancing people's roles as consumers. These changes have made the lives of ordinary people better in many ways, as can be seen by comparison with the standard of living in European countries that have tried to suppress change. But these changes have undermined the goal that people's "station in life" should be made secure against economic change and all other vicissitudes, and in many ways liberal economic attitudes focus much more on security than prosperity. Which, I think, is why Senator Kennedy did not want to take credit for what he had wrought. (20 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009
8:39 pm	"Don't ask, don't tell" is on the way out http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2009/09/30/pentagon_airs_criticism_of_dont_ask/ Pentagon airs criticism of ‘don’t ask’ Journal article backs gay troops; May signal brass open to debate By Bryan Bender WASHINGTON - An article in the Pentagon’s top scholarly journal calls in unambiguous terms for lifting the ban on gays serving openly in the armed forces, arguing that the military is essentially forcing thousands of gay men and women to lead dishonest lives in an organization that emphasizes integrity as a fundamental tenet. IMHO, this is the first step in an elaborately-planned political theater to bring the end of "Don't ask, don't tell." The Pentagon doesn't want to go through this twice, and an article stating bluntly that the policy should be repealed appeared in the highest-prestige journal published by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This means that there is already a plan in place -- including approval by Obama and careful counting of votes in Congress. The US army did this sort of thing once before, when it (actually) desegregated in 1951. My father said that it went very smoothly, evidence of careful planning. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, September 29th, 2009
9:38 pm	Roman Polanski arrested: Vindictive prosecution or justice finally served? LOS ANGELES - Thirty-one years after he fled the United States when he was convicted of having unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl, film director Roman Polanski was taken into custody in Zurich yesterday and could be extradited to Los Angeles. [Text added Oct 4, after I learned more about the case. I also corrected the spelling of the title line, which irritated me.] Well, yuck, the matter is far more noxious than I thought. All I had seen in the papers was "on the lam from a statutory rape charge", which since it seems to get you 3 years max, it seemed a bit excessive to go after Polanski 30 years later. But a quick perusal of the Wikipedia page tells a lot more, attempted drugging and forcible rape. Or I suppose I should add, a fairly plausible accusation of it. No wonder the California authorities are staying interested in snatching him back after all these years. In the circumstances, the year or so he is likely to get is a pretty good deal. I also get an extremely unpleasant feeling that the incident wasn't the first time he did something like that. It doesn't have the feel of an action of someone finally gave in to evil urges when the pressure got to be Just Too Much. He also doesn't seem to have had much trouble getting the girl into his clutches, which suggests he wouldn't have had much trouble getting others into his clutches. This has the smell of something repetitive. (Does anyone remember the pedophile scene from the Godfather book? Was it ever revealed who that was an attack on?) As for the people who are so vigorously defending Polanski, I'm curious what their motivations are. One petition says that it is a "matter of morals" -- perhaps sex offenses, even forcible rape, are taken less seriously in France. (I've some information that the Italians do so.) Or is it that there should be a "lese artiste", that an Artist should be given a Get Out of Jail Free card. Another possibility is that all the defenders are in the film industry, or are its parasites, and want to CYA. ( We report. You flame. ) (16 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 7th, 2009
9:53 pm	This is the one we were waiting for http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2009/04/vermont_lawmake.html "Vermont lawmakers legalize gay marriage" Not by court action, but by a legislative vote -- and a 2/3 majority. There will be lots of screaming and shouting, but the legislators have polled their constituents and there is clearly solid public support. There's no turning the clock back now. (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 22nd, 2005
12:15 am	Paris is burning. Quelle surprise! Its social conscience is something that the French elite has long taken pride in. The term "Anglo-Saxon" is now almost synonymous in the parlance of that elite with "savage liberalism," a state of affairs which is alleged to prevail on the other side of the Channel, and to an even greater and more terrible extent on the other side of the Atlantic, in which an economic free-for-all leads to mass discontent, grotesque economic inequalities, lawlessness and endemic instability punctuated by violent civil disturbances. Fortunately, the French social model avoids this miserable chaos, at least in theory (which, as every Cartesian intellectual will tell you, is what really counts). -- Theodore Dalrymple ( The elephant is a long, cylindrical object... ) (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, September 5th, 2005
11:42 am	Do the doctors have a word for this? Once every few years, I get a sudden shivering attack, like my body's thermostat was turned up 2 or 3 degrees F. Usually at night, I wake up freezing. And then a few hours later, or a few days sometimes, the fever will go, often as fast as it came, and I'll be sweating like a pig. I suspect that my body decided that it had been invaded by that disease called "some virus", and rolled out the heavy artillery. Anybody else get this, or is it just me? (7 Comments |Comment on this)
11:30 am	House of mirrors Did you ever notice how it's becoming harder and harder to distinguish real news from satire? There's the Boondocks discussed here. There is, of course, performance art. Then I ran into this, which points to this, which leads to this. And Sunday's Doonesbury suggests that Jane Fonda is doing a bizarre cross-country anti-war bus trip, in a bus fueled with vegetable oil of some sort. (As far as I can figure out, that last one is real, though there are remarkably few news mentions of it, and only in the conservative press. Perhaps the liberals have realized how embarassing it is.) Now, can you tell me -- without prior knowledge -- that you can tell news from satire? (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, September 3rd, 2005
3:44 pm	Anarchism and terrorism Thinking further on http://www.livejournal.com/users/achinhibitor/49892.html, the longer article pointed out that while the theorists of anarchist violence were from many nations, the people who did the violence were disproportionately Italian. I suspect this was because Italy, though it is in Europe, trailed much of the rest of Europe in economic development, at least partly due to the late development of an Italian nation-state government. This seems to resemble the current Arab state of affairs -- the Arab world is trailing many other parts of the world, and they have discovered that the oil wealth is not jump-starting the creation of a modern economy. (Possibly even worse, as the total sale price of oil exports has been more or less flat over the last few decades, but the Arab populations have been growing quickly. So the GDP per capita growth in many of these countries may be negative. That's a formula for severe discontent.) And I think the Economist is wrong that terrorism "won't fade". Yes, there will be repeated outbursts of terrorism, but terrorism has not been a steady thing over the last century, and there is no reason that high levels of it are intrinsic to modern society. (BTW, there is another type of anarchism, which has only slight resemblance to the type we are talking about here. See, e.g., http://www.anarchism.net/) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
3:14 pm	And they're still 3 1/2 games ahead of the Hated Yankees! Bwahahahahahaha! (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, August 28th, 2005
8:39 pm	The Economist, as usual, nails it exactly The good parts from the Economist's leader for an article exploring the parallels between the late-1800's [bomb-throwing] anarchist movement and current jihadists. Today's jihadists, like yesterday's anarchists, will fade. Terrorism won't ON THE face of it, anarchists, who believe in no government, have little in common with jihadists. [...] So what lessons can be drawn from a bunch of zealots who flourished over 100 years ago and whose ideology now counts for practically nothing? [...] The first is that repression, expulsion and restrictions on free speech do little to end terrorism. All were tried, often with great vigour, at the end of the 19th century when the anarchist violence that terrified much of Europe and parts of America was at its zenith. [...] Such people can be caught, sometimes before they have done anything terrible. That argues for excellent intelligence and police work. Perhaps their numbers can be reduced by ameliorating the grievances that lend them the justification for their attacks. That argues for political action. And certainly the public needs reassurance. That argues for honest explanation--that terrorism does not threaten any western government, that retribution, like police injustices committed in nervous haste, is likely to provoke more violence, that new restrictions are unlikely to bring new safety. Honest explanation, and simple history, also suggest that this wave of terror will pass, just as the anarchist wave passed, but that terrorism will not--not as long as strange men are captivated by strange ideas. The jihadists will go. Others will take the stage. ( The entire leader ) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, August 27th, 2005
10:30 am	"Number of unsold homes surges" Another entry for bikergeek's [user name corrected] catalog of housing market horrors. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, August 24th, 2005
7:20 am	Hints from Heloise Last weekend, I realized that my bathtub alert level was rising from Orange ("bachelor") to Red ("toxic waste dump"), so I scrubbed it out. Amazing that bathtub slime gets slimier as you srub it. But that dark grey crud on the bottom doesn't want to come off without tremendous elbow grease. Does anybody out there know a simple chemical solution? (11 Comments |Comment on this)
7:18 am	( A protest we should all get behind! ) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, August 22nd, 2005
8:11 pm	Bwahahahaha! (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, August 21st, 2005
7:25 pm	Real or fake? No, not breasts, but descriptions of performance art. One of these really happened, one is from the Onion. Can you guess which is which? ( Real or fake? ) The exhibition "Hang Zhuan: Seeds of Hamburg," showcases a powerful performance by Chinese artist Hang Zhuan, known for his ritualistic body art. In 2002, the artist coated himself in honey and birdseed, and entered a cage where doves pecked the seeds away. "Seeds of Hamburg" is a series of twelve photograph documenting the event. ( Real or fake? ) The nine-hour performance piece "Flag Fuck (w/Beef) #17B," in which Ivan Hubiak danced on stage wearing an American flag as a diaper while draping himself with raw meat. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
6:47 pm	Geekery I just wrote a little C program to see how many MFLOPS my antique desktop PC could do, and it came out to around 150 MFLOPS. I remember when the Cray-1 was slower than that, and you couldn't export them because someone could use them to design atom bombs. Somehow I don't think that the number of MFLOPS needed to design an atom bomb has increased. (Comment on this)
Sunday, August 14th, 2005
11:20 pm	The slow recovery I was reading The Economist, which is usually quite shrewd, and it notes that a lot of the current economic trends are heavily influenced by the entry of China into the world markets. In particular, China's entry (along with India, Brazil, and Russia, to a lesser extent) has added about one billion workers to the global market, but very little capital (investable funds). The result is that the labor-to-capital ratio has shifted to more labor-heavy, and as would be expected from elementary economics, labor prices are suffering and capital prices are benefiting. So it's not surprising that the recovery of wages after the last recession has been unusually slow, and the recovery of profits has been unusually fast. (Comment on this)