The 0.01% Oppose Renewable Energy Because You Can't Suck Rents From It

It doesn't get much more naked than this (AP):

A political group founded by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch wants Georgia's utility regulators to reject a plan requiring Southern Co. to buy more solar energy, but an Associated Press review ahead of a vote on the issue finds that it has used misleading figures to build its case.

Misleading figures?  Quel surprise.  Read the piece, the story is particularly egregious in terms of bald and bold lying to the public, claiming a 1% increase in solar energy purchased would increase residential electricity prices 40%. The Kochs are just an extreme case of the general composition of the mega-elite wealthy: Pure rentiers.  They get wealthy by extracting rent via monopolistic power over scarce resources needed by everyone else.  That's really what rents are in simplified economese.  I have stuff you need, and I will extort far more than the normal market value for my goods.  You will pay because you have to.  Every disaster story usually finds some villian charging $100 for bottled water or $5K for generators.  That's pretty much what the Kochs, and the billionaire class do to get and stay wealthy at a larger scale.

In particular the Kochs soak rents from fossil fuel resources.  Hence, they must oppose any move to renewable energy.  Why?  Because they care what price Georgia consumers pay for electricity. Haha, no.  Because the Sun can't be monopolized.  Wind and geothermal can somewhat be, in that particular places are better than others for wind and geothermal power, but there's far too many such places and the power of rentiers would be seriously diluted trying to dominate all the windy places of the planet.  The other problem is that renewables scale down quite well. A home can have solar panels, a wind turbine or a geothermal sump.  It can't have a coal or natural gas powered turbine.

This also explains why the rich are much more amenable to nuclear power than renewables.  Uranium is scarce and no one short of Monty Burns level wealth can own a nuclear power plant.  If they have to ditch fossil fuels, they'd much rather go nuclear than renewable.

Do drug dealers like it when their clients go to rehab?  No. That's why the Koch's and the rest of the billionaire class are either opposed or non-committal on renewable energy and the climate change crisis generally.  They got rich from the current system.  A renewable energy system will democracize energy in historically unprecedented ways. No matter what they won't be as rich as they are today.  We're going to have to do this over their active resistance and should expect little to no help from them, no matter how bad climate change gets in terms of extreme weather disasters.  The Inequality Crisis and the Climate Crisis are inextricably linked and both must be overcome simultaneously.

Rape Apologia Disguised as Men's Rights

This is outside my usual turf, but the more I think about this, the more angry it makes me:

The “Don’t be that girl” poster reads: “Just because you regret a one night stand, doesn’t mean it wasn’t consensual. Lying about sexual assault = a crime.”

Late Tuesday night a group called Mens Rights Edmonton, a local anti-feminism group, claimed responsibility for the posters.

 Several points occur to me:

• Falsely accusing a man of rape is of course a serious crime.  Every woman knows this, just like everyone in general knows accusing anyone of a crime maliciously is a crime.  What is the point of an "information" campaign to tell everyone something that's blatantly obvious?  It isn't to inform women of this valuable information they don't know, instead it is to paint a false equivalance between the horrifically common problem of rape, and the exceedly rare problem of false accusations of rape. That's just a shitty thing to try and do.
• No sane woman anywhere thinks that "I regret my one night stand therefore it is rape."  That's simply ludicrous.  Yes, maybe some "crazy" women think this way, but "crazy" people don't respond well to sincere information campaigns and we don't waste policy time trying to think of every permutation of thought a non-rational person might conceive of, absent evidence of a real problem occuring regularly.
• I'm sure somewhere, sometime there have been instances of false accusations of rape.  I'm also sure the motive for such accusations are much more weighty and substantive than "I regret a one-night stand."  The plot of To Kill A Mockingbird considers one plausible instance, that of a white woman who took interest in a black man, a thing of great shame in her racist community so at her father's urging, made it an accusation of rape to hide her (and his) shame.  The point being no one does such a thing without a lot more on the line than "I wish I hadn't slept with that guy."  Luckily we have made significant strides in liberalizing attitudes toward casual sex, so the shame-incentive for women to even consider a false accusation of rape are generally negligible.  There's plenty of informal sexism calling women "sluts" and so forth for having sex with men, but we don't stone them or brand scarlet letters on them.
• On the other hand, "one-night stands" are a quite likely place for rapes to happen.  Women pass out drunk, or get drugged, or change their mind at his apartment and he ignores their withdrawn consent and continues anyway.  Idiots like this too-typical "men's rights" group often treat sex like some entitlement, she accepted free drinks, got in the cab with you, therefore she's given irrevocable consent to whatever happens next, as she "knew what was up when she came home with me" (or some such rationalization).  I'd say women who accuse casual sex partners of rape are far more likely to be telling the truth than making it up out of guilt for breaking Victorian ethics.  The evidence around rape is that it is hugely underreported to Police far more than any sign that it is over-reported.  The women who report rape are quite likely legitimately very angry and aggrieved...because they've been raped!  They have no other incentive to get some guy they only met once thrown in jail for years.
• "Men's rights" groups are universally in my experience, a sickening lot of blatant misogynists.  I think there is room for some male activism on the subject of divorce and custody arrangements but they just can't help themselves in revealing their blatant misogyny and by trivializing rape.

I didn't used to call myself a "feminist."  I have definite ideological differences with mainstream feminists and feminism as I know of it,  but those tend to be around their views on nature versus nurture and how best to achieve meaningful equality as a practical and policy matter.

But disgusting displays like this are enough for me to throw in with the feminists.  If I have to pick sides in this, I'm glad to be a feminist and not whatever these men call themselves.  Rape is a real, pervasive problem that has major physical and psychological harmful effects on nearly all its victims.  False rape is a very rare thing that would even more rarely actually result in a conviction, given the obvious problems of proving such a charge to the satisfaction of a jury in a his-word-against-hers scenario.  Yes, if a man actually went to prison for such, he of course is a victim worthy of serious attention and sympathy, but in no way does this problem remotely compare to that of rape.

Stop Applying Marketing-Think To Government, It's Disgusting.

CBC, with some analysis on Harper's expected cabinet shuffle provides this quote from former Mulroney Chief of Staff David McLaughlin:

"There's a staleness about some of the ministry and some of the cabinet and how they're communicating with Canadians; the look and feel of it. So there's a chance to really show some new faces and say: 'There's still life in this government yet. We're looking ahead, look at this new blood.'"

I hate this kind of soulless marketing when applied to government.  This is how we, a free people govern ourselves in a system that took centuries of struggle to get to the point where the common person has some real say. It's insipid that we allow these consultants to talk about our government like they're marketing a product without hissing at them and throwing rotting fruit (metaphorically of course, throwing actual fruit is illegal).

The epitome of this was Bush's Chief of Staff explaining that the push for the Iraq war began in September 2002 instead of August because "you don't launch a new product in August."

I know politicians, especially the shadier ones like the current government will still do this sort of crass commercialization of politics but it should be a shameful thing done in secret, not something their allies brag openly about. 

Yeah, the government is allowing big oil to destroy the biosphere, wasting billions on a lemon of a fighter jet and makes the Lannisters look like ethical paragons whenever they're caught doing anything improper, but here, we stuck a "New and Improved!" sticker on the label and came up with a new jingle!  All's well!




We should be talking about a policy shuffle first, and if doing that requires some personnel to move around, fine.  That we still fixate on the personalities first is a sign how far the rot goes.

A Skeptical Look at Turks And Caicos Joining Canada

I'm sorry, I can't get enthusiastic about Canada having its own tropical paradise without wondering what the financial angle is.  The biggest alarm bells for me come from Turks and Caicos being notoriously corrupt (to the point that the UK Government took away home rule in 2009), with a higher banking secrecy rating (90) than Switzerland (78) and the Caymans (77) and "absolutely no taxes."  Well, ok, it seems they have a tax on hotel rooms and a "stamp duty" (which if I read correctly is mostly to cover transfers of money from the island back to the UK).

This increasingly looks like a scheme to set up a tax haven within Canada.  Forget racing to the bottom against Alberta, Canadian provinces would be plummeting toward the bottom well behind a micro-province with next to no taxes, a massive influx of the wealthy setting up residences there (for the attractive climate of course), and absurd levels of banking and financial secrecy.

A couple findings from that last:

• Turks and Caicos does not adequately curtail banking secrecy
• Turks and Caicos Islands does not maintain company ownership details in official records
• Turks and Caicos Islands does not require that ownership of companies is put on public record
• Turks and Caicos Islands does allow harmful legal vehicles (nb. reference to trusts)

Any of the people pushing this idea could have massive investiments there, and there would be no way to know. 

Yes, it's true if the place became a province (or territory) it would be subject to Canadian income tax.  It would also receive equalization, and though the population is small, given that their GDP per capita is about one-quarter that of Canada, it wouldn't be a trivial amount, in order to bring the island government's ability to offer comparable services up to Canadian standards. The key thing about Canada's financial laws is that they are mostly provincial, a power the provinces have zealously guarded, in particular over this government's proposal to set up a federal regulator for stock markets. 

Sure, ordinary Canadians would benefit from having the ability to fly domestic to a place that would run on the Canadian dollar for vacations. That's not really much of a benefit for the one or maybe two (and often less than one) annual trips to warm locales that the typical Canadian takes. We'd be subsidizing a libertarian paradise for our 1% to park their wealth, run their businesses (via teleconference) and shirk their duties to the commons.  It would likely become even less of a benefit as I expect prices to visit (and especially to buy real estate) on the islands would soar and there wouldn't really be much employment in the jobs most of us have. 

Conservative politicians have been pushing this idea since Borden in 1917 (and one NDPer in '74) and it's not hard to see why it appeals to them.   The UK seems willing to give up the islands, probably because the "Tax Haven Capital of the World" is already in London and they have plenty of other warm-weather overseas territories for their 1% to winter in (also notorious tax havens).  Canada's conservatives and business elite are just jealous of this arrangement, but that's no reason we should be beguiled by the mirage of beautiful beaches and warm ocean waters. 

The Resource Trap Explained

Canada is suffering from the Resource Trap, or Resource Curse. We don't have it acutely yet, to the point of sterotypical corrupt petro-states, but we are suffering numerous symptoms from the list:

• Dutch Disease. Yes, Mulcair was right. Oil sales have driven up our dollar and made our manufacturing and service exports less competitive.  This isn't difficult to understand and while you can try to argue the overall effects of oil are net positive (e.g. Alberta buys equipment from Ontario), there's no denying the basic case that manufacturing (concentrated in Ontario and Quebec) have been hurt.
• Revenue Volatility. Alberta has gone through serious cases of this several times. Now with Newfoundland and Saskatchewan increasingly reliant on oil sales for their provincial budgets, I think we can call this a national problem.
• Lack of diversification.  Not only are we failing to diversify, we are concentrating ever more of our labour market on extractive industry.  Every article extolling all the people moving out West for work is really about this.  Some of them come from industries that are already in long term decline or outright dead, like various depleted fisheries, but many also come from the manufacturing sector (see Dutch Disease above).
• Corruption. This one hasn't shown up yet in terms of oil execs doling out sacks of cash to buy off government officials, but if you look you can see our political system restructuring itself to serve the needs of the country's most powerful economic class.  The Federal Government gutted environmental laws to ensure various oil projects would get rapid approvals, and withdrew from Kyoto.  Climate change is just ignored.  Even the Alberta PCs with decades of uninterrupted majority rule were gunshy about raising royalties more than nominally despite credible analysis from all sectors not owned by big oil that this could and should be done.  They were right to fear it, Big Oil nearly put the Wildrose into power in protest over it.  Approval of the Keystone XL pipeline federally was basically a non-issue.  Not even Mulcair is openly opposing it and Trudeau has spoken out in favour.  Oil pipelines spill all the time and the companies are handled with kid gloves, huge ponds of horrific toxic sludge accrue in the north, and there's no plan to do anything about them.  Eventually, a flood will take them into the MacKenzie river.  Problem solved!

Why does this happen?

The basic problem of an abundance of natural resources is that in order to exploit them as a free-market economy, you're bascially expected to sell/rent permits to private owners to extract the resource and sell it for profit (Norway is a noteworthy exception, but sadly not really a model followed by Canada).  You are, by definition, setting up a class of rentiers who draw wealth from the land by virtue of a legalism issued by the state entitling them to that wealth.  These people are not like sterotypical gold prospectors panning rivers from a 19th century gold rush, they will already be rich and powerful since it takes a lot of money to get a modern resource extraction operation running.

Rentiers are not really entrepeneurs.  They are in the business of extracting rents, foremost.  Competition is not that important (except in obtaining more sources of rent in the form of extraction permits to resource rich land).  You're not really going to be able to drive your competition out of business - after all they have guaranteed revenue streams too, from their resource leases.  You can fight for market share, but that's a lot of work. Better ROI on spending your time finding more of the resource in areas not yet exploited.  I really suspect the big oil companies do not actively collude on gas prices, they simply all choose not to compete very hard because competing is a lot of work and effort and it isn't their focus.  We'll buy the product anyway, so why bother?

This is, you might say, the default direction of a resource system.  Avoiding this takes a lot of work and thought in how you design the incentives and how the money is used.  We really didn't engage in such an exercise.  Pierre Trudeau tried to do a few things on this score, but they were undone and they didn't become self-sustaining. 

It becomes a curse when it becomes your society's dominant industry, a sort of "resource industrial complex" that automatically has power and influence over the political system just by dint of its impact on the economy and government revenues. It begins to take over.

Of course rentiers never just sit back and let their influence over the state accrue naturally, they aggressively seek to expand it through all means legal and not so legal.  After all, at some level you understand that your primary source of wealth is not "innovation" or some such nice market concept, but a piece of paper issued by the state which empowers you, and you alone, to profit from this stuff that nature left in the ground (oil, diamonds, whatever).  If government is the source of your wealth, then the easiest place to make yourself wealthier is by influencing government to let you keep more of it.  Decreasing royalties, tax breaks on capital expenditure (which you would have made anyway), and straight up tax cuts all work.  So does gutting labour and environmental standards, which drive up your costs for extracting the stuff.  Annoying!

Canada has gone several steps down this path. At some point, perhaps we've already done it, you cross a kind of Event Horizon where the logic of the system carries you the rest of the way whether you want to or not.   Any hope we have of stopping this rests on not just electing a new government in 2015, but ensuring that government is empowered and emboldened to take us off this path.  I'm afraid neither major opposition party looks likely to do that as they stand (I'd give the NDP better odds, but far from a lock).  This is where ideology matters much more than partisanship.  Broad awareness of our poor strategy in going all-in on oil is key.  Without a change, we may as well join OPEC.

The Canadian 1% Want To Privatize the CBC

And it's just them, from a new Forum Research poll for the Globe & Mail, Canadians in general oppose privatizing the CBC by a 2:1 margin, and it is a majority (51%) who are decided against, versus only 25% who are for it.  That's the good news, and it is pretty good news considering that it's not like we've been waging a major national debate about this (though movement conservativism in Canada has made this a major goal for at least several years, the PM and Government have made no overt suggestion or move to do this).  The bad news is that those for it are the people who count:

Every other income group is strongly opposed, and what's remarkable is that the merely affluent in the 80-100K and 100-250K groups are very strongly opposed.  It really is the 1% versus the rest here (technically 32 people out of 1525 in the sample is 2%).

Now 32 is a small sample size for the subgroup, so I'm sure the margins of error are fairly large on this group, but I doubt they're enough to reverse a 66% for, 32% against trend.

Citigroup called Canada a "plutonomy" in a memo a few years back, a country ruled by the very rich.  If that's correct, it means the privatization of the CBC is likely to happen.  The 1% want it.  The CBC competes with their private media empires, it accurately informs people, and it isn't beholden to them.  All good reasons to eliminate it (a privatized CBC would not recognizably be the CBC anymore).

Given they're already consistently running behind Trudeau's Liberals, we can hope this scares the Conservatives off any such scheme, but we're in the mid-term period of a majority where you've got time to do things that anger the public and hope they forget in time for election day.  Destroying the CBC has been a long running conservative goal, they might try it whatever the polling.  Once it's done it will be very expensive to undo.

A Short List of Gun Product Safety Laws

One substory of the gun insanity in the US I had been unaware of previous to Newtown, was the bevy of liability shield laws (including a federal one) that protect gun manufacturers from the very normal product liability lawsuits that any other product maker would be subject to when their product's flaws cause injury or death to someone.

This is truly amazing when you stop and think about it.  There are all sorts of very powerful businesses who would love to have blanket immunity from the harm their faulty products bring, and if we include tobacco companies, the obvious and known harms of using their products as intended, but none seem to manage to get such specific protection. 

I'm not even talking about the thousands of people killed deliberately with guns, where the shooter is more or less using the gun in its intended fashion.  I mean, it's arguably fair that gun manufacturers should not suffer liability for that (also arguable that they should, but I can at least understand someone making that claim).  If a person gets beaten to death with a shovel, it would be bizarre to sue the shovel maker (even as that is not the intended use of a shovel). 

But instead, think of all the tragic gun accidents where some better design and additional safety features could actually save lives (and save gun nuts lots of bad press from children getting shot and such).  Week after week, Daily Kos' KagroX posts a round up of "gunfail" stories largely involving such tragedies:

1. LEALMAN, FL, 2/12/13: Not sure how I missed this one. A Bay Area church congregation is rallying together in prayer for their pastor's daughter. The young woman was accidentally shot. According to officials with the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office, church member Moises Zambrana was showing a 9mm handgun to two young men in a closet near the recreational area. Detectives say one of the men, who is Kelley's boyfriend, was interested in getting a gun. While Zambrana was showing him the safety features, authorities say the gun went off. The bullet went through the wall, and hit Kelley in the head. According to authorities, Zambrana did take out the magazine clip, but a bullet was still in the chamber. She died on Feb. 18.

That's completely typical.  I've noticed people in the comments to his People Who Died posts often rage on about how "stupid" these gun owners are.  I don't disagree, but that's really the point of why widespread gun ownership is not a great idea.  Lots of people are stupid.  Some people are smart most of the time, but everyone has stupid moments.  I was in the Canadian Forces for 8 years, in the Infantry and we drilled safety continuously and I still saw a couple dozen negligent discharge events - most with blank ammo and no one ever got hurt thankfully. Soldiers train regularly and have NCOs enforcing numerous means of gun safety discipline, yet still have ND's be common enough that every soldier knows what an "ND" is (we no longer refer to "accidental discharges" though they're remotely possible if a weapon suffers a mechanical failure which causes a round to fire).

All this is to say while convincing the population they don't need guns and are better off without them is the best approach, it would still be worthwhile to consider what the gun makers should be forced to do in order to make their products moderately safer, such that many moments of stupidity or irresponsibility by gun owners are less likely to end in tragedy:

• All guns should have a safety mechanism.  It's ridiculous that any gun can lack such. I don't even buy that Police or Military need such a thing. I don't care what design compromises it introduces, a thing that emits death at literally the pull of a trigger needs a safety.
• All guns need an indicator that shows whether there is a round in the chamber.  Mechanically this isn't hard to engineer.  One of the depressingly common Kagro stories goes "I thought it was empty when I pulled the trigger."  A visible indication from outside showing there's a round in there would save lives.
• Triggers need to be harder to pull as shipped from the manufacturer.  Yes, I'm sure some gun types will alter it and make a hair trigger.  But many won't bother, default settings should always be safer. If you go out of your way to make it less safe, fine.  Many children would be saved if triggers were harder to pull.  We made cigarette lighters and pill bottles harder for kids to use, why not guns?
•  Require proof of, or purchase of, a trigger lock when buying any gun, including private sales.  Yes, idiots would game this by having 1 trigger lock for 50 guns.  Nothing's perfect but many people who wouldn't buy one otherwise would get one and would use it, since they have it.
• The safety should be put on by the act of loading the magazine or chambering a round.  I'm less certain this can be done mechanically but if it can be, it should be.  Safety should be the default, rather than having to remember to put the safety "on" when readying the weapon, you should have to remember to take it off to fire it.  I'd also be more than fine if it is spring loaded and the shooter has to hold the safety off in order to keep firing, that it re-engages once their hand is removed.
• Require trigger guards.  Stupid but some weapons don't have them. Brushing up agaisnt something or dropping the weapon shouldn't pull the trigger.
• Two-handed holding to fire.  You could design weapons that required two hands on the weapon to fire.  Rifles could require the weapon be in your shoulder to fire.  There are a variety of ways to really help ensure the weapon only fires when you're positively aiming and mean to pull the trigger.  That won't stop all forms of tragic stupidity, but it will help.
• Sell a device that is designed to catch at least low power rounds.  Idea here is that this is where you aim when clearing the action of your weapon in the home/garage/etc.  I know at CF bases in warzones, the practice was to require a little sand-bunker area by the gate, so returning patrols could safety their weapons (removing magazines and chambered rounds) and "fire" the empty action into the sandbags - even if a mistake was made and a round fired, no one would be hurt.  Kagro always has a bunch of "pointed it at the floor/wall and it fired, bullet went through and killed someone on the other side" stories.  Like trigger locks require gun owners to have at least one of these things.  One that will stop a .44 or a 7.62mm round is of course likely impractical but something that would stop a .22 is not. Lots of people are killed by .22 rounds.
• Warning labels on boxes of Ammo ("This calibre can kill children. Don't leave guns loaded!" etc).  Safety manuals with the guns like the ones you get with a kid carseat (lots of diagrams with bad uses of the carseat and warnings "death will result if you do this!").  

All of the design requirements add to the complexity, cost and so forth of guns.  Boo hoo.  Safety addes to the complexity and cost of every system.  The purest designs have to be compromised to handle the rigours of real world application.  All of these are just at the mechanical level.  They've already started adding electronics to guns which means sky's the limit as far as safety features go.  Passwords, biometric coding to owners, detection of human targets, all sorts of features are possible once the thing's computerized.

A basic tenet of user interface design in computer science is to make errors more difficult and the consequences less severe.  Design so that the things people commonly do work out as intended or at least do no harm.  That's why most software will prompt you "are you sure?" when you've chosen to do something irreversible like delete a bunch of files or format a drive.  Why certain powerful options are buried in an "advanced" menu so you have to go looking for that possibly dangerous feature and really mean to turn it on.  Guns delete lives, it's not too much to ask that they get the nearest analog of an "are you sure?" prompt built in at design level.

Oh and don't you dare tell me that gun culture takes seriously safety.  If it did, everything above would already be baked into the design of "mainstream" guns and any guns lacking these features would be some kind of antique or exotic find, like the guy you know who has a car old enough to be grandfathered in before seatbelts were mandatory.  Unsafe guns (as they would be regarded) wouldn't be allowed at ranges and would be illegal to use hunting.  Collectors might have them but they wouldn't be in regular circulation.  Instead, gun culture would fight tooth and nail against most or all of this and instead rely on the proven failure "individual responsibility" as if people themselves will somehow magically evolve to be smarter and more reliable than we really are.  People are flawed, we know that, you address that by improving the system, not demanding better people.