Posts by dredmorbius

Limits to Growth is a pile of steaming doggy-doo based on total cobblers

Re: Enery is the secret

That ecologist is correct.

Ultimately, humans must learn to live within limits.

Or the lesson will be imposed on them. Or they'll fail to survive.

This boils down to two arguments, both fundamentally erroneous

Stripped of its barnyard epithets and insults (starting with the title -- really, Mr. Worstall, not a class act), this rant boils down to two critiques of Graham Turner's study. Both of Worstall's critiques fail to withstand the slightest intelligent scrutiny.

His first: Misunderstating resource availability: "Let's assume, just because we want to assume such a thing, that there are not many more minerals out there for us to mine."

His second: Assuming infinite substitutability: "To account for substitutability between resources a simple and robust position has been taken. First, it is assumed here that metals and minerals will not substitute for bulk energy resources such as fossil fuels."

Given that Worstall seems to have a fundamental belief in continuous economic growth, that is, unlimited exponential growth, which means that resource consumption doubles on a regular basis.

And that means that any linear increase in assumes stocks is eaten up quite quickly.

How quickly?

If 1x stock lasts you 1 doubling period:

10x stock lasts you 3.3 doubling periods.

100x stock lasts you 6.6 doubling periods.

1000x stock lasts you 10x doubling periods.

The formula, for the curious, is ln(stock)/ln(2). See: http://www.consumptiongrowth101.com/Basics.html

The result is that projections of exhaustion are extremely insensitive to increases in available resource. You need, as demonstrated, order of magnitude shifts in resource to provide only modest increase in fixed resource duration.

This means that duration is also stubbornly resistant to increases in efficiency. While $GDP/bbl oil has increased by roughly 350% from 1980 to 2012, this corresponds to increasing the size of the petroleum resource by 3.5x. A quick trip through the land of logs tells us this increases our resource duration by only 1.8x.

There's some more word-gamery concerning reserves and resources, for which I'll simply state that his presentation is 1) irrelevant given the exponential growth factor, 2) grossly misleading concering the terms, and 3) fails to accurately state standard usage of these terms (peculiar for a man with a background in the ores trade). See the USGS for more on this: http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1980/0831/report.pdf

Worstall's second category error is to rebut an assumption with ... another assumption. Which he them mis-states.

Substitutability is not an economic fact but an assumption modeled mathematically. Yes, some inputs are substitutable, but only to an extent. No inputs are perfectly substitutable across a full range of inputs. Rather, you'll find a great deal of economic ink spilt over discussions of elasticity of substitution, which is to say, how the ratio of A to B you need to exchange varies over the range of substitution:

http://economicswebinstitute.org/glossary/substitute.htm

In actuality, what one sees is better modeled via linear programming: there are fixed constraints, minima of a given input which must be supplied, or maxima of outputs.

And then we get to this gem: "starvation is a substitute for food". In which case, I'd very much like to see how well Mr. Worstall gets on for the next six months on a regular diet of three squares daily of starvation.

No, Tim, starvation is an alternative to eating, much as stupidity is an alternative to brains.

That is all.

Re: Doing More With Less

And what, exactly, is "value"?

Is it "wealth"? Because that's unambiguously defined by Adam Smith in the beginning of Wealth of Nations: "the annual produce of the land and labour of the society".

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3300/3300-h/3300-h.htm

Or is it the market value? Again, Smith finds that labour is the basis of value, and that the "real price" should be based on the labour required to produce it. Modern economists extend this further to the concept of "marginal cost", but it's effectively the same thing (scaled for varying costs at varying levels of production). And those costs ultimately reduce to the energy inputs, which is to say that value is measured in energy -- kilowatt hours or joules or barrels or tonnes of oil.

There's use value, but that too is given as the offset equivalent labour, and hence energy cost. We're back to material foundations again.

I really don't see how you can go about increasing "value" in perpetuity without some additional inputs. And there are limits to those, whether you agree with the Meadows, et al, Turner, OPEC, or the IPCC, on what specific resource and sink limits are, there's going to come a point where, on this pale blue dot, you've run out of things to toss and places to toss them.

What then, Mr. Worstall?

Re: Doing More With Less

Unfortunately, and Mr. Worstall's assertions notwithstanding, not all things are perfect substitutes.

Pasta (a simple carbohydrate) doesn't provide you the proteins, essential fatty acids, and B vitamins a grass-fed steak will provide (though carefully balanced grains and legumes will provide you the essential amino acids your body requires). Grains and grass are inputs to meat production, whether you're talking beef, pork, lamb, or poultry, and it takes a much larger quantity of feed to generate meat than you receive in calories. That old trophic level at work.

Horses provide less transport service while requiring greater inputs (in the form of hay or oats) and outputs (in the form of manure and urine) than automobiles. At the turn of the 20th century, New York City was home to some 120,000 horses, not posh pets but draught animals used in drayage. And producing some 22 pounds of manure each, per day, some 1,320 tons for the city. As well as another several gallons of urine each. Even their dead bodies littered the streets.

http://www.banhdc.org/archives/ch-hist-19711000.html

Where Worstall goes wrong with his supposings is in thinking that economic substitutes are perfect (they're not), that they're infinitely fungible (they're not), and that there's always a happy ending (only in porn films).

Contrary to your own assertion, it's all to easy to imagine how "any mere shortage" could cause civilization to collapse. The situation in Liberia at the moment, with Ebola spreading unchecked and doubling in a matter of 3 weeks, is testimony to that: a civil infrastructure operating in dire poverty, stretched to its limits, rampant illiteracy, minimal medical services, but sufficient transportation that a sick person can easily travel tens, or hundreds, of miles, to infect a new village or city. It's an example of what happens as the trappings of civilization finally give way.

Poverty? Pah. That doesn't REALLY exist any more

Smith disagrees with you on poverty

This is actually slightly more nuanced than your usual posts, Worstall, though I find both your view and that of Lanchaster questionable.

Smith discusses, at length, the basis for wages, the impacts of a sub-living-wage pay on the economy, and the effects on overall welfare of increasing that of the poorest of society.

It's also interesting to note how he defines poverty, in his passage describing the poor of China. It's not on the basis of their monetary wealth, income, or spending, but on the quality of their life:

"The poverty of the lower ranks of people in China far surpasses that of the most beggarly nations in Europe. In the neighbourhood of Canton, many hundred, it is commonly said, many thousand families have no habitation on the land, but live constantly in little fishing-boats upon the rivers and canals. The subsistence which they find there is so scanty, that they are eager to fish up the nastiest garbage thrown overboard from any European ship. Any carrion, the carcase of a dead dog or cat, for example, though half putrid and stinking, is as welcome to them as the most wholesome food to the people of other countries."

That is: poverty isn't a wage, it's a standard of living. And it absolutely is relative.

Smith describes income, "the real recompence of labour", again, in terms of what it gains: "the real quantity of the necessaries and conveniencies of life which it can procure".

And as to increasing the lot of the poor:

"Is this improvement in the circumstances of the lower ranks of the people to be regarded as an advantage, or as an inconveniency, to the society? The answer seems at first abundantly plain. Servants, labourers, and workmen of different kinds, make up the far greater part of every great political society. But what improves the circumstances of the greater part, can never be regarded as any inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged."

Yes, the post-Industrial Revolution period has increased the average wealth of many. Gregory Clark of UC Davis notes though, in his book "A Farewell to Alms" that the average income of those in the poorest nations of the world has actually _fallen_. "There walk the earth now both the richest people who ever lived and the poorest."

So that $1.25/day wage is actually somewhat worse than was the case in historical times. People with so little access to resources then would already be dead.

El Reg in email address blunder

It's one reader ...

... with a very bad case of OCD.

... not to mention talking to myself.

But I knew that already.

Google's WiFi snoop - who knew and who didn't?

It's fate

Or rather, 'kismet'.

If Google (or its now hapless engineer) used standard tools to develop his WiFi mapping system, he very likely relied on the o'en source 'kismet' program.

When run, this automatically (and by default) creates a session log, including significant amounts of sniffed traffic.

While there are indeed good reasons to be concerned about limitless power (just ask me about that...), this smells an awful lot to me like an honest mistake, triggering local concerns (privacy is a very significant issue in, papers, please, Germany). To which Google 'fessed up virtually immediately. The alleged data disposal may not have been the best policy though I don't see it as inadvisable itself.

The real lesson here is that open broadcast wireless networks are in fact, open, broadcast, and wireless, available to many individuals and organizations, many of which one might suspect to be less forthright than Google.

The real villain here to my mind are the device manufacturers who've made proper and secure configuration (and interoperability in same mode) so difficult for the hoi polloi.