Decline of the Empire

Love At First Sight

Humans are a notoriously friendly and benevolent species. Altruistic, good-natured, compassionate, caring—these are the characteristics which define Homo sapiens. Cooperation, not competition, is the hallmark of our species.

Cooperation always prevails, not only when one group of humans encounter a different group of humans, but also when humans encounter a non-human species. Not only are humans unselfish and generous, but they are infinitely clever, which has allowed them to dominate all life on Earth. All the other species, past and present, can only be grateful for the rise of their benevolent human overlords. 

Perhaps this doesn't strike you as an accurate description of Homo sapiens. If not, you haven't been reading the latest news about Humans and Neanderthals.

It was love at first sight 

DNA taken from a 40,000-year-old modern human jawbone from the cave Peștera cu Oase in Romania reveals that this man had a Neanderthal ancestor as recently as four to six generations back. (Svante Pääbo/Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology)

According to a new study published Monday in Nature, modern humans and Neanderthals may have been interbreeding in Europe as recently as 40,000 years ago.

We're all a little bit Neanderthal. That other species was human — we're all member of the genus Homo — but they didn't have the same physical characteristics as what we'd call a modern human. 

Scientists are certain that our modern human ancestors interbred with Neanderthals, suggesting that the species didn't go extinct so much as blend in.

But pinpointing just when that interbreeding occurred is tricky.

Why Don't The Poor Rise Up?

The title question was on Thomas B. Edsall's mind in his New York Times editorial of the same name.

Why are today’s working poor so quiescent? I’m not the only one posing this question.

“Why aren’t the poor storming the barricades?” asks The Economist. “Why don’t voters demand more redistribution?” wonders David Samuels, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota. The headline on an April 7 National Catholic Reporter article reads: “Why aren’t Americans doing more to protest inequality?”

There are legitimate grounds for grievance. For those in the bottom quintile, household income in inflation-adjusted dollars has dropped sharply, from $13,787 in 2000 to $11,651 in 2013. According to the Census Bureau, 64 million Americans currently live in the bottom quintile.

Before we can answer today's question, we must first ask "is it in the nature of things for the poor to rise up?" The human assumption in all cases seems to be that it is. After all, they're getting screwed, right? Why don't they do something about it? Well, maybe it's not in their nature to do that, unless they're starving.

Historically, people point to the rise of the labor movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but if you think about it, when was the last time the poor rebelled against their greedy masters? Those 19th and 20th century workers were actual wage slaves. We have something similar now, but 21st century wage slavery is much subtler than it used to be. Yeah, the poor rose up in Egypt recently, but that's because they were starving. Those 18th century peasants in France were starving.

You know, human monkeys in social hierarchies and all the rest. Even if the American poor did rise up, they would quickly find themselves on the business end of a {gun, taser, fire hose, tear gas cannister etc.}. I mean, police are already killing people in America for no reason at all. An actual rebellion in the streets would be a golden opportunity for them.

Here's a challenge for you — name some instances where the poor rose up just because they were poor and a very few people were rich. That's the American case now. Strictly political revolutions don't count (e.g. the 18th century American Revolution, the Russian Revolution).

But for the purposes of this article, I will grant the dubious premise. So, why don't the poor rise up?

Pacific Sardines — A Flatland Case Study (Part II)

The Pacific sardine fishery comes with some history (Monterey Country Weekly, January 1, 2014, emphasis added).

You won’t find them on any veterans memorials, but sardines — by the billions — died to help us fight, and win, the Second World War. In 1939 alone, 460,000 tons of sardines were caught off Monterey’s coast, most of which were shipped to the front. That’s 980 million pounds, about 3 billion sardines.

Sardines’ survival strategy is a function of those numbers — they form large schools that can swell into the millions.

Then there are the real impressive numbers: Under the right conditions, a large, mature female can produce close to a million eggs in a single seven-month spawning season. To keep up, a hen would have to lay almost 5,000 eggs per day.

“Older [females] can continually spawn month after month,” says Alec MacCall, a senior scientist at the Santa Cruz office of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Fisheries Service. “They can produce thousands of eggs per week.”

In a world where sardines only had to worry about the bigger fish, these qualities served them well. Then along came humans, and nets. Schooling in massive numbers no longer helped sardines —  it helped drive them close to extinction.

Monterey’s sardine fishery, at its peak in the late 1930's, employed up to 8,000 people and had two dozen canneries.

“Monterey was a small town in those days,” says Cannery Row historian Michael Hemp. “That was a lot of people for the workforce. And the rest of the economy also depended on the industry.”

Its vigor made it one of the most productive fisheries on the planet.

But it didn’t last.

“I made a graph of sardine abundance,” says NOAA’s MacCall. “I started at 3 million tons in 1930. By 1970, my pencil lead was too thick to show the [paucity] we had left. It was less than one thousandth of what we began with.”

For Monterey, the collapse was comprehensive: The town’s credit system, which was built upon the trust of sardine abundance, imploded. Along Cannery Row, buildings fell into decay, and others simply went up in flames. In the span of a decade, Monterey’s boom went bust, and the thriving burg became a ghost town.

The collapse of the Pacific sardine fishery in the 1950's was certainly exacerbated by overfishing in the two prior decades, but was probably inevitable due to a natural boom and bust cycle (and look at this overview).

Pacific Sardines — A Flatland Case Study (Part I)

This is the first of two posts on the collapse of Pacific sardine populations. I will finish up tomorrow.

Back on  April 16, 2015, National Public Radio reported on the closure of the Pacific sardines fishery (species Sardinops sagax).

Life has suddenly gotten easier for the sardine. Federal regulators are not only closing the commercial sardine fishing season early in Oregon, Washington and California, but it will stay closed for more than a year.

The decision to shut down the sardine harvest is an effort to build up depleted stocks of the small, oily fish. The conservation group, Oceana, says that sardine populations have crashed more than 90 percent since 2007.

There are a number of theories about why the fish stocks have collapsed. Oceana says it comes from overfishing. But a report by the Pew Charitable Trusts says the wide swings in the sardine population are normal and usually related to "decades-long shifts in ocean conditions."

The Pope Adds Fuel To Raging Fire

Today Pope Francis issued an encyclical on climate change and human responsibility for the poor and the environment. I'll quote from The Guardian's report on the document.

Pope Francis has called on the world’s rich nations to begin paying their “grave social debt” to the poor and take concrete steps on climate change, saying failure to do so presents an undeniable risk to a “common home” that is beginning to resemble a “pile of filth”.

The pope’s 180-page encyclical on the environment, released on Thursday, is at its core a moral call for action on phasing out the use of fossil fuels.

But it is also a document infused with an activist anger and concern for the poor, casting blame on the indifference of the powerful in the face of certain evidence that humanity is at risk following 200 years of misuse of resources.

 

Living In Hell

I try to avoid humans as best I can, especially when they are unknown to me or sometimes when they do become known to me. There are people I talk to, but those are the ones I have good reason to trust. It's a short list, the ones I trust, considering I've been on this planet for 62 years and I write this blog.

Today I looked in my gmail Trash folder and found a bunch of shit like this (sender withheld).

who are you and what are you trying to send me?

On Sunday, June 14, 2015 7:35 AM, Dave Cohen <[email protected]> wrote:

Hello,

 

I have been trying to send this wealth management documents to you, but It’s not been going through as attachment. So I’ve uploaded the documents to Dropbox,

CLICKHERE to view (link removed)

 

Have a great day

That blue-shaded text seems to have come from me, but of course it did not. That happened on Sunday, and today is Tuesday, so I didn't even see it until just now.

Now you know why, generally speaking, I do my best to avoid humans unless I have very good reasons to trust them.

And then there is stuff from people I do talk to from time to time. This one is from Jim Kunstler.

I have been trying to send this wealth management documents to you, but It’s not been going through as attachment. So I’ve uploaded the documents to Dropbox,

CLICKHERE to view (link removed)

__________________

Dave—

    I’m wary of opening this file.

    What is it exactly?

Jim

<rant>

Jesus Fucking Christ!

I have spent a lot of time on DOTE talking about how fucked up Homo sapiens is. I have talked about Big Brains Going Haywire. I have talked about an evolutionary "experiment" (our species) which went very, very wrong. 

I meant every fucking word of it. And so did Kurt Vonnegut when he referred to the human condition as "this crock of shit."

"Why," I have asked myself over and over again, "do I have to live in a world full of dangerous big-brained bipedal predators who will go way out of their way to fuck with me, or fuck me over, even as I do my very best to avoid them?"

And the only answer I came up with is "because that's the way it is. Suck it up."

I am exposed writing this blog of course. But I decided the comfort I might give to some outweighed the pain I might suffer as a result. I have often been wrong about that.

I'm sure I'm not the only person who has come to believe that he/she is living in Hell. 

When that existentialist douchebag Jean-Paul Sartre said "hell is other people," he was,  for once, on to something.

And here's what I intend to do about this e-mail fiasco — nothing at all!  I'll be damned if I'll let big brains gone haywire jerk me around, at least if I can possibly avoid it. Fuck 'em!!!

</rant>

I would contact/apologize to all those I know who received an e-mail from "me" saying I wanted to send them "wealth management" documents, but of course I never sent any such e-mail.

— Dave

A New Era Of Bogus Emissions Data

The global economy has entered a new phase which may go on for many years. The post-crash growth boom in the "developing" economies came to an end in 2014. A weaker global economy will slow the growth rate in carbon emissions going forward. As is often the case, the story starts in China (Financial Times, June 10, 2015).

[Spencer Dale, BP’s chief economist] said the slowdown in demand for coal in China last year, much of it consumed in iron, steel and cement industries, had contributed to a welcome slowdown in world carbon emissions.

Global carbon emissions rose by only 0.5 per cent last year, compared with an average rate of 2 per cent over the last decade, [Dale] calculated. “The one trillion tonne question is whether these developments in China are likely to persist, so possibly signalling the beginning of a lower trend in emissions growth, or whether they are likely to reverse in the near future,” said Mr Dale.

Non-fossil fuels including hydro, nuclear and other renewable sources had also provided a bigger overall contribution to global energy supply growth in 2014 than fossil fuels, for the first time in 20 years.

But despite increases in renewable energy supply outstripping fossil fuels last year, renewables still accounted for only 3 per cent of primary energy consumption in 2014.

Does Fed Policy Make Inequality Worse?

Is the Fed afraid to raise interest rates? That was the subject of Marketplace's interview with former Fed and ECB insider Athanasios Orphanides.

It seems to me that this question bears a strong resemblance to other questions which answer themselves.

Is the sky blue?
Does a bear shit in the woods?
Is the Pope catholic?

The Fed is also afraid to unwind its 4.5 trillion dollar balance sheet. It is easy to forget here in the "new normal" just how abnormal things are in year 19 of the Bubble Era. 

The more interesting question is does Fed policy make wealth and income inequality worse?

You might, with considerable justification, consult the short list above to find the answer. But Ben Bernanke, in pondering this important question on his blog, demonstrated once again that Flatland as I've described it is not a figment of my imagination, or yours.

Monetary policy is a blunt tool which certainly affects the distribution of income and wealth, although whether the net effect is to increase or reduce inequality is not clear.

More research will be needed to untangle and measure the many channels through which these effects are transmitted. But the (uncertain) distributional impact of monetary policy should not prevent the Fed from pursuing its mandate to achieve maximum employment and price stability, thereby providing broad benefits to the economy. Other types of policies are better suited to addressing legitimate concerns about inequality.

Bernanke's answer clearly did not satisfy the guys who write the Not Quant blog, who had me laughing out loud. I will quote from Oops! Philly Fed Admits QE widens inequality (hat tip Tim Iacono).

This is great stuff.

Politics By Default — Introduction

To say the human response to anthropogenic climate change has been "irrational" would put the case mildly. Climate change (among other self-created ecological disasters) poses an existential risk to humankind, and such threats, unless they are on our doorstep (here & now), are subject to cognitive filtering, as discussed in the original Flatland essay. In the second essay, I discussed the unconscious biases which inform the human response to climate change. In the third essay, I talked about the primacy of human sociality and the social roots of confirmation bias (i.e., the prevalence of bullshit, harmonizing, etc).

All the above is certainly illuminating, but my explanation of things remains incomplete. Lately I have thought about the dismaying fact that human responses to climate change, outside the scientific community, which strives to be aloof, are entirely political in nature. And politics (inter-group conflict) is a predictable product of the human animal.

I was reminded of this unhappy fact by the preliminary climate talks going on in Bonn this month. The current negotiating round is exactly like all the previous ones (The Guardian, June 6, 2015).

So, Ray — How's That "Singularity" Coming Along?

In this post's title, "Ray" refers to Ray Kurzweil, my favorite techno-optimist and certainly the craziest. Ray is a "futurist" at Google.

The "singularity" is his most famous prediction about the future, but Ray's "unfettered" imagination is not constrained by reality in any way. Another wacko technophile, Peter Diamandis, lists some of Ray's more recent predictions about the next 25 years.

• By the late 2010s, glasses will beam images directly onto the retina. Ten terabytes of computing power (roughly the same as the human brain) will cost about $1,000.
• By the 2020s, most diseases will go away as nanobots become smarter than current medical technology. Normal human eating can be replaced by nanosystems. The Turing test begins to be passable. Self-driving cars begin to take over the roads, and people won’t be allowed to drive on highways.
• By the 2030s, virtual reality will begin to feel 100% real. We will be able to upload our mind (i.e., consciousness) by the end of the decade.
• By the 2040s, non-biological intelligence will be a billion times more capable than biological intelligence (a.k.a. us). Nanotech foglets will be able to make food out of thin air and create any object in [the] physical world at a whim.
• By 2045, we will multiply our intelligence a billionfold by linking wirelessly from our neocortex to a synthetic neocortex in the cloud.

Nanotech foglets? But hey, this is Great Stuff! If you're writing Science Fiction, that is.

Back in what I affectionately call "The Real World," actual technologists and researchers are trying to build smart robots. Unfortunately for Ray, that's not going so well.

I will quote excerpts from the recent New York Times piece Relax, The Terminator Is Far Away (May 25, 2015).