TCS Daily : August 2003 Archives
Down the Tube
The first elected Mayor of England's capital city, Ken Livingstone, has seen his transportation policy descend into chaos in recent weeks. Londoners regularly rate the ease of getting to and from work as their major concern, and to a large...
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Real World 101
"Of far more serious import was the isolation of writing-school students (and teachers) from real-world America. The campus, for all its attractions, is a poor place to get any feel for life as most Americans live it, yet the...
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Move Over Culture War. Here's the Aquaculture War
Three years ago I was returning from Santiago, Chile, on a new Delta flight. It was less than a quarter full. I asked a flight attendant if we would go faster since the plane seemed empty. He responded that we...
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'A Tryst With Destiny'
Let's begin at the beginning and that, for me, lies in a quote. "Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but...
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Bjorn Lomborg's Groundhog Day
In the often hilarious movie Groundhog Day, a petty, narrow-minded character played by comedic actor Bill Murray lives the same day over and over and over again. He goes to sleep at night and when he wakes up in the...
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The Islamization of France
If Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilization" theory is right, France is on the front line. With at least six and maybe eight million Muslims living in its territory among a total population of 60 million, France is the most "islamized"...
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Europe's REACH Exceeds Its Scientific Grasp
European regulatory officials have raised hostility to technological innovation to an art form. Their current medium of choice is the precautionary principle, which holds that as long as the evidence about the safety of a product, technology or activity...
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Markets Reward Eco-Terror. So Let's Fix Them.
Eco-terrorists recently torched an auto dealership to protest big American cars. Unless intelligently countered, such economic terrorism might succeed in furthering the terrorists' environmental crusade. Giving in to terrorists encourages them. Unfortunatel
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An Insidious 'Standard Weapon'
You're sitting in traffic at a red light. You happen to be near a government building, maybe a courthouse or a federal office building. There's a white cargo van in the right lane just ahead of you. What's inside...
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Is the Pope Catholic?
From the halls of the Vatican to newsrooms around the world to the European Commission, everyone is talking about how Pope John Paul II may in coming weeks change his view toward genetically modified organisms. And no one's...
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Working With the System
We worry about terrorists, and rightly. But even without terrorists, things go wrong. SARS brought a major chunk of the global economy, and global transport network to a halt. The Great Blackout left 50 million without power for reasons...
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New Source of Confusion
Despite continued declines in emissions, environmentalists and their allies desperately want us to believe air pollution will skyrocket unless we impose far more aggressive regulations. Nowhere has their hyperbole been more extreme than for New Source Review, a Cl
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Stockholm Syndrome
The Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) is a United Nations Environment Programme Convention, which bans or regulates industrial chemicals and pesticides. The main concern is that POPs tend to bio-accumulate up the food chain, which means
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TELRIC Like It Is
OK. Where's the opera diva? Because while there was a whole lot of singing in the wake of the release last Thursday of the Federal Communication Communication's rulemaking on local phone competition and Internet access, most of the notes were...
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La France Hot
In the dog heat of summer, with a burning sun high in the sky day after day, week after week, La Belle France found out some ugly truths about itself. And right now the usually overly self-confident country is...
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Is This 'An Occasion to Celebrate'?
My friend Sunondo has four children. I asked him which one he loved the most and he said the youngest one. Now, this is contrary to Carl Menger's law of diminishing marginal utility, which holds that the more we have...
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The Beagle 2 Is Landing
Start with the premise that life is possible where energy and water are available. Now think of Mars. Mars is approximately one-tenth the mass of Earth, so the interior heat of the planet escaped to space soon after the...
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Eliminating Smoldering Coals
In the Vietnam War, when I first felt the pride of placing a green beret on my head, we in Special Forces had a dual mission: we were fighting an unconventional war in Vietnam and simultaneously training to be...
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The Muslims are Coming! The Muslims are Coming!
France, Italy, and Spain together could be called "Roman Europe," as they once formed the core of the old Western Empire. Or perhaps we could say "Latin Europe," as they speak what amounts to demotic Latin. Two generations hence, however,...
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GOP = Goldwater's Old Party?
The political coalition that has comprised the American right for half a century is showing signs of breaking up as conservatives and libertarians go their separate ways. While conservatives seem to be making peace with government growth, libertarians are increasin
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Last Chance Boost
Most observers agree that the Democrats are in trouble in the next election if the economy is strong. The latest economic data have suggested that the economy is at least headed in the "strong" direction, with initial claims for...
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Emissions Impossible
Among other things, the old Soviet Union was one of the most horrible examples of economic and environmental mismanagement. Now the Russian Federation is seen that way by the EU since it still has not ratified the Kyoto Protocol. The...
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Prioritizing Security
A few weeks after the terrorist attacks of 9/11/2001, Congress hurriedly passed with great fanfare a $15 billion dollar bill to aid an airline industry coping with the economic fallout of the attacks. More secretively, a few months ago Senate...
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Underdosing
If you're sick, and there's a pill for your condition, you want it. Recent medical progress has made many more conditions treatable, but the cost is often high. The elderly, who vote more than any other segment of the...
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Accountants Predicting the Future
The one prediction you can make about financial projections is that they will never be exactly right. That's one of the reasons it's so difficult to determine company value and why investment bankers and research analysts get paid a fortune...
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Julian's Genius
A recent article on auctions in the science journal Nature sparked memories of my interactions with the late Julian Simon, the famed economist at the University of Maryland. David Porter of George Mason University in Virginia found ways to make...
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Are You Living Uprightly?
Most people distinguish between what they are obligated to do, morally speaking, and what it would be (merely) good for them to do. The former is a matter of justice, the latter of charity. Justice consists in giving others...
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Confronting Terrorist Gangs and Their Apologists
For many weeks now, I have pondered the significance of the controversy over President Bush's nomination of Daniel Pipes to the U.S. Institute of Peace, but I have been puzzled over what I could write about it that had not...
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On "Weighing Obesity"
Every year, Americans grow fatter. Currently about 44 million Americans are considered obese, while fully two thirds are obese or overweight. Children are lumbering right behind their parents. By no coincidence, the fatter we become the stronger becomes the "fatlas
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Good News About the Environment
Does economic growth come at the expense of environmental quality? Democratic Presidential candidate Howard Dean thinks not. He's right. Here's why. Economic progress is a prerequisite for improving environmental quality. The real enemy of the environment i
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Sexing Up the Threat
"Rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in the earth's atmosphere, resulting from economic and demographic growth since the industrial revolution, are leading to potentially irreversible climate change. Human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases[...] are
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What It Takes
Weblogs are now becoming part of the upcoming presidential campaign. Two presidential candidates in particular -- Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich -- have weblogs of their own. Some herald the embrace of blog technology by Dean and Kucinich as a...
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My Libertarian Persuasion
"Neoconservatism is what the late historian of Jacksonian America, Marvin Meyers, called a 'persuasion,' one that manifests itself over time, but erratically, and one whose meaning we clearly glimpse only in retrospect." -- Irving Kristol, The Neoconservative Persu
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Mikey Doesn't Like It
My goodness. I'm amazed by Michael Fumento's reaction to my recent series on Tech Central Station, which he calls an "Oxford English Dictionary-length propaganda feast." If I were to condense it into a Cliff Notes' version, what I said...
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Do Not Do Not Call
Last week, Pejman Yousefzadeh made a spirited defense of the national "do not call" list here at Tech Central Station. Yousefzadeh's basic premise: despite the fact that the list was the result of federal regulation and legislation, it's still presents...
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Using the Military to Promote Democracy
The late July mutiny of over 300 Philippine military officers illustrated a major problem in the global war on terror: some countries, though supportive of American counterterrorism initiatives, lack the institutional stability to serve as effective partners. &nbs;
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Dear Posthumans
Dear Posthumans: I am addressing you using terminology that is fashionable in 2003. I would not be surprised if you refer to yourselves by some other name. After all, we humans do not call ourselves "post-Australopithecenes." By posthumans, I...
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Look and Feel
Looks matter. Everyone who has ever dated knows that. Of course with people, as a large cautionary body of literature and country music makes plain, other qualities may come to the fore: a pretty smile can famously hide a...
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From Brussels With Love
In its original format dating back to 1993, Belgium's so-called "universal competence" law allowed virtually anyone to use Belgian courts to bring war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity charges against virtually anyone else, regardless of where those alle
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Pushme-Pullyu Socialism
LONDON -- Remember Pushme-Pullyu? That was the llama with a head at both ends, from the "Dr. Dolittle" stories by the British-born Hugh Lofting. The creature could get along just fine in the 1967 and 1998 movies starring Rex Harrison...
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Damn the Science, Full Speed Ahead
A funny thing happens on weekends in most cities. Nitrogen oxide emissions go down by 10 to 40 percent, but ozone smog levels stay the same or rise. Ozone accumulates when nitrogen oxides (NOx) and volatile organic compounds (VOC)...
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When More Is Less
From conservative House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter to liberal military pundit Michael O'Hanlon at the Brookings Institution, the ranks of those calling for additional Army divisions are swelling faster than the military itself ever could. The
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Full Monti
Microsoft may have successfully fought off the threat to its business from the U.S. Department of Justice in November 2001, but it remains under serious fire from across the Atlantic. Brussels' anti-trust watchdogs have stepped up their remorseless four-year invest
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Environmentalists for Enron
CERES, the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies, is terribly concerned about corporate governance. Worried by the recent corporate scandals, this coalition of environmental groups and institutional investors has taken a hard look at one of the bigge
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Robot Economics
Will robots steal all our jobs? Although today's robots may lack the intelligence God gave ants, robots of the future might perform many "human" tasks. Economics shows, however, that humans needn't fret over robot-induced redundancies. For millennia most...
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On Civil Unions
One point has been ignored in the current debate about homosexual civil unions: there is nothing unnatural about homosexuality. Many species of animals are so organized that the range of endocrine chemistry for individuals includes obligate homosexuality, usually f
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Tilting at Windmills
Sometimes environmental issues are not as clear as you might think -- or as green activists want them to be. Norges Naturvernforbund (Friends of the Earth Norway, the country's largest environmental campaign group) is criticizing plans to build a...
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Beyond the Blackout
One of the first things I did after arriving in the U.S. from Europe in 1969 was to study the 1967 report of the Great Blackout that left 30 million people without electricity in November 1965. As I began to...
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Once More Into the Breach
On most issues great and small the defenders of free trade stick together to oppose the fiendish array of restrictions that protectionist governments use to insulate domestic producers against foreign competition. It is therefore noteworthy when free traders divid
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The Solution, Not the Problem
The blaming and finger pointing began almost as quickly as the lights went out. First it was the U.S. and Canada blaming each other for causing this particular blackout, but inevitably the blame conversation turned to larger issues of policy,...
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Illogical and Undemocratic
Policymakers worldwide regularly make major decisions based on the assumption that European consumers are firmly opposed to genetically modified (GM) food. This is a belief that has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. By their hasty decision not to stock GM, B
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The Keynesian Way
There has been a collective sigh of relief in Europe - and elsewhere - ever since the European Central Bank yielded to pressure and lowered its interest rate in an effort to boost growth. Politicians were delighted by this decision....
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A Grand Shame
Next June, for the first time in over 25 years, there will be no Canadian Grand Prix in Montreal. While the 2004 Formula One calendar will not be officially released until October, race organizers in Canada were notified in...
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Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't?
The world uses about 660 million PCs, says eTForecasts. The Blaster worm has reportedly infected only about 250,000 in the first day or two. The original Code Red hit that many computers in just 9 hours; a second version...
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Blame Canada
A desperate American recording industry is waging a fierce fight against digital copyright infringement seemingly oblivious to the fact that, for practical purposes, it lost the digital music sharing fight over five years ago. In Canada. "On March...
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No Big Government Vindication
Like the dutiful son that I am, I recently called my parents in Illinois to ask about them and see how things are going on their end. My sister answered the phone, and appeared quite annoyed at having to talk...
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Regressive Measures
The English-born University of Chicago economist Ronald Coase enjoys the rare privilege of knowing that he has changed the world forever. A founder of the conjoined discipline of "law and economics," Coase has expanded the conceptual universe of both...
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Eyes on the X-Prize
Few countries on the planet have a space program. Those few that do are either one of the two traditional space powers, the United States and Russia (formerly the USSR), or take their technological and programmatic lead from one of...
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Close Encounter
This year Mars and the earth will be extraordinarily close -- on August 27 the earth will sweep closer than 35 million miles to Mars. It's enough to give earthlings Mars Fever. Not since the deep ice of the...
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The Real Internet Candidate
"The Internet isn't a thing. It's an agreement...If you want to put a computer - or a cell phone or a refrigerator--- on the network, you have to agree to the agreement that is the Internet." --Doc Searls and...
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Size Isn't Everything
Seven years ago in Chicago, the first ever U.S. and European Partenariat for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) was held. The objective was to provide a unique "matchmaking" opportunity for businesses that otherwise might not have the resources required to..
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'Changing Our Behavior'
Europe has decided to go it alone and implement the Kyoto Protocol, but what price will its citizens pay? Unfortunately, economic modeling tells us very little about the level of personal pain one can expect when carbon emissions are forced...
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How Many Must Die?
The four-year old U.S. outbreak of West Nile virus is a significant threat to public health. With the peak season just beginning, the mosquito-borne virus has been found in animal hosts (primarily birds and horses) in 40 states, and has...
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A House Divided?
The ongoing debate over the market for prescription drugs shows little sign of abating. After days of contentious debate, Congress recently passed a bill permitting prescription drugs made in the U.S. that are sold and shipped to another country to...
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What Threatens Us
Among modern writers of the English language, few exceed G. K. Chesterton and his friend Hilaire Belloc in range, fecundity and vision. Writing in the early twentieth century, these men addressed everything -- Christian apologetics, theology, history, philosophy, e
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Think the Unthinkable
The impossible can only be overborne by the unprecedented. -- Sir Ian Hamilton, Gallipoli Diary, 1920 The thing was done in a minute. It was September dusk and traffic was relatively light on the Grand Central Parkway as the black...
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The Need for Speed
Anniversaries are always good times to stand back and reassess a particular field of endeavor. This year, for example, is the 100th anniversary of the Ford Motor Company, the iconic Harley-Davidson Motorcycle Company and the Wright Brothers' first powered...
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EU = Equality Undermined
Good news abounds for some people in some malarial countries. Delegates to the recent WHO Southern African Malaria Control (SAMC) meeting in Lusaka, Zambia heard how indoor residual spraying with DDT and other insecticides is dramatically reducing malaria cases in.
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Sagan Reloaded
Nick Sagan is a writer who has spent a decade working on science-fiction scripts and games. He wrote and edited for the TV series Star Trek: Voyager. In 2000, he was a colleague of mine at Space.com. He is the...
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Chicken George's Administration?
"It is always those who have not seen war itself that are most willing to send other people into war on their behalf." Who said that? Practically everybody. The liberal talk-show host who precedes my show in the morning...
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Terrorism and Disease
A while back, I wrote about the importance of learning faster in the context of fighting terrorism. But it's just as important to learn quickly when it comes to dealing with an older and more deadly enemy of humanity:...
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Safety's Wellspring
Increasingly, the debate over climate change is moving from alarmist global climate predictions, to alarmist regional climate predictions -- reports purporting to predict the future climate impacts of rising greenhouse gas concentration on specific regions of the
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Pots and Kettles
"The Administration's political interference with science has led to misleading statements by the President, inaccurate responses to Congress, altered web sites, suppressed agency reports, erroneous international communications, and the gagging of scientists." So
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Extreme Fakeover
The Internet boom and bust cycle produced its share of spectacular flops, poorly constructed business models and inappropriate assumptions about the power and distribution capability of the Internet. In an ironic twist, though, companies from nearly every corner o
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Piggyback Hero
Tomorrow morning they'll lay the remains of Glenn Rojohn to rest in the Peace Lutheran Cemetery in the little town of Greenock, Pa., just southeast of Pittsburgh. He was 81, and had been in the air conditioning and plumbing business...
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The Structure of a Scientific Revolution
The Kyoto Treaty provides for mandatory reductions of emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases, because these are believed to cause man-made global warming with all kinds of harmful effects. It has been signed and/or ratified by a majority...
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Border Crossing
The U.S. House of Representatives voted last month to allow re-importation of cheap generic medicines from Europe and Canada into the U.S. Since then the U.S.-based pharmaceutical industry has been frantically trying to explain the consequences of this action to...
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A Matter of Health
People either loved it or they hated it. Either way, the recent 10-part series on obesity was a success. It got people thinking - I hope more critically -- about the current beliefs surrounding weight and dieting. The...
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Driven to Distraction
"...Tuning in an automobile radio while the car is in motion involves a hazardous division of the driver's attention." From the book, "Man and the Motorcar." 1939 What if there were a miniature camera in your car, installed somewhere around...
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Selfish Baby Universes
Has an Oregon lawyer discovered the secret of the universe? This question arises in connection with a new book titled Biocosm, by James N. Gardner. Gardner presents an imaginative, even bizarre, speculation about life's role in the cosmos....
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A Simple Plan
The goal of this series was to encourage all of us to critically question the vernacular precepts about obesity and (weight loss) dieting....and to reveal the facts we never hear. The current war on obesity has caused more harm...
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The Party Goes On
By exploiting flexible financing rules, a new entrant increased its market share to equal that of the leading incumbent within a year. Despite its public promise of more transparency and tighter self-imposed ethical standards, the newcomer set up off-balance-sheet
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Peace, Progress and the Market
Some of my best memories come from summer road trips with my wife, Ramona. I naturally focus on economic anthropology, i.e., how folks organize, coordinate, and exchange. Differences are huge. They testify to the vitality, viability, and variety we've come...
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I Love LUCY
"...one could instead define expansions and recessions in terms of whether the fraction of the economy's productive resources that is being used is rising or falling (in which case the behavior of the unemployment rate would be a critical...
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'Not Debatable'
"I would stipulate that the earth's climate has changed through the millennia. There's no doubt about that. I mean I've done enough to know that we've had ice ages and that we've had floods and that we've had volcanoes...
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Thank the 'Reformers'
Arnold Schwarzenegger, Arianna Huffington, Gary Coleman, Larry Flynt and at least 11 others, all running for governor of California -- none of them ever elected to anything, and one of them given at least a decent chance of getting...
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The Wrongs of Right of Reply
Should individuals and organizations be entitled to reply to criticism that is made of them? Certainly they should. This is commonly known as the right to free speech. It means that no authority should be able to forcibly prevent...
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A Wind From the East
Poles recently gave a resounding 'yes' to EU membership. But without deep internal reforms, it will not be possible for them to profit from integration. The public EU debate in Poland was about emotion: fears and expectations, theology,...
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Unhatched Chickens
Securities and Exchange Commission chief William Donaldson recently put his clout against the President who appointed him and behind the burgeoning movement to require expensing of stock options. At a recent speech he gave in Washington, Donaldson was asked,...
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Start-Up Success
All charter schools are not alike. They're not supposed to be: The idea is to experiment with different ideas to see what works. But most studies of charter school effectiveness don't distinguish between wildly different schools: Back to Basics...
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'A Deep Concern'
Just as the American approach to climate change is winning support around the world, a group of Northeast governors, including New York's George Pataki, is siding with European nations by embracing the Kyoto Protocol, which President Bush rejected two...
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More Equal Than Others
Wealth has lost some of its privileges. If Bill Gates and I caught the same disease, he could afford better doctors than I. We would both, however, probably use the same pharmaceuticals to treat our condition. While Gates could...
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Regulation Delegation
Recently, a few principled members of Congress introduced what they called the Congressional Responsibility Act of 2003. The bill's aim? To rein in the regulatory state by requiring Congress to vote on every regulation issued by executive agencies. Given...
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The Natural Gas Fallacy
The fundamental intent of strategic planning is the pursuit of intelligent, rational, steady progress toward a defined goal; in other words, the avoidance of "crises." The U.S. (the Department of Energy and Congress in particular) seems to prefer crisis...
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OverREACH
In 1997, Robert Nilsson, a senior scientist at the Swedish Chemicals Inspectorate, (which is much like the US EPA), told me that Swedish officials were going crazy by trying to outlaw numerous chemicals. Professor Nilsson is no corporate lackey having...
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Fever Pitch
On his recent trip to Africa, President George Bush paid homage to the tens of thousands of slaves who were held in pens on tiny Gorée Island, Senegal before shipment to the United States. As he stepped ashore, he must...
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More Than Human?
My four-year-old nephew wants to be a superhero. It was Superman for a while, then Spiderman. (A brief interlude of enthusiasm for being The Incredible Hulk didn't survive the lameness of the film, apparently.) Most of us outgrow...
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To Do List
What separates those of us who are the healthiest from those who aren't is not what we look like, how much we weigh or what our measurements are. It's what we do. Svelte people aren't necessarily healthy just because...
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Sink the Terrorists
Through the smoke Horton could see that the tide of battle was still flowing decisively in the Allies' favour. In this month, later judged by some commentators to be the one in which Britain's vital lifeline to North America came...
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Hot Topic
A central scientific issue in the debate over the sources of changes in the Earth's climate rose to the level of a Senate hearing last week. The hearing was called in an attempt to help determine the answers to...
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Something's Fishy
To justify a policy that violates rules under which it is supposed to operate, the Environmental Protection Agency has calculated that Americans love fish more when they are swimming freely than when they are on their plates.The story starts with...
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New England Journal
COOPER, Maine -- Last week was a bad week coming at the end of a bad month here in downeast Maine. The prevailing winds out of Northeast Harbor suggest more policy based on a mixture of religious collectivism, alarmism and...
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Passionate Intensity
Let's give the gay marriage dispute another six weeks to run its course and it will then be time to turn to the next controversy to blossom, which will be over "The Passion," Mel Gibson's movie on the last...
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Is the Case for Euthanasia Dying?
A recent issue of the British Medical Journal (July 26) looked at current topics in "end of life" care. In other words, what science is currently telling us about the dying. While there were some non-related observations (including the...
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A More Perfect Union
Europeans will soon consider a proposed constitution for the European Union that is very different from the U.S. Constitution. The United States is the oldest and largest surviving constitutional republic -- a nation that has experienced a larger increase...
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Ideal-isms
If being overweight is as deadly as we've been told, the evidence should be irrefutable. It's not. "The conclusion that obesity is dangerous represents a selective review of the data," concluded David Garner, Ph.D., and Susan Wooley, Ph.D.,...
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Equality vs. Poverty
Arvind Panagariya is a Professor of Economics and Co-Director of the Center for International Economics at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of numerous articles and scholarly papers on free trade and globalization, including the...
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Natural Gas Synergy
The natural gas "crisis" is official. Both Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham have said so. They are predicting further sharp rises in natural gas prices due to short-term tight natural gas supplies. When asked...
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Nader in '04!
The silly season -- i.e., the 2004 presidential campaign -- is upon us, so let me provide a public service by helping you spot (and encouraging you to disregard) a particularly insidious but strangely alluring argument. It is an...
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'Compared to What?'
I recently spoke on the scientific and ecological issues of genetically modified foods. Many in the audience and friends I meet at our co-op are concerned about "globalization." Some want to arrest the spread of the market economy and modern...
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Nevada's Mario Cuomo
Martians have landed in Nevada. Really. State legislators and the Republican Governor just enacted the largest tax increase in the state's history, but the Democratic leader of the Assembly swears that the tax burden won't fall on humans....
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The Brundtland Legacy
The five-year tenure of Gro Harlem Brundtland as head of the World Health Organisation has just come to an end. She leaves behind some notable political successes, but many health failures. Her time at the helm has significantly reduced complaints,...
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Berlin vs. Washington
The majority of Germans (55 percent) are convinced that relations between Berlin and Washington will soon be improved significantly. According to a survey by the Emnid research institute, even the Greens are optimistic; 61 percent believe transatlantic tensi
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Reformed to Death
The Bush administration has weighed in on the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education appropriation bill being debated in Congress. Unfortunately, the administration's Statement of Policy on the bill shows how deeply it has embraced expansion of the welfare
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