Strikers should be fired

A general strike is crippling Greece today.

In principle, strike may be a legitimate tool of the employees to show or try to show that their work is more important and valuable than what the employer seems to indicate by her behavior. This claim may turn out to be right. However, this claim may also turn out to be wrong. Only if the strikers bear some responsibility for their decisions and behavior and if they are at risk of losing advantages because of their decisions, strikes may turn out to be a tool that improves the life of the society.



Once a nation enters the mode of thinking in which the employees are always right - because the government and the employers who are in charge are just reflections of the same striking employees - the nation is just destined to drop to the bottom of the sea. Glub glub glub. Such a nation is going to give ever greater advantages to the employees for ever smaller amount of work.

Tomorrow, there will be a strike in the Czech Republic. Trains and various cities' public transportation systems will be among the sectors that will make many consumers upset. Of course, the strike won't occur in as dramatic conditions as Greece but it's still annoying.




While I don't claim that my homeland is perfect, I see a striking difference between the atmosphere in Czechia and the atmosphere in Greece. In Czechia, most of the population realizes that the striking unionists are lazy assholes who just protect their own interests. Facebook is flooded with groups claiming that the "unionists don't speak on behalf of me". General population realizes that it has nothing to do with them. More importantly, it really has nothing to do with them.

Czech President Václav Klaus has urged the Czech government to hire private bus companies to do the job previously done by the unionists, and tell the strikers "good-bye". That means to fire them. I think that most people who are not directly involved in the strikes agree with our president. Some people will surely disagree. Some hardcore communist and/or socialist voters will always support lazy unionists, regardless of the context, as a matter of principle - but they're fortunately a small minority.

The situation in Greece looks very different. As far as I can say, the political confrontation in Greece is about a disagreement between lazy parasites and even lazier and more parasitic parasites. It's a battle between socialists, hardcore socialists, and communists. I am not sure whether there is any top politician in Greece who dares to say that as many of the strikers should be fired as possible. It's a job for any sensible employer to minimize the expenses and an employee who doesn't work much but who would surely love to be getting lots of money is not such a positive contribution to a company, or the mankind, for that matter.

Even if Greece were forgiven the USD 0.4 trillion debt, what's really wrong about the country - which already has the lowest Standard and Poor's rating among all countries in the world (and don't forget that some of them are really screwed!) - the main problem is that the citizens have lost their sanity. Their way of thinking is incompatible with the creation of wealth. It's not just the case that a majority of the Greeks have lost their sanity. It seems that almost no one who realizes that what they're doing is really intolerable is able to survive in that country. I think that everyone who would loudly say that the strikers have to be fired and replaced would be harassed or beaten in Greece.



Business as usual in Athens. Sara Firth of Russia Today is offering us a pretty peaceful, relaxed report. :-) Good idea to send them EUR 100 billion to have more money for Molotov cocktails and yogurts to throw at the cops. See two more minutes of some drama. The Telegraph can only shoot such things from a safe distance. ;-)

Greece is totally captured by insane conspiracy theories claiming that their debt is not real and that their unsustainable fiscal situation is just a numerical trick perpetrated by the evil global banks and others. It is just totally crazy. It is a country that is importing about 3 times more stuff than it is exporting. It is a country where people eat 3 times more than what they produce. How can these shocking and comprehensible coefficients be hand waved away by references to big foreign banks?

Obviously, a solution has to be radical if there's any hope for Greece to get back on the track. All government employees should see their salaries and pensions drop by something like 50 percent because it's really the government employees who are the source of the problem. That wouldn't reduce the living standards by 50 percent; it would only reduce them by about 30% because there would be a corresponding 20% drop in the prices as the bogus wealth of the people is erased and brought closer to the reality. But a radical change of this magnitude is necessary.

Slovakia has agreed to participate in the second wave of the likely waste of money but they have several conditions:

1. the Greek government should make more savings
2. it must start privatization and the opposition has to promise to continue in the privatization as well
3. the loan should be guaranteed by the state Greek property
4. the private sector should agree with delaying the maturity of the bonds by seven years

I have some doubts about the ability of Slovakia to assure that its viewpoint will be adopted but they're still perfectly sensible demands. The budget cuts have clearly been extremely far from being sufficient so far.

Privatization is needed. Together with that, Greece has to liquidate pretty much all of its "achievements" giving special rights to all the employees who are pretty much guaranteed by the law to be un-firable and to have salaries that are much higher than the work that they actually do. The business environment in Greece is suffocating because of the anti-employer and anti-prosperity socialist garbage regulations that so many Greeks still have the chutzpah to defend.

No wonder that the unemployment has increased from 11.6 to 16.2 percent in the last year and the unemployment between less-than-25-year-old folks, around 40%, resembles countries like Zimbabwe. Who would like to employ people under such conditions? The strikers pretend not to realize that the very demands they're defending during their strikes are the source of the high unemployment and the misery (which will inevitably get worse).

Because it's otherwise way too likely that all additional loans will be thrown to the trash bin, they should be actually backed up by some actual assets such as islands and the remaining state companies that have some value.

Finally, the private sector must share a burden because the taxpayers in the countries of creditors - and even in countries that have nothing to do with Greece (except for having entered the same currency union) - shouldn't be the only ones who suffer and who lose their money. Obviously, the rating agencies will have to decide whether such a forced collaboration means a "default". If I were working for a rating agency, obviously, I would think that it does. But the default of Greece is really unavoidable. All these extra ideas are just ideas how to make it more organized, following some predictable rules, and to give Greece chance that it will start to function as a proper country again in the near future. They're not ideas how to avoid any default because this would be an impossible goal.

If I were not personally able to see a Greek political party which is supported by dozens of percent of the population and which loudly emphasizes that the way of life that Greece was choosing in the recent decades was unacceptable, unsustainable, and has to be abandoned, and that it was unforgivable for the Greeks to repeatedly vote for pernicious left-wing populist parties such as PASOK, I wouldn't pay a penny to that country. Unfortunately, it seems to be the case. It is a nation brainwashed by idiotic utopias about a paradise where employees may have all advantages without doing the corresponding work. Such a nation has no future and shouldn't have any future.

It sounds very unpopular and I know that many people won't like it but I am convinced that at this moment, Greece vitally needs someone like Pinochet to take over, save the country and send it in the essentially right direction.

Windows 8 PCs will be like iPad 2.8

Microsoft is catching up.



The video looks pretty impressive and the inspiration from iOS in particular is hard to hide.




Available in late 2012.

Greece: can the infusion remain permanent?

Since the last year, the sick fat socialist pig called the Hellenic Republic has devoured EUR 110 billion - a package that was pumped into that country a year ago - and it's hungry again. It needs another package of EUR 100 billion or so, Fitch calculated.



So the EUR 110 billion gift has disappeared and we are where we were one year ago.

Some things have changed, however. First of all, today we are already pretty much certain that Greece hasn't succeeded in a single condition that was imposed a year ago. Populist politicians want to look nice in the eyes of their parasite voters - and they don't care about any creditors.

Also, in May 2010, people were shocked to see that the interest rate on the Greek government debt soared to nearly 9 percent. Last week, in May 2011, the interest rate soared to 17 percent - twice the value where it was a year ago. The two-year loans have a 26-percent annual interest rate. I don't know whether it's the rate (that should be exponentiated to get the yield) or the yield - and be sure that at numbers that are this high, it makes a significant difference. ;-)




Most people don't realize how stunningly high the figure EUR 110 billion that Greece has devoured is. For all practical local purposes, it's infinitely high. All predictable laws of economy and the rational behavior resulting from it break down. Greece has 11 million people, if I count the infants. That means that the average Greek, including infants, has devoured the "loan" of EUR 10,000 per year. And this is just the infusion from outside. Normal nations are supposed to work, too. For normal nations, the imbalance is supposed to be relatively low. Just to be sure, your humble correspondent has spent less money during the same year.

Equivalently speaking, all Greeks could be declared pensioners as soon as they're born. They could be put into fancy retirements homes and none of them would have to ever work. It would cost about the same to the European taxpayer. In other words, the country is pretty much economically dead. And it doesn't care. No surprise. There is apparently no threat it faces.

Now, I want to mention the crazy politically correct vocabulary that's being used in this context. We are hearing the term "restructuralization" and similar constructs instead of the proper "sovereign default" which should be governed by the laws about "bankruptcy". That's because people are supposed to believe and convince others that we're living on a civilized continent where state bankruptcy couldn't ever take place, could it? Only the third world, e.g. Latin America, could face such things.

Except that this opinion is nothing else than flagrant racism. Greece is about as screwed an economy as Argentina was before it bankrupted some time ago. So why the hell people are trying to create a different impression? There's no difference, and if there is, chances are that Argentina was more promising. This dilution of the common terms - that, as some pathologically insane utopianists believe, can be permanently avoided - is affecting the solution of such situations, too. People are saying that the "restructuralization" (default) would be disastrous, and so on.

But the restructuralization is already taking place. Some creditors are forced to delay the maturity of the debt, sacrifice parts of it, and so on. Guess which creditors are forced to do such things. Yes, it's the taxpayers. The taxpayers are just milking machines that fucking Greek communist politicians and their international accomplices may rob whenever they want. No one will notice, and if they will, the taxpayers may always be shitted into their faces, can't they? The politicians who sign these deals don't pay a penny from their pockets, so why wouldn't they sign it? They may be invited to vacations in Greece in the future.

It's the fucking parasites - the voters of the Greek socialist party and similar scum across the world - who are the foci of this whole theater and whose interests have to be protected by the politicians. That includes much of the nation of Greece. After all, a majority of the nation is composed of parasites, and because the country is a democracy, they ultimately decide. And they decide to steal money of anyone else they encounter.

I am disgusted by the behavior of the politicians and others. There's a clear looming bankruptcy of a fucking communist government that should have bankrupted decades ago. So please let it die. Make it die. The socialist government of Greece is a nasty tumor that should be not just left to die but deliberately liquidated. The bloated Greek government sector has to be nuked, neutralized, and if thousands of people have to starve to death to achieve this goal, they should be encouraged to starve to death. This is the best thing that could happen to the Greek nation.

By the way, if you think that the previous sentence is extremist, I assure you that 90% of the Slovak citizens agree with it, among majorities in many other countries.

In the case of insolvency, the politicians from the countries with lots of creditors etc. should insist to be paid by whatever Greece has, such as its islands, and if Greece decided to reject this offer, the creditors should declare the war against that arrogant crippled country. The assumption is that the creditors would win and would get what they deserve with some legitimate interest in hundreds of percent.

I am exaggerating but just a little bit. The behavior of the international politicians who support the Greek nation in believing that it may devour EUR 100 billion every year - which is why the Greek government sector may continue to be a giant fattening station - is much more insane an exaggeration than anything I have proposed as a solution above.

New IMF headquarters

I have a message from the boss to all the world financiers and politicians who read TRF. The International Monetary Fund has relocated its headquarters to a neat island in New York:



See more videos about the facility.

Out of the 14,000 inmates (maximum capacity is 17,000), 92% are black or Hispanic and 90% have not graduated high school. A nice place.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn has graduated high school but he decided to relocate after an unpleasant experience in a hotel near the Times Square. It turned out that a 32-year-old 6-feet-tall :-) black maid called Ms Nafissatou Diallo wasn't included in the USD 3,000 fee for one night.




Moreover, he wasn't in the hotel at all - instead, he was having a dinner with his daughter and his cell phone has quantum tunneled to the hotel room. But the chief of the IMF fund doesn't really need a cell phone so he simply left the restaurant for the airport.

Well, more seriously, I can't be any certain whether he is innocent. My guess is that he is not; given some known data, his alibi sounds awkward, indeed. If the DNA tests have indeed shown that pieces of his p*nis ended on the Guinean maid's lips and an*s, it sounds more convincing a piece of evidence by a few orders of magnitude.

And there may have been other cases in which he was not innocent. Of course, if he is proven guilty, he should spend some time in a prison, and of course, it's a good news that a top socialist leader of a big country and the leading 2012 presidential candidate in the same country - the kind of guys who can get away with anything - may be punished like that.



About this large...

Still, I think that 15-20 years for an act that hasn't really substantially hurt anyone is excessive. This isn't really equivalent to a murder, is it? I think that some other activities of the IMF have been much more hurtful. According to the Czech president's speech in October 2010, the IMF is a barbaric relic of the Keynesian era that should be abolished as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, it's not difficult for the French leftists to replace Strauss-Kahn by a morally cleaner person. For example, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a co-chairman of a leftist group in the European Parliament, is just a pedophile. ;-)

Bill Gates on global warming

Related: Yesterday, Czech President Václav Klaus gave a talk in Cambridge, U.K.:

The Global Warming Doctrine is Not a Science: Notes for Cambridge

Now let's get to the topic mentioned in the title.

Microsoft has just bought Skype just like if it were buying an ice cream - for USD 8.5 billion - but Bill Gates finds it important to talk about climate change (that's how the hosts want to frame it) and alternative energy sources (that's how he wants to frame it) in this Grist video of a dialogue during a Climate Solutions fundraiser breakfast in Seattle two days ago:

Watch live streaming video from grist at livestream.com

The dialogue begins at 6:30 (unless they have already removed the beginning from the video), after the green folks are encouraged to invest dollars to the green lobbyists so that the donations are inflated by 50% and they return to them so that they have even more green dirty money in the future, and so on.

The host wanted to improve the efficiency of his Prius by inserting his skull to the motor. He broke his skull and got some stitches. So Bill Gates also took a hat in an attempt to pretend that he is an idiot, too. Both of them have "caps" but only one of them is also good in "trade". ;-)

Well, it's kind of a bummer. :-)

But what Bill Gates is saying is not really offensive to me in any substantial way. He likes the challenge to find new energy sources and because the condition that CO2 shouldn't be produced makes it even more challenging, he says why not. Unlike the green folks, Gates wants to help the poor nations so his new energy source should be cheap. He sensibly thinks that only technological innovation may substantially change the CO2- and energy-related numbers (and that this activity should ultimately be controlled by the invisible hand of the free markets!) which some green people may already find heretical.

When Gates is asked what he has done to learn about climate change, he mentions that there are good sources and the best one is by Mr Václav Smil. The green audience gets scared because Czech names and global warming hysteria don't get along too well.




However, Mr Václav Smil, a Czech Canadian (Gates' Czech pronunciation is very good), isn't really a skeptic. The main reason why I am not actively aware of this unskeptical but not too hysterical man focusing on new energy sources is that he is less important than your humble correspondent in the climate science. But it's apparently enough for Bill Gates.

Bill Gates then says lots of boring bureaucratic stuff about his meetings and negotiations with deluded politicians and entrepreneurs. Around 12:40, Gates says he was begging to get more money but he didn't get anything. It's indeed very natural for Bill Gates to beg for money! ;-)

He complains that there is no bipartisan support for spending of hundreds of billions of dollars for R&D in this business. There's already lots of money being wasted in this way and the results are extremely modest, to put it optimistically. That's despite the fact that many competent people are already working on it. Adding much more money could only mean adding lots of incompetent people who could drive not only the average quality but even the overall research results to the South.

It seems to me that Bill Gates doesn't appreciate how huge amount of money he wants to be wasted. If the main guy in the largest software company doesn't have enough money to do any of these things, it's just not cheap. The society doesn't have thousands of Microsoft companies to be wasted for fruitless research.

Gates is being "praised" for saying that we can't just lower CO2 in energy production by 80% - we have to reduce it by 100%. No comment. ;-) At some point, Gates also says that in a formula, we don't want the population go to zero. The green folks laugh at him hysterically: you don't know us too well, Bill, do you?

Surprisingly, Gates fails to propose another clever method to improve the formula: shrink the people. If all people will be short and small, they will breathe out less CO2, need smaller cars, less steel, and so on, but they will be equally happy. The CO2 emissions will go down, won't they? Why don't we reduce humans to something like rats? The global warming activists have already done it with their minds, knowledge, and moral values. Rats are 99% lighter so they may reduce CO2 emissions by 99%, too.

The host tells Gates that Gates spends lots of time in China, a country that is "so much ahead of us" (us=US) in clean energy. I was rolling on the floor, imagining the dirty chimneys covering China where the desire to make a plant clean is exactly zero.



China is so much ahead of the U.S. in clean energy. :-) Al Gore has already been astonished by the excellent new five-year plan by the incoming communist leader of China. Xi Jinping is just... wow! They have already made the right choice and Al Gore will spend the rest of his life to fight for the West's being controlled by communist dictators and amazing five-year plans, too (which isn't really much different from what he has been doing in his life so far).

While answering, Gates focuses on technological progress and research and he totally sensibly says that the U.S. is still well ahead of China in the development of new technologies. No doubt about it. The idea that China has become a top machine to produce the most advanced concepts and technologies is preposterous. It's just a big and cheap factory to produce and imitate what people invented and produced elsewhere. And when it's ahead, it's because of the quantity, not quality. Of course, there are exceptions to the rule but this is the rule - despite the fact that lots of people (including famous ones) got used to parroting something completely different. The universities and research places are concentrated mainly in the U.S.

At the end, the host informed us that the organizers had promised the Gates Foundation not to ask whether the foundation would get involved in climate change. Being a rat, unsurprisingly, he asked whether the foundation would get involved in climate change. Gates spends several minutes to say Nope, the foundation will continue to do things to help the poor (including those related to the availability of energy but not climate-driven).

Again, what Gates is saying and doing wouldn't be enough to promote him to the status of a climate skeptic but on the other hand, I don't see anything substantially offensive about his behavior. He's helping the poor and trying to spend his money because he has realized that what he has earned was excessive and unnecessary for him.

Intel: tri-gate 3D transistors within a year

Intel Sandy Bridge microprocessors are already being sold. However, Intel just announced something much more shocking, namely Ivy Bridge microprocessors that will use 3-dimensional tri-gate transistors (Google News).



The 2-dimensional transistor is illustrated on the left picture, the 3-dimensional one is on the right.




Intel's main competitor, AMD, has responded in a somewhat tragicomic fashion. They essentially said that no one will need to buy an excessively new technology that will increase performance by 37% and reduce power consumption by 50% (which may naturally double battery life, and so on) because everyone has the freedom to buy obsolete technology that sucks. ;-)

Intel will gradually switch from the 22 nm technology to the 14 nm technology by the end of 2012, I guess. I am not sure whether the percentage figures above refer to the improvement including the jump to 14 nm or not.

Education bubble

One of the world's most ingenious venture capitalists, Peter Thiel, the father of PayPal and the first major Facebook investor, believes that the air from the subprime bubble has already been moved into another, perhaps more long-lived bubble waiting to be burst, the higher education bubble.

Google News, Tech Crunch, Business Insider, CIP, Bee

What do I think? Well, I completely agree. People are wasting way too much money and time with formal education and degrees, especially when it comes to degrees at expensive universities. Both at the global level and the Czech level, the number of college degrees people pursue is unnaturally high.




By the way, if you ask how I took the picture of Peter Thiel, well, I was just walking on a sidewalk near my concrete block and a superfancy Mercedes suddenly stopped nearby and took me to the airport. So I was suddenly walking around a castle in Nice, France, and Richard Lindzen just happened to be taking a picture of Peter Thiel and other famous faces, so I took my copy, too.

How many readers would think that I am just making it up? ;-) I assure you that your humble correspondent is unable to lie.

But back to the main story. There is a certain fraction of people in the society who are actually able to learn certain complicated things at a high enough level. There is also a limited amount of work that the society needs to be done and that require college or higher education. And there is a limited chance that the particular stuff that the people learn will be useful for their future source of income. And there is a rather small difference in the things you may learn at different possible places.

When it comes to all these limitations, it is pretty clear that the people are spending way too much time in colleges. First, too many people are trying to get degrees in various disciplines which inevitably drags the average quality of the members of these communities closer to the bottom of the sea.

Second, there is still a lot of simple work - that doesn't require any PhD and not even lower degrees - that the society needs to be done but there's no one who expects to do such jobs. Third, most of the stuff that the people learn in the colleges is not directly relevant to what they're doing later. And fourth, the advantages of an expensive or famous college or school turn out to be largely inconsequential for the money-producing occupations.

Respect for education has become one of the clichés that a large fraction of the society has adopted but it has been mixed with political correctness. After all, everyone is equal, so if one combines these two insights, it follows that pretty much everyone should struggle to get a college degree if not a PhD. But should she?

It has become almost heretical to ask such a question. However, this question should not only be asked but the likely answer for most people is No. A typical person spends a significant portion of her life with similar activities and those years can't really be regained afterwards because macroscopic processes are irreversible.

Some people such as Lexington of the Economist who disagree with Thiel show graphs that demonstrate a huge correlation between the average income and the level of education.



However, what this argument overlooks is a well-known wisdom that

Correlation is not causation.

If A (higher level of education) is correlated with B (higher expected salary and lower odds of unemployment), it doesn't mean that A is a cause of B. Even if the correlation is such that it is unlikely to have arisen by accident, it doesn't mean that there's any direct causation between A and B.

Naively, you could think that either A caused B or B caused A. However, it's not true. There is a third possible explanation - namely that both A and B were caused by something else, namely C. This largely applies to this case as well - and C is mostly the "innate aptitude" or something similar that existed before the decision to acquire or not to acquire a college degree. The talented people are likely to have a higher income whether or not they get a degree - but they are also more likely to get a degree so these two consequences of their talent will end up being correlated with one another even though there's no direct causation in between them.

But there is one more reason why the graph above doesn't disprove the idea of a higher education bubble. This bonus reason is that the higher education bubble exists on the side of the employers, too. I think that it's not just the consumers - the students who pay tuition - but also the employers who are still overestimating the value of the degrees, even though less so than the payees of the tuition.

Well, an employer surely wants an employee who is good at whatever work he is supposed to do. This requires some talent, eagerness to work hard, and some ability to deal with the co-workers, business partners, and environment, to adapt, learn new things, and so on (I have surely missed some important issues). And those things are largely correlated with the level of education, too.

However, sending a person to a 5-year or 15-year process of higher education is not necessarily the most effective method to figure out whether he is good at something much more specific. Chances are that an employer may find out whether someone is appropriate by much more effective - and much more accurate - methods than by looking at degrees in the applicant's CV.

In the previous paragraphs, I have largely discussed jobs that are a "preparation for life". However, there also exists a more inherent side of education, one that is obviously closer to my heart. John Dewey has said

Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.

Obviously, knowledge of many things has an immense value by itself, regardless of the economic consequences. You don't expect a string theorist to say anything else - or to have a lower respect to pure knowledge, do you? Nevertheless, I think that even many (or most) high-energy theoretical physicists are doing their job just like people are doing any other job - as a source of income that is convenient enough, without any special emotions.

Fine. So liberal education and teaching of pure science is needed, isn't it?

Except that even in this spiritual realm of education, there should still exist some efficiency in the process of teaching and learning. Even if you forget about the money, it's questionable whether the time - the lives of the people - is being invested properly and efficiently. The most straightforward way to quantify the question whether time is being wasted is to convert time to money according to the "time is money" law and let the people optimize their money again. But even when this is not done, people should try to think rationally whether they're doing the right thing.

A special discussion is required to discuss tuition and the differences in its magnitude at different places. I have been largely educated in the socialist (and post-socialist) system where education was (and still is) free - and the socialist propaganda would emphasize this point about tuition (and personally paid healthcare) in the evil capitalist system whenever it could.

Well, I think that tuition may play a helpful role - and in some contexts, it is literally an investment and the students should pay some money for the investment, at least to cover a big part of the expenses. The school's chance to obtain more money from the excited students (and their parents) is exerting pressure on the school to increase its quality which is good. This is intuitively the case for law schools or management schools that prepare the students to earn some big money.

However, would I recommend someone - who is not a multimillionaire or their son or daughter - to pay tuition around $40,000 a year or higher? Especially if you discuss physics? I wouldn't. I find it crazy. There are many things that I have learned at schools. There are many more things I have learned outside the schools. When all those things are reasonably quantified, I don't think that the schools were as useful as hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In reality, people are paying money for the studies in sciences because they expect long-term employment in the field.

Alternatively, you may divide the tuition to individual lectures and you would get dozens of dollars for every single hour-long lecture. Isn't that too much? I can imagine paying $10 for some good lectures - but every lecture, with a topic defined by someone else and with a very variable quality? I don't think so. People never make this comparison with other ways how the dozens of dollars may be spent. That's why the tuition ceases to be a regulating mechanism pushing the subjects to behave economically or rationally.

Some people don't mind if they're being bored while sitting in a class where most of the information can either be learned much more quickly or should be learned more slowly (and/or in the solitude of the homes), or you don't care about it all (especially because you could learn some of the "details" later if you needed them which is unlikely), is just a waste of time. Of course, the teacher has to be paid but for the student, it's often a lot of work, too. Does he always appreciate the time invested to such things?

Various colleges have totally different flair. Almost no one in the West knows Charles University - but after a decade in the U.S., I am confident that the undergraduate education in Prague is pretty much equivalent to that at Harvard or elsewhere - if not better. The inferior quality of the research environment kicks in at the graduate level.

But at the graduate level, it's still true that e.g. the physics PhD program at Rutgers is not that different from the corresponding program at Harvard even though Harvard is much more famous a school. At the postdoc level and faculty, Harvard is arguably a stronger place - even though it wasn't the case in the mid 1990s when Rutgers and Santa Barbara were the main machines driving the Second Superstring Revolution (before the traditional top schools sucked most of the top brains).

However, does it really matter whether you become a PhD student at one school or another? There's a lot of worshiping of the brands. It's a special feeling to be excited e.g. about the brand of Harvard (much like some teenagers worship Nike or another brand - something I could never understand). I remember my excitement (and songs) in 2001 when I became convinced, after the interview in the Harvard Society of Fellows, that I did well.

But this kind of excitement fanned by some superficial knowledge - while an interesting portion of human emotions - is exactly what is ultimately producing bubbles. In reality, even when it comes e.g. to the income of the professors, the gap between the top schools and the more generic schools is much smaller than the gap in their brands - and gap in the tuition that people are ready to pay. In my opinion, this is irrational as well.

Moreover, the gap between the brands' influence isn't large in many other contexts. This is why I don't think that famous universities may save otherwise falling quality of research. When I learned five years ago that laymen interested in fundamental physics are ready to pay as much attention to a stinky and idiotic computer administrator with 0 contributions to science at a not-stellar-class university as they would pay to the big shots from the world's most famous university, I have learned my lesson. The brands really don't make any difference - and it is primarily the people who waste for expensive tuition who think otherwise.

Portugal's bailout: panic is suddenly gone

José Sócrates, an obnoxiously politically correct leader of Portugal with a somewhat arrogant surname, has changed his mind. His country needs a bailout, after all.




The European Union, led by an equally Portuguese José Manuel Barroso and similar chaps, is reacting in a typical way: do you want EUR 70 billion? No problem at all! You will get whatever you ask for - seventy billion euros is pretty much nothing for us. More precisely, if we tell them, and we don't even have to tell them, the European taxpayers won't hesitate to pay you billions, trillions, or quadrillions - choose any word you want.

Despite the large numbers, almost no one is panicking today. People got used to such things. In fact, they love certainty, so the euro has climbed to USD 1.43. It will be so clean and nice when Portugal gets "its" money and avoids debt problems, most traders seem to think.

Meanwhile, the opinions in the countries that actually have to pay or could be asked to pay - such as the Czech Republic - may be a bit different but no politically correct journalist would care about such things, would she? Czechia may pay to Portugal up to USD 60 per person, including infants - that's like a new digital camera for everyone.

Czech poll on Europe

According to a new poll (March 20th, covered about 10,000 respondents), the Czech Republic would probably reject an EU entry if the referendum were taking place today: 42 percent would vote "join" while 45 percent would vote "stay away". Quite a different result from 77-23 which was the result of the 2003 "Yes" referendum.

74 percent of the respondents disagree with our entry to the eurozone - with the adoption of the euro as the currency. 62 percent of the people oppose Turkey's membership in the EU, largely because of different cultures and security threats. On the contrary, 66 percent would approve Iceland as a new EU member. 73 percent of the people disagree with EU's bailouts for countries such as Greece or Ireland - Portugal wasn't mentioned in the poll yet.

58 percent of the Czechs consider the European institutions to be ineffective and untrustworthy. A very negative image of the EU bureaucracy added a lot to this outcome. As you can see, the pan-European political institutions don't have too much credibility in our country. However, I have to add that the credibility of the national institutions is not much higher - quite on the contrary. ;-)

The approval rate of the Czech government and the Czech Parliament is almost systematically well below 50 percent as well. The Czech President is the only visible political institution in the country whose approval rate oscillates around 70 percent.

Hopes for a U.S. government shutdown

The U.S. debt ceiling has been USD 14.294 trillion - since last February when it was raised by unprecedented USD 1.9 trillion - and the actual debt is just USD 0.095 trillion lower than this value.

The U.S. government shutdown is becoming a real possibility. It could come as early as on Friday - assuming that the Senate Democrats will try to reject the rather ambitious "3rd stopgap bill". The White House has already rejected it.



Despite the short-term shocks and hassles, I think that such a shutdown would be a very healthy procedure for the future of America and the world. The U.S. politicians' skyrocketing chutzpah - when it comes to the wasting of the taxpayer money - would be reduced a little bit. The future behavior of the politicians could become more responsible - in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Obviously, the debt ceiling is just another artificial and random bureaucratic figure. Without a bill that makes the USD 14.29 trillion figure special, nothing dramatic would happen when this threshold is breached. However, similar artificial thresholds may be necessary to make the politicians realize that something is getting out of control.




I am an admirer of the United States but I find the U.S. debt to be so high that buying of the U.S. treasury securities has become irrational. If you divide USD 14,390 billion by 0.309 billion - the population of the U.S. - you will get about USD 46,000. That's a lot of debt for an average person - including infants.

Moreover, the debt seems to be increasing more quickly than the GDP, despite the fact that the recession has been over for some time.

The world continues to lend money to America - because it has gotten used to it. Many people have decided that America has acquired an eternal degree, "the country that can always pay its debt". However, such a degree only exists in the minds of the people who don't think about the problems seriously.



Beijing, 2030: this realistic ad puts recent claims that shutdown would violate anti-slavery amendment under a slightly comical light. Under the influence of the current socialist government in America, the ad was ultimately censored away by the networks for which it was produced.

In reality, the American debt - when expressed in multiples of the GDP - is not far from the most troubled European countries. However, America is a bigger country. Does it make its debt safer or less safe? Traders obviously think that it makes the debt safer.

I think it makes it less safe because smaller countries such as Greece may be bailed out by other countries - such as Germany - that are afraid of the proliferation of problems that would result from a Greek bankruptcy. Now, Spain and Italy could be larger but if they found themselves in problems, they could still be bailed out - although it would be far more costly.

But almost no one can really bail out America. That's what makes people think that America will never need it. But this logic is kind of inverted and based on wishful thinking. America may need it.

In some sense, a dramatic impression is needed for the politicians to become more sensible. If such a dramatic event is absent, the likes of Timothy Geithner will continue to abuse arguments and would-be arguments in increasingly more lopsided ways, in order to uncontrollably increase the money that the big government needs.

(By the way, note how Geithner tries to demagogically identify the government shutdown with bankruptcy even though it is pretty much the opposite thing.) This has been the trend for many years and the fiscal irresponsibility of the U.S. government is not that far e.g. from the Greek example. A huge Europe-like socialist monster has been growing in Washington, D.C.

Incidentally, I think that too much pathetic nationalism is being used in those arguments about the "impossibility of the default". The whole financial system of the world would surely collapse, and so on. Shouldn't you try to regulate your insane nationalist messiah complex a little bit, Gentlemen?

If the U.S. government went bankrupt, it would just mean that the people who hold the U.S. debt would be in some trouble - they would lose a part of their assets. If the U.S. dollar went to 1/2 of its current value, its holders would lose 1/2 of their assets in the U.S. dollars. But would it make trading impossible?

It's just nonsense. The U.S. dollar and the U.S. treasuries are just two possible things that a person may hold. Some people think of the U.S. dollars as the "ultimately constant unit" of wealth. But this is a purely subjective feeling. People think in this way because other people think in this way. But obviously, if the credit worthiness of the U.S. government changed dramatically or the U.S. dollar fell, people would quickly understand that it's not a good approximation to consider the U.S. dollar or U.S. treasuries a constant. They would quickly pick a different benchmark or unit to express their wealth.

Any upheaval of this magnitude would cause many shocks across the world - but they would have approximately as many winners as the number of losers (outside America). However, for America, that would be the ultimate shock, and this is the event you really want to avoid.

So if I were their constituent, I would encourage the lawmakers to get rid of the fear of the government shutdown, prepare for it, and actively work so that it will actually occur because this "diet" is badly needed. There have been about 5 government shutdowns in the 1980s and 1990s - the last one in 1995 (when the debt ceiling was just 5 trillion) helped to create the Clinton budget surpluses around 1999-2000. Sixteen years is clearly a long time...

CERN chooses Hewlett-Packard for networking

According to Business Wire,

HP Boosts Performance of CERN Network

Products and services of Hewlett-Packard were chosen by the CERN network team to deal, among other things, with the 15 million gigabytes of data that the LHC needs to share, store, and analyze every year.




That's more data than what could be stored on the whole hard disk of my ancient HP Pavilion ze4125 laptop ;-) which I still keep alive but no longer use too often.

It seems that the network will primarily use the new IPv6 protocol for IP addresses.

Japan: we wasted ¥6.55 trillion for 214 failed AGW projects

Today, we learned that based on the 2010 GDP figures, China overtook Japan as the world's second largest economy.



It may be pretty unlikely for Japan to return to its place because the current mess in the land of the rising Sun seems pretty remarkable. Japan Times just announced the results of an official government audit:

Trillions for biomass projects fruitless

Their 214 biomass projects, motivated purely by the global warming hysteria and funded in the recent six years, have led to no results. The cost was ¥6.55 trillion i.e. about $80 billion. That's like the GDP of the whole Czech Republic for 4 months. It's gone ;-)





There is one more event that can be compared to these biomass projects and whose price was $80 billion: hurricane Katrina. Just for totally dumb biomass projects, the bureaucratic jerks in Japan have caused the same damage to the Japanese taxpayers as the famous hurricane that landed in New Orleans.

Katrina killed 1,836 people, too. If each victim were an electron, their total mass would be exactly that of a proton.

Also, in the case of the Japanese biomass projects, 1,836 people are going to die. It's because 1,836 screwed Japanese government officials will commit hara-kiri. Or at least, they should: Naoto Kan and his not-only-socialist comrades should begin as role models. Besides hara-kiri, I can't imagine another acceptable response of a Japanese government official to such a larger-than-life failure.

Judging by an example, the projects seem stupid. They seem to be based on the idea that the country doesn't need to produce any new food; they may just recycle the old biomass. For example, one project for ¥1.6 billion was all about rebranding unsold boxed lunches from the supermarkets as dinners for the livestock.

Now, if the supermarkets aren't doing this thing by themselves, you may be pretty sure that they have a good economic reason not to do it. The management firm of this project collapsed and the project was abandoned. The managers themselves have surely swallowed a large portion of the evaporated money - and lots of additional subsidies that were paid to the very same things independently of this project.

The smartest politicians in Japan are slowly beginning to understand that the Japanese can't be completely fed by recycled biomass and recycled feces but it may take hundreds of years before the majority of those politicians will understand this point and reach a new consensus. Meanwhile, the global warming idiocy and the global warming idiots will waste and steal trillions of yens at many other places.

To save the once impressive empire, once again, I urge all Japanese politicians who have participated in this massive scandal to commit hara-kiri because you can't ever be useful for your country again.

Via Business Insider and Marc Morano

Poland, EU are joining the shale gas revolution

Shale gas is natural gas (NG) produced from shale i.e. from finely grained sedimentary rock composed of mud, flakes, and fragments of minerals.



Czech readers may want to know that "shale gas" is "plyn z břidlic", something we don't usually talk about. ;-)

Benny Peiser has distributed links to a couple of articles showing that the EU is getting serious about shale gas - which has been increasingly important in the U.S. from 2000 or so.

EU countries promote risky gas drilling (Spiegel)

---

Oil has joined the past: NG is the future (Business Insider)

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LNG Energy joins Polish shale gas project (press release)

I added the last link because it's very fresh. For CO2-obsessed people, natural gas produces about 20% less CO2 per kWh than oil and about 40% less than coal. Clearly, not so much difference for a CO2 fundamentalist. ;-)




More importantly, there are lots of reserves. The proved oil reserves are about 1.2 trillion barrels. However, the shale gas contains the equivalent of more than 1.2 trillion barrels, too. And it's likely that the estimate will keep on increasing.

Poland may soon become another "shale" Norway. One week ago, the Czech media would inform us that foreign companies came to look for shale gas in our homeland, too.

In particular, BasGas (Australia) and Cuadrilla Resources (United Kingdom) are going to check the territory around Valašské Meziříčí (Northeast of the country, near Poland) as well as the region near Barrandeum - between Beroun and Prague, one that is seen from the train if you travel from Pilsen to Prague - named after paleontologist Joachim Barrande who studied the rocks over there.



Nearby neighborhood of Prague, Barrandov, is also named after him and is the main Czech counterpart of Hollywood or at least Bollywood. In fact, this plate on the Barrandov Hill could even be viewed as the counterpart of the letters "Hollywood" in Hollywood even though it's a little bit smaller. :-)

I find the rocks in the Barrandeum fascinating and I wouldn't be too happy if they were destroyed by miners. On the other hand, they're fascinating because they look like the Moon landscape, and maybe the character wouldn't change much if the hills became a new powerful source of shale gas. ;-)

EU 2020 climate targets: $3.9 trillion

A few years ago, when this blog was getting started, there was a counter in the sidebar that was copied from (and created by) Steve Milloy's JunkScience.COM.

It was showing the nanodegrees Celsius that the carbon regulation managed to subtract from the global mean temperature - 0.07 °C per 50 years - and the cost of this policy which used to be referred to as the Kyoto protocol. The counter was based on the figure $150 billion per year - these were claimed to be the global expenses.



Steve Milloy would be attacked as a denier from the left and left. Carbon regulation couldn't have been that expensive, the fearmongers would scream. Well, times have changed. According to Business Green (link via Benny Peiser),

Europe must invest €2.9tn to meet 2020 emissions goal (other sources)

the EU commitments to reduce the carbonization of the economy before the year 2020 will cost a staggering €2.9 trillion which is $3.9 trillion.

That's the result of a study, Carbon Capital (PDF), by Accenture and Barclays Capital. The figure is $390 billion per year - it's more than twice the Milloy's "denier" value, and it's only the European Union which only represents 1/7 of the world's CO2 emissions.




If the expenses were extrapolated globally, according to a fairly shared burden, we should multiply the figure by 7 to get $2.7 trillion per year. That's 18 times the Milloy's figure that many alarmists have claimed to be an overestimate. And we're still talking about policies that can't possibly have any measurable impact on the global temperature.

So thanks to some breathtakingly irrational politicians who were tolerated at the top political tiers of our continent, the European Union is expected to pay dearly - €290 billion per year. The EU GDP per year is about €10,700 billion per year so you can see that according to the study, the Europeans will pay 2.7 percent of their whole GDP just for the meaningless "fight against climate change".

This is more than the budget for many traditional key sectors of the economy, including all of science. Even more strikingly, the annual €290 billion expenses are more than twice larger than the whole shared annual EU budget for 2011! ;-)

It's not hard to see that the climate regulation is a tumor that has to be liquidated as soon as possible. In five years or so, we have encountered an 18-fold increase of the amount of money wasted for this utter nonsense. If we see another 18-fold increase, we will be paying essentially 100% of our GDP to this idiocy.

Well, if there were a threat that this could be the case, I would prefer to reduce our compassion a little bit and shoot every person who dares to defend these insane policies. This is no longer funny. It's a threat for the civilization as we have known it for centuries.

Cella Energy hydrogen beads: gasoline for $1.50 per gallon

Cella Energy claims to be close to the construction of a new fuel that would be compatible with your car: it could literally replace ordinary gasoline, they claim.

Giz Mag, Google News

However, this new fuel would be made out of micron-sized nanotechnological beads - hydrides stored in small porous polymers. It would be cheaper than the regular gasoline - relatively to the prices in Central Europe, it would be 4 times cheaper.




The usual pseudoscientific tirades about the absence of CO2 emissions is a mandatory appendix in all the media.

Do you actually understand what the polymers are made out of, what happens with them in your regular motor, and how the fuel is produced? And most importantly, how close they are actually to a working prototype that you may pour into your motor?

Via klimaskeptik.cz

China working on thorium reactors

Ordinary nuclear power plants use uranium, Z=92, as their fuel.

Nuclear fission has done and is doing a great service to the mankind. However, the uranium still has several disadvantages. The waste products remain radioactive for thousands of years. And the world's reserves of uranium are only enough to cover less than a century of the mankind's energy consumption.



Thorite

Thorium, Z=90, avoids both of these problems and a few others. China has started a new program to develop a molten salt reactor based on thorium:

Brand new nuclear programme within 20 years (Register)

---

Google News

Note that the thorium reserves are enough to cover something like 8,000 years of the energy needs of the mankind. Moreover, the waste products' half-lifetimes are mostly below 50 years so they don't have to be stored for insanely long periods of time. In particular, plutonium and long-lived minor actinides are almost totally avoided.




The technology has been tried already in the 1950s and it was running in Oak Ridge between 1965 and 1969. The power plants may be smaller and they are safer. Kazuo Furukawa's private company - which has already built the Fuju reactor - hopes to produce a reactor in 5 years. The electricity could be profitable at current energy market prices. He even talks about a personal reactor in your garage.

Thanks to Peter F.

Intel Sandy Bridge is here

In recent years, I was disappointed by the rate at which the speed of microprocessors was increasing. While Moore's law describing the total number of transistors worked very well - the number of transistors in a computer is doubling every two years - and the memory (and flash disk) capacity was increasingly nicely as well, the frequencies of the microprocessors in computers you could buy were not changing much. Of course, I realize that there was a transition to multi-core processors, but anyway, it looked slow.

Finally, Intel began to sell its Sandy Bridge processors and they became a part of many computers that are sold across the world, including my homeland. They use the 32 nanometer architecture: finally some progress.

In 1971, computers would be built on a 10-micron architecture. Every five years or so, the distance scale dropped by a factor of two or so. When I was leaving America in 2007, they would be getting ready for the 45 nanometer architecture which was launched in 2008. Finally, we have another step.

The computers with the 32-nm chips consume less power - 17-55 W for laptops and 35-95 W for desktops. And of course, the speed may get a bit better, too. The jump to 22, 16, and 11 nanometers is planned for this year, 2013, and 2015, respectively. There could be a few more steps after that but it is not guaranteed: they are getting damn close to the size of the atom.




I am generally against subsidies but this is one of the contexts in which I could imagine some room for subsidies. I think that lots of slower and less efficient microprocessors will be produced in the future, making the consumers less satisfied than what would be possible and forcing them to pay more electricity than needed.

It seems to me that lots of the slowdown is due to the patents and copyrights which lead the fast companies to continue with their slower products and which prevent the slower companies from following the footsteps of their faster competitors.

Of course, the patents are very important for keeping research profitable. On the other hand, I can imagine that under some controllable and logical rules, the governments could buy these patents and release them to the public domain, at least in individual countries such as the U.S.

The justification would be that if a newer product X2 saves time and electricity that is worth P relatively to an older product X1, the government may afford to pay P for the upgrade from X1 to X2. I am sure that my fellow free-marketeers are going to burn me with anger :-) but still, I am curious what people think about these matters.

Sino-American renewable energy trade war

Benny Peiser has sent us - subscribers of his GWPF mailing list - some articles about a newly emerging trade war between China and America. This civil war inside the de facto Sino-American currency union is kind of incredible.

Let us start in the "good old days" before the trade war. As The New York Times recall, Evergreen Solar emerged in the last three years as one of the top 3 U.S. producers of solar panels. It was a source of pride for Deval Patrick and other socialist politicians of Massachusetts.



They have paid something between $43 and $58 million (it was a typo, thanks!) in subsidies - cash that was stolen from the sensible Massachusetts taxpayers and/or wittingly donated by the brainwashed ones. The idea has always been that it's great to waste money for this stuff because it will be making a better world in the distant future.

In reality, of course, such companies and projects belong among the most ephemeral and kitshy activities that people are doing these days. Within three years, the company decided to move its production to China whose socialist government can waste even more money - much more easily stolen from the Chinese workers - than the U.S. government. Moreover, the standard advantages of cheaper labor add to the reasons.




China is doing what the green politicians and activists in America have always wanted: it is actually supporting alternative energy sources. Because they're not profitable - instead, pretty much by definition, alternative energy sources lead to a financial loss - the Chinese government has to pay for that. Isn't it exactly what the green activists wanted? Isn't it the only way how it could take place?

China is also subsidizing wind turbines. In this way, it is sharing the burden in the transition to the renewable energy that the green people - including those in the Obama administration - have defended for years. What is the answer of America? Well,

US targets China’s wind subsidy.

America has filed a complaint with the World Trade Organization. I kid you not. That's how Obama's administration cares about the transition to the renewable energy sources in the world.

Needless to say, the reaction is irrational from any viewpoint. If you think that it's a good idea to move away from the fossil fuels and to waste money for sources of energy that are not profitable at the present and that are at risk of remaining unprofitable for years or decades, then you should praise China and criticize America for making the transition harder.

If you're a sensible person who thinks it's stupid to waste the money for unprofitable forms of energy, but you may imagine that the energy may become profitable at some point in the future, then you should thank China that it is wasting its own money and not the American money. When they develop better technologies which will no longer require subsidies, they may be used for free - essentially in the whole world. Even if China wanted to prevent their achievements by patents, it won't be able to enforce them.

The only logic in which the lawsuit makes any sense is the logic of a debauched politician who wants to feel better by wasting a maximum amount of money from their constituents. Indeed, if you're such a politician in America, it's bad if unprofitable companies are moving to China because you will have no companies to waste your constituents' money for and you will feel weaker.

America is attacking not only Chinese wind turbines. It also attacks the Chinese solar industry - which will be extended by Evergreen Solar, as we have mentioned. For example,

Pentagon cannot buy Chinese solar panels anymore

Try to decide whether these countries could co-operate in a hypothetical project of lowering CO2 emissions if they can't even agree that both countries are allowed to waste subsidies for solar panels and wind turbines that only produce a few percent of the electricity these days. These subsidies for the actual production of current, unprofitable products are actually about the wasting of the money. But imagine how the countries could agree about positive money.

In the current perverse world, however, it's much more devastating for a politician if he loses a channel by which he can waste his taxpayers' money. If he - more precisely, his constituents - actually lose the money, instead of gaining them, that's not so bad for a politician. The poorer his constituents, the better for the politician. That's how many politicians think because those politicians who think in this disgusting way haven't been liquidated by the voters efficiently enough.

The hypocrisy and fake symbols of morality have penetrated so deeply into the politics and even the life of many ordinary people that the politicians no longer realize that they should try to save the money of their taxpayers in order to preserve or improve their well-being. Instead, they must be convinced that their eligibility increases with the amount of money they waste. Or do they always get a percentage from the money that is wasted? Glenn Beck and others have surely presented some evidence that it may be the case.

Reuters describes the possibly looming trade war from the German perspective. The Wall Street Journal just wrote about the solar power eclipse in general. Pierre Gosselin and TAZ (Germany) mention that 30,000 jobs have been lost in Spain since 2008, as a result of the photovoltaic fiasco.

Couldn't the politicians in sensible countries, please, agree that the alternative energy sources are already getting so realistic that they should be left to the invisible hands of the free markets and they should receive no subsidies? And couldn't the politicians kindly agree that China and any other country has the right to waste the money it earns? Because it's China's fault that doesn't hurt anyone else? China is clearly earning lots of money because its workers are working hard. Don't they have the right to decide what they spend the money for?

The Chinese leadership can spend a big part of the money produced by its workers - it's about its internal, socialist system, and by the way, when it comes to "green investments", America is not too different these days. Even if we agree that subsidies are bad, America has no credentials to criticize or even sue China.

Thanks to Benny Peiser

Sarkozy and Merkel may be humiliated over Lisbon revision

Nicolas Sarkozy decided to press a button.



No, I don't mean this button. What I mean is that before an upcoming EU summit, he agreed with Angela Merkel that the Lisbon treaty should be updated in order to strengthen the fiscal responsibility in the EU.




An anti-federalist fiscal conservative such as myself inevitably has mixed feelings. ;-)

Apparently unaware that it took 10 years to approve the European Constitution slash Treaty of Lisbon - and it was pretty likely that the process would fail again and again - Monsieur Sarkozy thinks that it is now possible to modify such treaties within a few days.

But the days of Napoleon are over, Monsieur Sarkozy. ;-)

Difficulties to approve the treaty

The Finnish PM has endorsed the Franco-German plan, some countries are neutral, many others are strictly against the plan - especially because they don't think that France and Germany can or should dictate the rules in such a direct way. It's pretty clear that one can't get the unanimous support that is needed to revise the Lisbon Treaty. In particular, the country whose debt is high are unlikely to approve the plan.

Also, it has been more or less promised that a referendum would be needed in the Czech Republic to approve any additional modification of the Lisbon Treaty. A referendum could also be a "must" in Austria, Denmark, and maybe elsewhere across the EU (the U.K.?).

Germany and France are the two largest EU countries. But their politicians clearly overestimate their role. For example, in the European Parliament, 96+74 = 170 (DE+FR) deputies are French or German. That's just 170/736 = 23 percent of the deputies. The Franco-German proportion in other organs of the EU is even smaller. Their proportion on the EU population or GDP is just a bit higher but well below 50 percent.

They seem to think that just because the German and French politicians just happen to think similarly these days, they are in charge of the EU. But the EU is much larger than their failing knowledge of the European geography. ;-)

In this small conflict, we're starting to see how the individual organs of the EU are going to be polarized in further conflicts. For example, a priori paradoxically, the European Commission turns out to be a central player against the further centralization of the EU and against the increasing role of France and Germany.

For example, vice-chairman of the European Commission, Ms Viviane Reding of Luxembourg (the EU justice minister who has previously attacked France for its "Nazi" treatment of the gypsies), has gone ballistic over the plan. The French and German politicians correctly pointed out that Viviane Reding wasn't really elected by anybody so she shouldn't scream too much.

During this criticism, however, the Franco-German politicians forgot to mention that they too were only elected in small parts of Europe and they have no business to overly confidently scream across the continent, either. ;-)

This conflict is going to be just a ludicrous farce. Sarkozy and Merkel will almost certainly lose and everyone will be happy again. The two leaders will pretend that they're no painful sore losers and most of their voters will buy it. Nevertheless, the conflict is another explicit proof that democracy can't work at a supranational level. There are many ways to compute the "majorities" and "the strength of a political mandate" and each computational method is good for someone and bad for someone else.

Also, there are many kinds of laws that encourage you to look at various political issues differently. This ambiguity becomes extremely hard when the question is whether the rules and laws themselves should be modified and who has the "moral right" to lead this process.

The content of the revision

Merkel and Sarkozy want to prevent new copies of the Greek debt scenario. So they want the fiscal villains to be punished by the EU - and, in fact, strip them of voting rights if they violate some budget rules. This is a pretty strong cup of tea. Twenty years ago, I would find it natural for the voting rights to be correlated with the financial situation but I no longer think it's sensible or just.

By the way, this is one of the differences between Czechia and Slovakia whose new right-wing government otherwise agree about pretty much anything: the Slovak government finds it OK to strip nations of their voting rights if they overspend while this attitude is not endorsed by the Czech government.

It is not endorsed despite the possibility that the Czech Republic could become the only EU member that satisfies the rules around 2013. At that time, we would be the only nation to decide and we could turn the 26 other member countries into protectorates and their citizens into Helpful EU Citizens (formerly known as slaves). ;-)

Another technicality in which people had different opinions was whether the rules should be imposed automatically. Frau Merkel, a physical chemist, sensibly wanted the rules to be imposed automatically. That's a good choice - and it's no threat for Germany that is unlikely to be among the EU countries with the highest debt.

However, Monsieur Sarkozy not only wants to impose tougher financial rules. He also wants these rules to have no impact on the traditional allies of France - the PIGS - who are the most likely subjects to the new rules. That's why he disagreed with the automatic option. He preferred an agreement between the finance ministers of all the EU countries (there are so many types of ad hoc ensembles of people who may be proposed to decide about something!). Frau Merkel ultimately surrendered and agreed with Sarkozy.

These details are not too important because the revision of the Lisbon Treaty is unlikely to pass, at least not anytime soon.

The automatic option is clearly more just - because Germany and France would always use methods to circumvent the rules, by blackmailing other members, whenever they would need it. Everyone knows that: such rules are only be applied to the "smaller ones". On the other hand, the automatic prescription is so good that it's easier for politicians to say that it is "too cruel" and suspend the rule much more rapidly; similar suspensions have taken place many times in the EU. These are difficult practical considerations.

Moreover, the EU already has many rules that should have played a similar role but they were never enforced. For example, the EU laws don't allow a country to bail out another country. Clearly, most of these laws have already been transformed into dirty pieces of toilet paper - very often, the only countries that actually respected the rules were viciously attacked (e.g. Slovakia in the Greek case) - and there's no reason to think that any additional rules will be different in this respect.

For a law to be enforced, you always need some powerful enough parties who actually care about the enforcement and who have a sufficiently direct access to the organs to enforce the rules. Some of these conditions are always violated when it comes to fiscal irresponsibility in the EU. So I am skeptical that any rules of this kind will ever work in the eurozone.

Even with the eurozone, assuming that it won't break into small pieces, the countries have to learn that they still have independent budgets and that a bankruptcy of one country wouldn't immediately cause lethal problems everywhere - just like a country using gold as a reserve currency doesn't get destroyed just because another country using gold goes bankrupt.

But truth to be said, it's still safer not to be a part of the Eurozone that seems to combine and amplify all the irresponsibility of the individual member states and all the crazy attempts to deal with it that can never work but that cause lots of pernicious side effects. The people on the European continent don't have any common "national" identity, they don't think "in unison", so they can't create any genuine and functional democratic country.

And that's the memo.

Why EROEI is not important

In his efforts to save the world, John Baez has promoted the notion of EROEI, or "energy return on energy invested":

Baez's blog

EROEI is the ratio of usable energy that you get out of an energy source divided by the energy you had to insert. The idea is that this ratio should be high. If it is smaller than 1 (or 1:1), the source is supposed to be unusable.




Baez quotes a 2006 article by Nate Hagens,

A Net Energy Parable: Why is ERoEI Important?

at a green ideological blog about energy called The Oil Drum. The very first sentence of that article didn't look too promising:

Besides water, energy is the most important substance for life on the planet. For most organisms energy is embodied ...

Oh I see. So energy is a substance. May I inform Mr Hagens that the 1667 theory of phlogiston has been completely debunked at least since 1753 when Mikhail Lomonosov heated a metal to find out that the mass didn't change? The substance of heat didn't exist. Well, in 1905, Albert Einstein showed that E=mc^2 so energy did carry some mass :-) but let's not get too far.

At any rate, energy is not a substance. Energy is just an extensive physical quantity - a number - whose conservation law holds as a consequence of the time translational invariance, whenever the latter exists, as proved by Emmy Noether.

But let me return to EROEI. Clearly, some lower values - i.e. below one for some biofuels - are a big warning sign. But it's a complete delusion to think that the higher value of EROEI you get, the practically better source of energy you found, and vice versa.

The usefulness and attractivity of an energy source must always be measured in the units of one dollar (or one Czech crown, to choose a harder currency) instead of one Joule.

The dimwitted environmentalists - or, equivalently, the environmentalists - think that it's "dirty" to calculate the "goodness" of a technology in the units of money.

Money stinks, they think.

However, whenever a society wants to make some rational recommendations about investments, it's exactly the other way around:

Money think, and they stink. ;-)

The expected profit is what actually calculates whether it's a good idea to make an investment. The profit contains all kinds of expenses and benefits that must be taken into account in our world that is complicated. These subtleties may look too complicated - i.e. too "dirty" - to the environmentalists but they're exactly what measures whether a decision is sensible or not.

If you have two different Joules of energy, they don't necessarily have the same value for you - or "for the Earth". How much they're good for you - or for the mankind - depends on their location and form. What has the same value is a pair of dollars. Even one dollar and four quarters have the same value. While this statement sounds pretty simple, it's just way too complicated for the dimwitted environmentalists i.e. for the environmentalists.

In practice, a very cool energy source in the future may have EROEI equal to 1.5:1. It can still be very profitable and people may have very good reasons to choose this one instead of a source that has 50:1 (e.g. coal). The fact that coal has such a high EROEI is a hint of its importance but it's not the ultimate number that universally drives all rational decisions.

In fact, even energy sources whose EROEI is smaller than one may be useful. For example, we like to recharge rechargeable batteries because the batteries in our gadgets can be moved from one place to another. Similarly engineered biofuels or special fuels for rockets may be helpful for the same reason. After all, even one gallon of gasoline is more useful than just the electricity it can produce if burned. Clearly, we need to invest a slightly higher amount of energy than what we get back from the batteries and similar devices and substances - but we still often have very good reasons why we do so.

Why is it so? Well, if you recharge your iPod Touch, you can take it to the forest - or at least away from your power outlet - where you have no access to the electric grid. It's an advantage. Why is it an advantage? It's not an advantage because of some overall counting of the usable energy. It's useful because you can use the iPod Touch in the forest and it can offer you some pleasure that is equivalent to other pleasures that you would have to pay more money for. ;-)

Moreover, EROEI is never quite well-defined because you don't know how "deeply" you should go in your energy audit. If Joe Sixpack works for a hydroelectric power plant, should you include the energy expenses that his grandfather had to make to get laid with his grandmother? What about the projector in the cinema in 1934 before they had the first intercourse? :-) These things were needed for the power plant to work. My example is meant to be amusing but the essence is very serious.

One can say that the environmentalists always believe that there exist some "objective physical quantities" that all the actions of the mankind should try to minimize or maximize. And they believe that the only reason why people don't do so is that the people are irrational and corrupt by the evil big corporations. ;-)

After all, the money is mostly pushing us in the wrong direction, they think.

So according to the environmentalist morons, everyone should try to minimize the average concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere; or maximize EROEI; or minimize the average global mean temperature; or minimize the world's human population; or maximize the number of substantially different DNA codes, and so on.

However, none of these values is a "universal canonical quantity" that fairly describes everything that we want and care about in our world. Who would care about the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere? Only complete loons: as long as it is between 150 ppm and 5,000 ppm, it's just fine. If you want the closest objective quantity, it is profit, after all. Because of the importance of this method of counting priorities in the real life, it could be sensible to include a unit of currency among the basic units of the SI system:

meter, kilogram, second, ampere, kelvin, Czech crown, mole

If the units were taught in this way, maybe some extra people could understand what the environmentalists don't understand - that the Yes/No decisions are not universally determined by a comparison of two values of energy in Joules, or two currents in amperes, but by a comparison of two values of price in the units of a currency.

The financial attitude doesn't mean that we should always prefer the dirtiest source of energy. If someone pollutes the air by SO2 or SO3 or another pollutant and others may agree that a ton of SO2 creates a damage equivalent to XY dollars, the polluter should pay XY dollars or so. That will influence his cost-benefit analysis.

Also, there are positive values that we're not used to pay for even though they clearly have some value for us. Sometimes, they are priceless. It's still clear that in some rational decisions, they can be replaced by a financial equivalent.

We may often be irritated by other people's bad priorities - the wrong perceived value they associate with various things. For example, it's annoying how little most people care about the knowledge how the world works. Still, if we can't make the other people's opinions irrelevant, their perceptions of values will still influence what will happen in the world.

However, it's just not true that any of the "naive" physical quantities such as total useful energy, EROEI, global mean temperature, CO2 concentration, or anything else of this type may be a good guide in all the decisions that the people ever do. The realization of this fact is one of the main things that distinguishes an environmentalist ideologue from a sensible person.

And that's the memo.