Clarke's Laws

 Science Fiction Author, Scientist and Futurist Arthur C. Clarke wrote about three laws of science:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Another way of stating the first law is that "science proceeds one funeral at a time." The innovators of each generation are greeted with skepticism, often forceful and political, by the vested interests of previous generations.  Only through death can that forceful skepticism be overcome.  Max Planck said it, Thomas Kuhn wrote a whole book about it.

I think the second law speaks for itself.  It's true in other areas too.  Racing drivers "Test" their car and the track by finding what is too much and driving as close to the edge as they dare.

The third law is the most interesting, and when somebody talks about Clarke's Law (singular) this is the one they're referring to.  Even in a technological society like ours, most people operate as if the technologies they are using are magic.  How many cell phone users understand even a little about how they work?  I know very competent engineers who don't understand anything less vague than that they're a radio, and don't understand what a "Cell" is.  (the key innovation that made them possible was the cellular handoff algorithm, allowing handoffs between radio towers organized in a cellular pattern).  The television, the car, the computer are all this way.  I don't think many people in our society actually believes that they're magic, but they believe they need to defer to an arcane expert to do maintenance, often rejecting their own abilities in favor of purported expert.  What percent of the population really understands these things well enough to work on them?  (although the reality with a lot of stuff, especially microelectronics and software, is that there are barriers to entry which are not intellectual.  I can't work on the traces inside an already-built integrated circuit, even though I know how they work and have helped design them.  They're too small.  And a lot of stuff is intentionally secured from access, for reasons ranging from IP to national security)

Clarke talked about three generations of technological advance:  One generation invents it, the next deploys it, and the third takes it for granted.  Anyone in the inventing generation or earlier (and we're talking about their knowledge and analytical tools, not when they were born) who finds themselves in the "for granted" context, sees it as magic or it's equivalent.  This may be because they come from sufficiently different culture, or it might literally be generational.

In the early 70s, I had a long conversation with my grandmother about computers predicting the weather.  I was 17 and had recently learned to program in BASIC.  She was a very smart woman (one of her sons was an economics professor and the other a rocket scientist) but she could not understand that the computer really was just a tool, and in no way capable of independent thought like a human, or even a dog.  We had to teach it everything.  the fact that computers were being used to predict the weather is entirely based on their capacity to implement human algorithms more quickly than humans can, not that they have any inherent knowledge or ability that humans lack.  My grandmother, smart as she was, couldn't make this leap.

It's not always the case that the "for granted" generation treats a thing as magic.  The four stroke engine was invented in 1876 by Nicholas Otto and commercialized by him and his one-time employee Gottlieb Daimler.   Henry Ford figured out how to deploy it on a massive scale in the early years of the 20th century, and from about 1920 on, nearly every American had access to one.  Many of them became competent mechanics and invented many things using them.  How many mines, machine shops, sawmills, and other tiny industries had a Model T at their core, especially during the Great Depression.  Even the Amish use horse drawn wagons that are built using automobile wheels and bearings.   This continued for at least three generations. It's only the last few decades that people started giving up.

Washington State License Plates

Before 1963

 

Before 1963, a new plate was issued every year, with a different color each year.  They tended to be green or blue on white or silver or grey, or the lighter color on green or blue.   Prewar plates tended to be collected for scrap metal so they are quite rare.  During the war they didn't issue plates, only window stickers.

1947

1958

Starting in 1958 they went to three letters and three numbers.  During 1963, they issued permanent plates in 1963's color--green on white, which served for the life of the car.  A sticker was added each year.  Prior to 1965, the word "WASHINGTON" was abbreviated "WASH", which apparently annoyed some folks, so a bill was passed in the state legislature banning that abbreviation for license plates.

 1963-87

Vanity plates began being issued in 1975. In the 1980s they were green on yellow

In the leadup to the state centennial in 1989, they began issuing plates with a picture of Mount Rainier in the background with the state name in a curly font in upper and lower case, and the position of the numbers and letters were switched.  This is a  1987-1989 "Centennial" Plate

 In 1990, they dropped the "Centennial Celebration" motto.   The single "A" here means commercial vehicle.

1990-present. After 1990 they switched to uppercase letters in a Swiss font for the state name, and added a motto at the bottom.  They ran out of numbers and had to add an extra digit in the mid-2000s.

And this one is a state trooper. (WSP for Washington State Patrol).  They like to mix it up: some unmarked vehicles do this, and some have completely ordinary plates, while others use the XMT (exempt) logo. Marked vehicles always either have these WSP plates or the exempt logo.

At around the same time (mid 2000s), they decided that license plates needed to be replaced every 7 years.  The justification was that the paint and reflective material that the plate is coated with sometimes wears out.  As far as I can tell, the only plates that this actually happens to are on vehicles that are very frequently subjected to high pressure washing, such as municipal buses.  Ordinary weathering and car washes don't seem to hurt it much.  This was found very annoying to most Washingtonians--rating #5 in a poll of the laws they'd like to see changed.  Not only was it obviously a waste of resources, it forced you to learn a new license plate number every few years.   It turned out you could get the old number back (for a few dollars and about a month's delay), but you had to know to ask.   In 2014 this law was overturned.

Special interest plates.  There are quite a few more, not shown here.  The one in the upper right is for an antique vehicle. The "Year" is the year of the vehicle, not of the plate.

references:
http://www.dol.wa.gov/vehicleregistration/sphistory.html
http://staff.washington.edu/bbirt/wahist~1.htm
Wikipedia's article on this subject

An absolutely astonishing collection of license plate photos can be found here: He has 5 pages on Washington State alone!  1976 y2k y2k2 y2k3 y2k4

Why is Too Much Speculation Bad?

The largest pieces of the Bush tax cuts were cuts on speculation: specifically, Long Term Capital Gains, Dividends, and Carried Interest.  These are all mechanisms by which speculators make profits.  These profits contribute very little to the economy as a whole, but they make a few people very rich.  Until the "Fiscal Cliff" settlement last month, they were all taxed at 15%--less than half the marginal rate for rich people.  This is a very powerful incentive for figuring out ways to make your money in these areas.

Of itself, this might be harmless, but because it occurs in competition with the rest of the economy, a lot of investment chooses to be done in these low-tax areas, which has the effect of driving investment out of areas that can create more jobs.  We need some speculative investment:  it creates a back end for IPOs and commodity production, but if we over-incentivise speculation, it actually reduces investment in the very thing we're trying to stimulate: manufacturing, engineering, services, etc.   Productive business. This further increases competition for the few remaining speculators, which makes it harder and harder for small investors to compete.

It gets worse:  the board members of the productive businesses make most of their income by being shareholders, so they have a huge incentive to increase the short term profitability, and thus their share price, at the expense of the employees, the product quality, and the long term viability of the business.  Not all do this, but since their personal competition is largely with people who make their income by speculating, a lot do.  So they cut long term expenses--pensions, health care, employee training, etc.  Now the other businesses, the ones whose board were behaving responsibly, are at a disadvantage, so they have little choice but to cut benefits too.

We need speculation.  But too much of it is worse than too little.  With too much, we have wrecked the greatest engine for economic growth the world has ever seen.  It may not be too late.  But eventually it will be.

Centrifugal Spaceships

Back when we still thought we were going to spend the next 50 years exploring space, one of the popular ideas was to implement artificial gravity by putting passengers and crew into a big centrifuge.  Wernher von Braun, Chesley Bonestell, Arthur C Clarke and many others included giant, rotating space stations as part of their imagery.   These guys understood that lack of gravity was a real problem and thought dealing with that was critically important.  As real experience with humans in space as been accumulated, the consequences of "microgravity" have been recognized to be even more serious than they'd feared, leading to bone loss and other problems.  So why is it that we haven't built spinning space stations?

The reason is that there turned out to be lots of other problems that were equally, or maybe even more serious.  Simply getting stuff up there has proven incredibly challenging, and the economics have worked out that many, small, unmanned satellites provide a much better return than putting humans up there.  Secondly, the reality turned out to be that the political advantage gained by the space race was fairly limited to "beating the Russians".  Once that was accomplished, there was really very little popular support for the space race.  So there was little support for big ideas like the space station in the image above (by Bonestell), which inspired Arthur C Clarke and Stanley Kubrick in their movie 2001: a Space Odyssey.  The space station we've actually got, 12 years after 2001, has a pressurized volume of 29,600 cubic feet--about what 3700 square feet of building have.  Much of this is filled with equipment, so the living space is really no more than that of a moderate family house.

If all that space were organized into a ring like the one above-12 feet wide by 8 feet high, the ring would be a mere 64 feet in diameter.  To spin it fast enough to make a 1/6th G (lunar gravity) would take 7RPM, or fast enough to make 1 G, it would take 17RPMs.  Ridiculously fast, and not really practical if you're trying to take a look outside or dock a spaceship.  To get it down to the stately speeds we saw in "2001", it would have to be a half mile or more in diameter.  At that size, lunar gravity can be simulated with just one RPM.  The centrifuge inside the "Discovery" spaceship, where we first met movie astronaut Frank Poole jogging, was about 50 feet in diameter, so it would have to spin even faster.  I'm sure for really long trips, like the one they're on in the movie, space ships would have to contain such centrifuges.   I think that's about the smallest practical human centrifuge though.    Eventually, we'll have big, kilometer diameter or bigger space stations, and I have great hope for O'Neill Cylinders some day in the future.  But not for a while yet.

Pieces of Paper

"Fiscal Conservatives" imagine that it's impossible to create wealth by printing pieces of paper. That's true, but the way that you distribute those pieces of paper is important--and you can stimulate the economy in ways that actually do create wealth by doing that.


It's true.  Adding printed money, or the electronic version of the same, to the economy only dilutes the wealth that is out there.  But the way you do it matters.  For example, if you give it all to a few people, in exchange for nothing, those people have now captured an accordingly large share of the wealth in the society, for doing nothing.  If those people just store it away and don't spend it, the effective influence on the economy is small--the people who got the new money are richer, but the functioning economy isn't.  The people who didn't get the money are poorer than they were before: they have the same number of dollars, but those dollars have less buying power.  Only a little though: the rich people have kept most of the dollars out of circulation.  Distributing money this way can prop up an economy at risk of deflation: if the rich people are scared enough, they'll take money out of circulation, which makes individual dollars worth more, but it means employers can't afford to hire and consumers can't afford to spend...a very bad situation for an economy.  Many economists regard deflation as the indicator that defines a depression.

If, however, you give the pieces of paper to people who are having trouble getting work , this can overcome a demand problem.  Lack of demand is a vicious cycle: Employers can't sell their products, so they cut back on workers, who now don't have enough money to buy stuff, so they cut back on spending, further reducing demand.  Giving money to unemployed people can break this cycle.  It does dilute the value more immediately, because poor people tend to spend their money right away.  But this creates demand, encouraging employers to hire and invest, which can create real wealth.  And at least at first, it increases the buying power of those who get it.

The Bush and Obama administrations mostly did the wrong things: giving the pieces of paper to banks, and cutting taxes.  Since poor people don't pay much in taxes to begin with, tax cuts, even if they're mostly directed towards poor and middle class people, tend to favor the rich.   A 2 percent tax cut for a middle class person may be sufficient to create 1/50th of a job, so it's not nothing, but a 2 percent tax cut for a rich person may be enough to create several jobs.  But rich people don't need to spend the money right away, so they tend not to--and if the economy is bad, they're especially prone to saving the money.    The government would have been much better off creating the jobs directly: spending on infrastructure.  This would have directly impacted the construction industry, the one hurt worst by the crash in the housing bubble, and it would have left behind new roads and transit for all of us to use in the future.  Even giving the money to banks, as was done with TARP, could have been done in a better way.  By requiring recipients to lend in ways consistent with what they'd done before the bubble, they could have boosted the construction industry and the economy as a whole.  Probably not enough to reverse the crash, but enough to slow it some.  Instead, the banks just pocketed the money--redistributing upwards, and ending the bank panic, but not slowing the wider crash at all.