As I was dressing this morning (which would’ve been afternoon for you east coasters), I was listening to an interview / call-in show featuring Congressman Mike Doyle (D - PA).

He was speaking at length on the necessity of saving the US automobile industry by granting their request (to be made formally this afternoon by the CEO of Ford, I believe) for a large taxpayer loan. As I listened, I kept hearing him say that the auto industry must be saved really for two reasons, which were repeated consistently no matter what the initial question.

The first, which I don’t dispute the fundamental truth of, is that the automotive industry is a major employer of middle class workers in the US. This is all well and good, but discussing this bailout (and, loan or not, it is a bailout) as if the industry will disappear completely overnight is extremely misleading. Yes, certainly the industry is in trouble. Companies have been slashing their workforces for years, continually hemorrhage vast amounts of money, and seem incapable of genuinely gaining ground against their foreign competitors. Further contractions of the industry will hurt, yes, but we’re not actually talking about 3 million additional unemployed skilled laborers tomorrow morning if we don’t drop tens of billions of dollars on the Big 5 (or is it 3 now?) today.

The second major presumption of Doyle’s “Save the Automakers” position was that the loss of this industry (again, all of it, immediately, by implication) would represent the catastrophic loss of all the Research and Development work that the industry does and which America needs in order to remain competitive in the global economy.

This point I dispute on a couple of levels. First, and I hope you’ll forgive the snark, if the United States automotive industry’s R&D was really all that, they wouldn’t be requiring tens of billions of dollars of assistance. They are just years, decades maybe, out of touch with the state of the art being developed in Japan and Germany. They’ve moved only reluctantly towards retooling to support hybrids and alternative fuel vehicles and even then had to be dragged, kicking and screaming about their bottom lines and the needs and wants of the American consumer, to that table. Claiming that we need to salvage their vaunted R&D programs at taxpayer expense represents either a clear misunderstanding or a deliberate oversight of the meager reality.

Of course big companies do R&D, and many do it very well, but the foundation of the argument for saving the carmakers because of their R&D wings presupposes that there are no alternatives, and further relies on the belief that market forces represent the most efficient way to allocate resources for this kind of work. The market is a wonderful thing, but if there is one area that arguably is least benefited by reliance upon market economics, it’s basic scientific research.

Let’s face it, the market is a lagging indicator in most cases. It responds only as rapidly as consumers recognize and understand the conditions that affect the market. In a perfect case, the consumers are all well informed about current circumstances as well as the predicted future conditions that will affect the market, and in that case only, the market may (but is not guaranteed to) respond rapidly and ahead of immediate circumstances. In reality, most consumers are not that well informed, either because they aren’t paying attention, don’t exercise reason in tracking through difficult issues, or, commonly, aren’t provided enough genuine facts about what to expect in the future.

This argument underpins most of my response to knee-jerk free-marketeerism — even allowing that a perfect market will best allocate resources, we don’t have perfect markets, and we must be sure to recognize those cases where the imperfect ones that exist in reality actually do provide the superior solution.

To presuppose that the kind of basic scientific and engineering research that will support the future generation of energy efficient cars (not to mention all other devices that will benefit) ought to be performed by the historically deficient auto industry is just absurd. In fact, it’s clear that the market is largely to blame for the very situation we face. The American public demanded big trucks, SUV’s and other inefficient but fun vehicles, and the industry not only made their billions by filling that desire, but actively lobbied in favor of policies (energy and otherwise) that would keep them in the high margin business of selling these types of vehicles, even after the writing was on the wall with respect to our eventual need to reduce consumption drastically.

So here’s my alternative proposal… let’s not loan billions of dollars to a set of organizations whose credibility in performing basic scientific research is nil, and whose management has been self destructive or brain dead for 25 years. Rather, make that money available to organizations who can and will make good use of it. Direct those funds to the National Science Foundation and other funding mechanisms for academia, whose ability to perform basic science is part and parcel of their mandate. Set aside 200-300 million dollars towards establishing a series of X-Prizes for advances in the materials science and engineering disciplines necessary to advance the state of the art in this country. Provide incentive for American entrepreneurs and researchers to do this kind of work for the auto makers, whose market incentives were never before, and will never be, sufficient to make them forward looking and responsible stewards of the huge power they hold over the economic, environmental and energy policies of this country. Perhaps even found a national laboratory with a mandate for performing work on modern energy and automotive technology, much as the Sandia, Los Alamos and Oak Ridge labs did for Nuclear research and as the NIH does for much basic public health research.

By all means, salvage what can be salvaged of the auto makers in the interests of job retention and maintaining an industrial and manufacturing base in the US. But please don’t foist this ridiculous notion of automaker funded R&D on the public. It’s wrong, and while it may be politically sensible to speak well of companies that employ your constituents, in this case doing so is to spread misunderstanding and inaccuracy. Basic science will almost never be performed best — and by best I mean best for the world at large… by this metric, even the drug companies largely fail — by organizations responding to market forces, because by it’s very nature, basic research may or may not be economically rewarding and will always have to be initiated well in advance of the day the resulting technologies are needed. At best, todays markets provide incentive just as new ideas need to be available, and at worst, lag until they’ve been needed for some time already. It’s time to wake up to this reality and stop throwing good money, money that could be made to serve this nation in countless ways, at companies that provably, unequivocally, do not deserve to be trusted with it.

My attention was called to an article on CNN called “Lights out on Edison’s Bulb? yesterday.

I have strong feelings on the matter, the catalyst for which will be the following quote, but do at least skim the article so you know what I’m talking about later on.

“It’s a 19th-century invention that was perfected in the 20th century,” he said. “That’s part of the evolution of all inventions.”

Calling fluorescent lights the “perfection” of lighting technology is like calling a fucking Unicycle the perfection of transit technology.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m into saving power… I like that the lights in the common areas of my government workplace go off automatically after a set time if no one’s moving and I’m even the little gnome who goes around and turns off the desk and office lights of people who leave them on when they leave.

But!
I
HATE
FLUORESCENT
LIGHTING

I can’t convey how much I hate it. I can’t work effectively bathed in that flat, dimensionless glare; I absolutely feel the effects on my mood and motivation. I feel like I’m suffocating in some oppressive cell if I have to have the fluorescents on. In the halls it’s fine (as long as there’s no flickering, which is a whole other issue), but in my workspace, it kills me. I was saved in my old building by being in a window cube where the natural light tempered the F-effect, and in my current one by getting an office where I have two, yes, incandescent lamps (which I frequently use singly, to save power) because the light is SOOOOO much more pleasant. I’d rather work in the dark than under fluorescents. I’d rather work with chains on my body and perpetually sticky fingers. Fuck fluorescent lighting 100%.

I see some hope on the horizon in the form of tunable LED lighting which can emit a warmer color spectrum while still being more energy efficient than fluorescent. I don’t know that they’re available yet, but got I hope they get here before someone demands that I remove my incandescents. I will lose my damn mind.

California Assemblymember* Levine is right when he says

Electricity-saving technologies may not be glamorous, especially when compared with the idea of a shiny new power plant, but the facts are that there are hundreds of electricity-saving innovations now on the market that if fully used throughout the United States, would significantly decrease the electricity the country now uses,

but I don’t care if the result is me feeling like shit all the time. Start with weather stripping and insulation and tankless hot water heaters… you’ll have to pry my incandescents from my cold, dead fingers.

Can I get a hell yeah?!

* P.S. and O.T. but WTF, seriously. I’m just PC enough to allow that using Assemblymembers to refer to a mixed group of Assemblymen and Assemblywomen is ok, even if it does violate my linguistic sensibilities as being unwieldy. Fine, I’ll survive. But on his own page? Why, I ask? Why? Who’s being offended when I call an Assemblyman an Assemblyman?

this is fantastic.  at least one company in the music business gets it (via boingboing): 

Nettwerk became involved in the battle against the RIAA after 15-year-old Elisa Greubel contacted MC Lars, also a Nettwerk management client, to say that she identified with “Download This Song,” a track from the artist’s latest release. In an e-mail to the artist’s web-site, she wrote, “My family is one of many seemingly randomly chosen families to be sued by the RIAA. No fun. You can’t fight them, trying could possibly cost us millions. The line ‘they sue little kids downloading hit songs,’ basically sums a lot of the whole thing up. I’m not saying it is right to download but the whole lawsuit business is a tad bit outrageous…”

Nettwerk Music Group has agreed to pay the total expense of all legal fees as well as any fines should the family lose the case against the RIAA.

“Litigation is not ‘artist development.’ Litigation is a deterrent to creativity and passion and it is hurting the business I love,” insists McBride. “The current actions of the RIAA are not in my artists’ best interests.” (emphasis added)

of course, it truly goes to show that when RIAA speaks of working in the interests of the artists, that they are full of it.

in the current issue of discover, there is a piece profiling Didier Sornette, a geophysics professor and complexity theorist who is using his research to study cause/effect in everything from earthquakes to economic models. in the piece, Dr. Sornette notes several interesting things in the course of this answer:

Discover: What do you think of gloom-and-doom predictions for the U.S. economy?
Dr. S: These statements are really based not on science but on overinterpreting a very complex system using unscientific methods. There are indeed a certain number of indicators that the United States is on an unsustainable path. But the United States also is a very special player, eh? It has the dollar, which is the world’s currancy. It has teh army of the world; it is the Roma Imperial, if you will. So it has a lot of things that are a positive leverage to its clear overspending. Is it sustainable? I don’t believe it is. But the correction won’t necessary be a crash. (emphasis added)

This quote (especially in the context of the entire article), raises the two interesting statements as emphasized above. First, he notes a conversation that t and I have had on numerous occasions concerning how, despite the accuracy of the different economic models used by the fed or even private investors in a vacuum, they are usually too simple to predict any long-term activity in the economy in general because the system is too complex (not dissimilar to the problem of weather prediction: closed yet complicated system leading to imperfect advice).

Second, he repeatedly notes in the article that economy of the United States (and, indeed, most compelx systems) are not binary: there does not have to be a “bubble” which “bursts”. There are any number of equilibria that could be reached. We just don’t know yet where that is.

While the serious situation with Mike continues, I thought I might post something on another topic altogther. Altercation directed me to the following interesting post that succinctly brings together a point that we have been discussing for some time, namely that consolidation and the race to the bottom in content across the media has driven a large number of Americans to alternatives, thus continuing the financial pain inflicted on the media companies:

But the internet allows for an viable alternative to come into use: Blogs. Poof! There go your readers. For Radio, its the rise of iPods and Satellites. Poof! There go your listeners. Print media is deep into the effect. Hollywood is only starting to feel it, as is TV. (Haven’t figured out about books, as we produce so many unique titles each year).

Bottom line: Any content industry that finds itself dramtically reducing variety or quality or both, is an industry heading for long term trouble — especially if the internet can be used to easily and cheaply find an adequate or superior substitute.

Go to The Big Picture and read the whole thing. Very interesting stuff. Good blog– may have to go on the blogroll.