Monday, October 20, 2003

War is Obsolete  R. Buckminster Fuller said: Society neither hears nor sees the great changes going on. Either man is obsolete or war is. War is the ultimate tool of politics. Political leaders look out only for their own side. Politicians are always realistically maneuvering for the next election. They are obsolete as fundamental problem-solvers. If you have enough to go around war becomes murder. Since it is now physically and metaphysically demonstrable that the chemical elements resources of Earth already mined or in recirculation, plus the knowledge we now have, are adequate to the support of all humanity and can be feasibly redesign-employed by 1985 to support all humanity at a higher standard of living than ever before enjoyed by any human, war is now and henceforth murder. All weapons are invalid. Lying is intolerable. All politics are not only obsolete but lethal. ... Success for all is the only way of overcoming the need to kill, either in the swift death of official war or in the slow slum death of unofficial war, mistakenly labeled Peace--when the lack of knowledge of how to provide for all includes lethal competition as vast numbers are shunted into poverty and a far more protractedly painful and humiliating slow death. Then you will learn in due course that their idealistic compassion and hope to eliminate lethal warfaring cannot be gratified by political action means, for the last resort of politics is always inherently to physical force, be it actively waged with guns or passively provoked by sitdown blockades. (10/20/03) BP AMOCO's Magic Curve Andrew McKillop writes: BP Amoco like other consumer nation players in the world oil market necessarily has to provide logical seeming rationales for a downside view on prices. On the supply side, agencies such as the OECD’s IEA and the US EIA present a possible return of ‘structural oversupply’ by about 2006. The underlying credo is that world oil supply will always tend to increase faster than demand. On the demand side, BP Amoco has created what can be called its ‘Magic Curve’. This purports to show that world oil demand growth is always trending downwards. Complete zero growth would be attained in about the year 2007. In other words, from about 2007, according to BP Amoco, all net demand growth for oil at the world level will shrink to zero – as if by magic ! Both on the supply side, and on the demand side, any temporary ‘oversupply’ of the market will be precisely that – temporary – for a number of reasons. While oil discoveries, replacement to lost capacity from both economic and geological depletion, and net energy available from the overall effort to produce and deliver oil will and can only fall, world oil demand can only rise. Conversely, and underlying the BP Amoco Magic Curve, which can be called petroleum’s answer to the Laffer Curve, is the preconception of ‘price elastic’ responses to what, in real terms, have been only limited increases in oil prices since the most recent low – about USD 10/bbl in dollars of 2003 – which was briefly attained in 1998-99. BP Amoco’s approach is fundamentally flawed through overbelief in the so-called price elastic response of oil consumers, who are in no way homogenous anyplace in the world. BP Amoco totally ignores the observed and real fact of reverse elasticity. That is, in very simple terms, oil demand growth increases as oil prices increase, up to very high price levels relative to the still-depressed oil price levels of today (about USD 30/bbl). This is for many reasons, notably that much oil demand is inelastic, but also because of global macroeconomic changes induced or triggered whenever oil prices break out of their recent, artificially low levels. It is likely that BP Amoco’s Magic Curve integrates or takes account of possible or likely reductions in oil and gas burn by Kyoto Treaty compliant countries (EU countries, Japan, Canada and others). This effort – which in certain cases will need heroic 50% reductions in oil and gas burn, and coal burning where it is significant, in the 4-year period of 2008-2012 – may or could start being applied in the immediate and very short-term future, but its impact on global, composite oil demand growth will be swamped by long-term growth trends in many emerging economies. Energy conservation and efficiency raising can be completely discarded as any kind of supporting rationale in favour of BP Amoco’s claimed « trend rate » of falling oil demand growth (a claimed figure of about 65% in 9 years, see below). All OECD countries, notably, have rising average car engine sizes, number of vehicles, and annual kilometres run per car, and thermal electric power production is on the rise in many countries, some new plants even using fuel oil ! (10/20/03) Quicksilver Neal Stephenson: Around the time that I was closing in on the end of Cryptonomicon, I heard from a couple of different people about some interesting things having to do with Isaac Newton and with Gottfried Leibniz. One person pointed out to me that Newton had spent about the last 30 years of his life working at the mint, which was interesting to me. In Cryptonomicon there was a lot of stuff about money, so I had been thinking about money anyway. The other related thing that I bumped into about the same time--I was reading a book by George Dyson, called Darwin Among the Machines. He talked a little bit about the work of Leibniz with computers. He arguably was the founder of symbolic logic and he worked with computing machines. I found it striking at a time when I was already working on a book about money and a book about computers that there were these two people 300 years ago who were quite interested in the same topics. And not only that, but they had this big, famous rivalry that supposedly was about which of them had invented the calculus first, although it was really about a lot more than that. I began to do a bit of reading about that era and immediately got excited about it because so many things were happening all at once during that time period. So, I decided that as soon as I got done with Cryptonomicon, I would turn all my efforts towards trying to write a historical piece set during that era. ... Reader Harriet Klausner writes: Neal Stephenson's new book is a delightful complex telling of the birth and impact of the scientific revolution. The story line recreates some of the greats like Newton, Leibniz, and Hooke as they interact with key fictional figures. ... Princess Caroline commands Enoch Root to go to Boston to persuade computational systems developer Daniel Waterhouse to come to Europe. The royal wants Daniel to mediate a geometrically growing mathematical squabble. Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz claim the invention of calculus. The two geniuses are locked in a feud that could destroy the enlightened foundations of empirical data as the basis to support scientific claims. ... Daniel, a friend of both scientists, sails to Europe as he muses over the scientific revolution that took root in the previous century. Urchin Jack Shaftoe treks across Europe doing odd jobs like pretending to be a Musketeer until he meets Eliza in Austria. She is an English woman who escaped a Turkish harem that was her home as a teen. She wants vengeance on the merchant that sold her into slavery and feels Jack can help her achieve her objective. Ultimately she works her way up from the former muddy street rascal to English and French royalty. ... The novel contains three "books" that focus on the Age of Reason so that the audience feels they are traveling with Daniel, Jack, and Eliza. Neal Stephenson makes the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century seem vividly alive at a critical junction in when reason and technology changed the world as few eras did before or since.  (10/17/03) 7:08:04 AM

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