Abortion / Birth Control

It always astounds me that a group can campaign against both contraceptives AND against abortion. It's simply ignoring the facts, which are thus: There is a limited amount of room on this planet. There is not enough room for an unlimited number of human beings. For example, the population of Latin America is about 550 million. To paraphrase Sir Richard Dawkins:

"If the population continued to increase at the present rate, it would take less than 500 years to reach the point where people, packed in a standing position, formed a solid human carpet over the whole area of the continent. This is so, even if we assume them to be very skinny -- a not unrealistic assumption. In 1000 years from now, they would be standing on each other's shoulders more than a million deep. By 2000 years, the mountain of people, traveling outwards at the speed of light, would have reached the edge of the known universe."

The way nature deals with overpopulation is, the weakest individuals starve to death. The human race overcomes this with a thing called the Welfare State. If two people have more children than they can feed, then the state (meaning, the rest of the population), simply steps in and keeps the children alive. This is generally seen as a good thing, as most people don't want to return to nature's system of simply letting the children of oversized families starve to death. If you starve to death as soon as you are born, you had no more of a chance than did the baby that was aborted. Therefore, it does no good to outlaw abortion if you also do not have some way of feeding excess children.

But then, how to control the population? How to avoid the mountain of humans? The answer is simple: Birth Control. Many people attack birth control as unnatural. And it is. The problem is, so is the welfare state. You cannot have an unnatural welfare state without unnatural birth control, or things would be even worse than they are in nature!

In my humble opinion, birth control is humane. Abortion is less so, but still humane. Letting children starve to death when there is no more food is what is not humane.

Repeal the DMCA

October 3rd is Defective By Design's "Day Against DRM." For those of you that don't know what DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) is, here is a quick rundown of the technical and legal aspects of it:

• DRM is any technology that controls, through technical measures, what you can or cannot do with your media. Examples include:
  • The 'No Fast Forward' tag on DVDs
  • The encryption on songs bought from iTunes, preventing you from sharing or buring too often your music
  • The expiration date on songs from Napster, disabling your music after a certain time period
  • The 'Do Not Record' technology on TiVos
  • The encryption technology that prevents you from copying DVDs
• Copyright law does not cover any of these technologies. You have the right, under copyright law, to copy your DVDs and iTunes music for personal use.
• The DMCA is an act that states, in elaborate language, that it is illegal to circumvent any of these technological 'protection' measures. Which means, if you code it, it's law. A programmer could create a technology that would only allow you to view a DVD once, and, even though you have the right to copy it for later viewing under Copyright law, it is illegal to break the 'Do Not Copy' code under the DMCA.

This cannot stand. This will not stand. We cannot allow our culture to be endangered in this way. If you live in the OKC area, join me on October 3rd in stickering Circuit City and anywhere else supporting the technologies of the DMCA. Email: ohnodoctor a*t gmail*com

Contact Lenses

Today I received a letter from my eye doctor informing me that I was due for an eye examination. It has been one year since I have had my eye examined, and my doctor seemed to feel that my eyes would have changed sufficiently to warrant another checkup. I felt differently. My eyesight has not changed, and I would know; I see well enough to make out details that people with 20/20 vision cannot see. However, when I told him this, my doctor cited an Oklahoma law stating that, had I not received an eye examination in the last year by a licensed medical doctor, a hold would be placed on my prescription, and I would not be able to purchase any more contacts.

Apparently, in Oklahoma, contact lenses are a controlled substance, and you to pay for an annual eye exam in order to wear them. This of course, is to protect the public; you wouldn't want rogue, unlicensed eye examiners writing you a prescription for much cheaper than a licensed doctor, like they do in every other state. We can't expose our docs to the competition that is capitalism; it's so ... Tacky.

Never mind that you that, at any pharmacy, a minor can buy unlimited quantities of hypodermic syringes without a prescription.

This is yet another example of the corruption that we end up with, having the government interfere with the medical industry. This law was not intended to protect the public; it was intended, obviously, to drive up business in the ophthalmology sector, by outlawing competition from optometrists.

Net Neutrality

In response to this.

First of all, I don't think any ISP would seriously see any big monetary gains from tiering their service. If one tried it, the other local ISPs would launch ad campaigns advocating an ISP switch. I can see it now:

"This is how your SBC service treats internet traffic."
[cut to shot of russian soldier and a long line of people]
'Your papers please ... Your papers please ...'
"Make the switch to Cox, your toll-free on-ramp to the information superhighway."

Second of all, the LAST thing the Internet needs right now is more haphazard regulation. There is no way a bunch of senators are going to write a bill that doesn't outlaw a currently legal and legitimate use of the Internet, such as QoS, while preserving net neutrality.

This is one of the many situations where a free market is unquestionably the best choice.

What is Radio?

Albert Einstein, when asked to describe radio, replied:

"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."

The "Free" Market - Counter-Retort

In response to The "Free" Market - Retort

In Drew's latest piece of propaganda, he starts off by making a bunch of correct statements about the economy that he implies I don't agree with, finishing it all off by putting words in my mouth:

Mike believes that all the wealth in the world at any given time is conserved. That is, in real dollars, the wealth of the entire universe has been the same from the moment of its conception (if any) until now.

Actually, no, I don't believe this. Dunno where you got that. Sorry.
He then begins questioning the validity of the California Energy Crisis:

Mike basically maintains that Enron created 'artificial' power shortages, etc. etc. But I mean, come on. There's either a power shortage or there isn't one. What is this 'artificial' nonsense?

Well Drew, I'll tell you what all this nonsense was; and by the way, you are correct again: it WAS nonsense. What happened was this:

• Enron buys company that owns most of the power infrastructure in California. All is well.
  
• Enron lobbies for utility deregulation. All is well.
  
• Govenor of California shifts uncomfortably in his chair, not liking the idea. He's overruled. All is well.
  
• Enron succeeds, power is deregulated. Prices immediately spike due to new market factors, and so does Enron's profit margins.

Allow me to explain something here. Enron owns this entire market in many areas; in other words, they have a Monopoly. This means that other conpanies cannot realistically compete, or that the profits or chances of success are so low that it is not worth it. On with the timeline:

• Enron wants more money. Because there is no competition to switch to, they can charge whatever they want, as long as they have a good enough excuse to feed to people.
  
• Enron executives have a brainstorming session
  
• Enron calls several of its power plants and tells them to shut down for a few hours, completely and deliberately blacking out entire regions of California.
  
• Enron tells the world that it is having supply problems, and that there is simply not enough power available. Enron continues selling its California power to New Mexico because this statement is a flat-out lie.
  
• Prices reach an all-time high for the country in the state of California.
  
• California power is re-regulated and supply problems are never heard of again. California goes back to having one of the best-supplied power grids in the world. All is well.
  

Now what does this "regulation" consist of? Well, it says that "this power company must be able to supply X amps for not over X dollars." It's like a maximum-wage for utilities.

And so everyone's best interests are represented. And they're represented 100% right, 100% of the time. And it's 100% fair.

Tell me this: There is one power company. They are charging $370/(mw/h). What do you do? How do you look out for your best interests? Do you expect everyone to go buy a generator? Or do you simply say: "No, power company, you can't charge that much. We let you have a monopoly, so stop exploiting us." Becase they were exploiting us; for the amount of money these companies were making, you could buy some very nice power plants on E-Bay and fix your supply problem. The only real crisis here was that monopolies were being allowed to charge anything they liked for a utility.

The "Free" Market

In response to this.

This post is one of many that is saturated with a complete, unfalliable belief in the sanctity of the Unregulated Free Market. An Unregulated Free Market, in this sense, is a system where everything is free to be bought and sold, and the owner of an item has complete control over what is done with his property.

This type of a system is best suited to an environment in which there are no natural limits to anything upon which the UFM depends (See Internet). In such a market, the costs to entry are either small or nonexistant, and anyone is free to begin selling products that compete with other, existing products. This works.

However, in the real world, there are natural limits. And they aren't trivial ones like limited bandwidth. The main problem is that there aren't enough of the things we want.

But wait! Competition forces us, an an Unregulated Free Market, to use our available resources as efficiently as possible! Ah, what a relief. In the Unregulated Free Market, money results from efficiency, and efficiency is a side-effect of competition. I believe that, typically, the most efficient way is also the Right Way, and is thus the way that will make the most money.

For Enron California, the Right Way was to create artificial power shortages to drive up prices. Enron would call up its power plants and tell them to shut down for short periods of time, or else shut them down completely. This allowed Enron to charge more for less power. And they were Right, too; the power crisis forced people to use what power they had as efficiently as possible.

There was no real shortage of power. Many other power companies had excess power to sell. They just couldn't get on Enron's grid.

In other states, however, regulation forces all of the power companies to use the same grid, thus encouraging competition, even if the grid technically belonged to only one of the companies.

CONCLUSION: Regulation is often required, in modern industries, to preserve competition. The absense of all regulation is as opressive as too much regulation, except that, with no regulation, the opression will come from property owners and corporate entities rather than from the government.