geoengineering -- can we reduce risk of death by fire and brimstone?

My thanks to a friend from DOD  for posting this important link on an important issue,
on a policy discussion list:

http://www.booktv.org/Program/15147/A+Debate+on+Climate+Engineering.aspx

Now that I have seen the whole thing, I do have additional comments,
starting with:

> 2. Martha's comment is that the problem with the sulfate spraying
> proposition is you can't test it in the lab first to see what the bugs might
> be.  That's a big engineering problem.  I'm not willing to let you operate
> on my heart with an experimental drug.  Especially when we have
> alternatives.

By the end of the video, all the panel agreed that major new research is needed in
order to make geoengineering LESS of an "experimental drug." If you
are in the middle of a heart seizure,  you may know that exercise and
diet are a better way to prevent it, but here and now... if the
experimental drug is all you have which can act fast enough, it's
better to have some chance of survival than none.

I don't agree with EVERYTHING that David Keith (author of The Case for
Climate Control) said, but he was a model of clear thinking, even if he
doesn't quite support the school of utilitarianism which put me on a
path to my own variation of rational thinking.
(I would say the problem he cites is not with utilitarianism but the
choice of utility function.)

Aside from all the nonsense chaff, there were two valid serious
worries he introduced about the specific type of geoengineering he
advocates, using sulfate particles to reflect away the light of the
sun enough to reduce warming:

(1) The possibility of stratospheric ozone depletion, the focus of
research he is now doing (and presumably would want to expand). I will
always remember that the mass extinctions of life on earth in the past
mainly came with levels of H2S poisoning and radiation (from ozone
depletion) enough to kill at least all mammals bigger than a mouse. My
quick run of the numbers suggest that radiation poison reaches fatal
levels long before H2S concentrations, if we go over the threshold
with "black water/green sky" problems. We really need to keep an eye
on this. I have sometimes suggested to colleagues that we should have
a focused R&D call for ideas for ozone layer geoengineering ideas --
just my opinion, which I haven't spent much time pushing.

(2) The problem of what happens when geoengineering is discontinued,
if even more CO2 has accumulated in the atmosphere in the meantime.
Forgive me, but I even checked wikipedia -- opinions about "the
lifetime of CO2 in the atmosphere" are divided, centering around 90
years, but with heavy support for 200 years or for less than 90; it's
basically an issue of rates in the natural system, which depend in
part on what we do. We do need to consider the lifetime issue,
somehow... but the risk of being killed tomorrow does not justify
dying today. There are ways we can keep going.

Beyond those worries are two more concerns worth acting on:

(1) The concern about political factors. I for one am glad that so
many conservative thinktanks seem to be supporting geoengineering,
whatever their reasons. (Too much self-manipulation of PR and counter
PR can land us in a death spiral, if we don't cut the Gordian knot and
simply focus on what needs to be done objectively.) I was glad to hear
that all three viewpoints on the panel agreed that Keith's kind of
geoengineering could be done at a low price tag, "doable by Hindustani
airlines." BUT CLEARLY WE DO NEED SOME KIND OF INTERNATIONAL AGREEMENT
HERE. In fact, is creating a treaty the most important precautionary
"R&D" we need to buy the ability to act quickly? I was glad to see
that David Keith clearly understands the crucial importance of delayed
reaction effects in determining what actually has hope of avoiding
extinction of the human species.

(2) Alternatives -- of two kinds, geoengineering and reduction in net
CO2 emission -- must of course ALSO be on the table of those of us who
care about human survival.
(As are W/M/D issues, and even EMP.)

For the space mirror concept -- I did mention that Abdul Kalam of
India is a strong supporter of that one, and that he has a relatively
strong understanding of the concrete opportunities to dramatically
reduce launch costs (dollars per kg to orbit, and also emissions per
kg to orbit). India has elections in March which currently occupy most
of his attention. I am VERY concerned that DARPA's XS-1 program, the
best we have had in a long time in that direction, may not be enough
even to preserve our CAPABILITY to get to low-cost launch; it doesn't
include the crucial filter of structure testing at the unique WPAFB
test facility before heavy investment, and doesn't seem likely to
involve key folks either at Boeing Seattle or NASA Langley with
knowledge of how one would pass those crucial tests. Also, there is a
simple intellectual problem which is ONE of the factors that has
screwed up US launch efforts; so many people "understand the rocket
equation, the poor specific impulse you need to get thrust enough to
exceed the pull of gravity" -- not understanding that horizontally
launched craft with wings CAN have thrust less than their weight,
allowing more fuel efficiency and thus more payload per fuel and per
flight. Such a simple thing, like not wanting to melt on the way back
to earth! Yet lack of clear understanding of simple things keeps
screwing us up... in aerospace
as in climate policy.

But iron fertilization, yet a third geoengineering approach, has more
than just "black water" costs. Biochar has already had a lot of the
required research (some NSF supported), and is more in the stage where
deployment and incentives are the issue.

People talked a lot about "solar geoengineering," which logically
includes BOTH the sulfate approach David Keith was discussing, AND the
space mirrors approach.

One questioner said "ocean acidification is the big gorilla." David
Keith acknowledged that solar geoengineering would do nothing for
that.  While I am grateful to Peter Ward for what I learned from his
book Under a Green Sky, I don't believe the politically correct
section on ocean acidification, or, even worse, the movement to view his book as
just another data point to support concern about ocean acidification. The more
rational section of his book is where he urges us to look more closely
in a new way to thermohaline currents -- and that's what I've been
doing, and what motivates me to worry about the ocean surface
temperature at the poles as the key tripwire of life or death. How bad
IS ocean acidification? In 2009, I had access to the CRS report, which
cites folks like Caldeira saying "Ocean acidification may be much
worse than we thought.  At present rates, it might drop down from ph
of 8.0 to 7.7 as soon as 2100." Fresh water is 7.0. Fresh water is
compatible with ordinary life as we know it. Yes, there are risks of
extinctions, but nothing even close to the scale of green sky events.
Corals are most at risk, but it sounds as if a lot of other things
(like nutrients and oxygen levels and temperature) may have been
hurting them more lately.

In discussing "alarmists," Keith referred to those UK people who worry
about methane cycles due to melting in northern Siberia. That's not my
major worry... but sulfate geoengineering focusing on Arctic and
Antarctic areas  would also help with that one.
Many folks in Russia would actually appreciate a little warming (if
they can avoid
poison, radiation and drowning)... but they probably don't really want
to move to North Siberia in most cases anyway. In some parts of
Siberia, people actually like their snow.
But what about the Chinese folks who might want to move a bit north?
Beyond the scope of this panel, and of this email.

All for now. Best of luck to us all...

for the real deal on what we really know about quantum physics, go to New Zelaand

Some friends who study the mind want to do more to account for quantum mechanics. Since one of them happens to be in New Zealand, I sent them an email today... which may be easier to understand than a lot of other stuff on that topic:

=================
====================


Good morning, Yeshua and Robert!

A few days ago, I mentioned how Howard Carmichael, now at Auckland University, is one of the world's leading quantum physicists. Yesterday, I had a chance to get deep into the next to last chapter of his two volume set, Statistical Methods in Quantum Optics -- and I can say a bit more about how and why he is unique and important.

But where to begin?

Even in philosophy -- every decent philosopher who studies quantum physics knows about the classic important little book by J.S. Bell, called The Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics. That book is the primary source which a whole lot of secondary speculation and philosophizing comes from.  It is not light reading like a newspaper, and many lighter books basically try to explain what Bell's book actually says. But Bell's book is much, much easier to understand than Carmichael's.

It shouldn't surprise anyone that Bell's book is a primary source of information about "Bell's Theorem experiments," the most decisive experiments ever done to "prove that quantum mechanics is right, that the universe really is weird, and that classical physics (including Einstein) was wrong." As it happens, the most important Bell's Theorem which he describes in his book was actually proven in a paper by Clauser, Horne, Shimony and Holt (CHSH) -- and, since Holt was a classmate of mine at Harvard, I rely on sources which are more primary than Bell's book. About a month ago, I posted a paper at http://arxiv.org on "lumped parameter modeling" which reviews the Bell's Theorem experiment in some detail, using RELATIVELY simple math.

Bells book is famous for making the argument: "Now that we have done this experiment, we know that the true laws of physics could be realistic (there exists an objective reality!) or local (no action at a distance), BUT NOT BOTH.  The only possible way to build a theory of physics which fits experiment, and describes the evolution of objective reality, is to build a NONLOCAL theory, a theory which allows action at a distance."

Many people became very excited about this, and it helped create a boom of interest in "Bohmian" physics, one way to try to develop a nonlocal theory. The devotees would not want to give up.. but it essentially did not work, because the only way to make it work was to assume a parallel universe or multiverse theory, which people like Everett and Wheeler and David Deutch of Oxford already did.

Personally, I suspect that the true cosmos DOES have more than the 3+1 dimensions of space and time that we see every day in the physics lab... but studying 3+1 dimensions is like studying the mouse brain; it is a key step on the way to understanding more, and we can't achieve that step if we let ourselves be distracted by fantasies like .. superstrings... whatever.

What Carmichael really shows in his chapter 17 is a nonlocal but realistic model

in 3+1 dimensions that actually works, in the realm of quantum optics, the area where quantum theory is best known and tested in a solid empirical way -- yet with deep mathematics used to come to grips with empirical reality.

But it's also not easy to read. Carmichael has been pushing his mind to the utmost of what it can handle, and moved away from the soporific culture of lemmings which degrades a lot of the basic science in the rest of the world.  I can empathize with that; on one level, I am fully immersed into connection with the "noosphere" of the earth, the collective thinking... but I also can and do pull away from it at times, to try to get a higher perspective. Clearly he has done some of the same.

But as I said... though in a way different from what I might have expected before reading that chapter..  I still see a step beyond. Transitions can be local, and the physics can be totally local, if one gets past the implicitly forward time-marching he imposes on his models of discrete quantum transitions. One also does not need the usual zero point energy, either, to explain things like Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Lasers (VCSELS), a very important piece of our database of knowledge about physics; the future can take over the job he now assigns to that energy. 

Robert may wonder: where did the solitons go? I don't see light as made up of solitons.

Again, it's a step=at-a-time mouse brain kind of story. The solitons are as crucial as ever --

to a later chapter of the story, getting deeper into fermions (which do have a kind of quantizing effect on light).

Best regards,

     Paul

message to India about chakras

This morning, a leading technologist form India sent me a piece on the chakras, which appears to come from the Hindu university of Florida, founded by Prof. K.C. Gupta, a prominent electrical engineer I once worked with
(who used one of the algorithms I developed in practical device design).

Here was my reply:


=========================================================

Happy New Year to you, too .. !

After kundalini yoga worked so well for me in 1972, when I first tried
it, I have wondered "how?" What is the underlying mechanism which
allows it to work?

And also -- why does it work so well for some people, with strong
immediate results in a few cases, but not so well in other cases?

My guess is that it depends mainly on what assumptions people bring to
the exercise.

Many people think of chakras in the same way as some Europeans used to
think about the pineal gland. They think of these as parts of their
bodies which they (their brain) can use to control a kind of
radio-like interface device to the spiritual world. And they try to
imagine the physics of whatever kind of radiation they think these
devices are using to interface with other people and with the
spiritual world.

Perhaps one reason why kundalini yoga,  traversing the chakras, worked
so well for me the first time was that it was the next stage in a
simple book, preceded by another exercise which focused "qi" or
"prana" in an interesting way, using a little mobile as a focus. (In
my case, the mobile was made up of little plastic fish, hanging from
strings to thin metal arms, able to spin about a center which itself
hung by string from an overhead light. I focused on it in relative
dark, focusing on light, feeling and movement.)

Very crudely, at some level, we are a symbiosis of "soul" and "body,' both.
If we think of a chakra as something which "we" (as soul, or operating
through the soul
"half" of our consciousness) manipulate in order to better interface
with our body
and the world of our body, RATHER THAN the other way around, we get a
better understanding of the real physics at work, and better practical
results. The power of the chakras is not how they connect to the
spiritual world, but how the spiritual side of us can use them to
better connect to the body.  It only works if enough of our
consciousness
is on the spiritual level that we can focus the qi or prana in the required way.

In fact... I had a more recent experience which felt very similar in a
way to the time when
I raised the kundalini to remarkable effect when first I tried it in
1972. The similarity of feeling is very important.

The recent experience was the result of my wife Ludmilla dragging me
and my younger son to a cruise from New York to Florida and Bahamas.
(I would not pay money for such things on my own, but there are many
reasons why I am happy to go with her.) We stayed in an inside cabin,
with no natural light at all. It was a good spiritual exercise, at
night, to cross the room without turning on any light or making any
sound which would disturb the sleep of Luda or of our son. At first,
seeing in the dark seemed impossible,
but after a few days it was not so hard. I deliberately did some
exercises at that time, to test and strengthen that learning a bit.

As I learned to adapt.. I noticed a sensation towards the back of my
head. And I noticed that I could accelerate my adaptation to the dark
each time by recalling and strengthening that sensation. In fact... it
seemed that it worked best if I sent exactly the same kind of feeling
and energy to that area as I once had, years ago, to the chakras.
I then realized... this area is of course also the area of the primary
visual cortex. It is the area one must stimulate in order to create a
visual image directly in the cerebral cortex.

The truth is -- years before I believed in spiritual reality, when I
thought that all our mind is in the brain, I was very interested in
learning how the brain works. I took Harvard's only course in
neuroscience in my freshman year, and I knew the basic geometry.
Because I believe in using empirical evidence as much as possible in
science, I decided to search for clues by doing some introspection,
watching the flow of events and information in my own brain -- for
example, in crucial places like the thalamus, which lies in the very
middle of the brain, perhaps a bit towards the front. It was not so
long after I started such experiments (in 1966-1967) that the
anomalous experiences started to happen which opened my mind, and put
me on this path.

What physics does the soul use to perturb the brain, the chakras and
the body as a whole -- and other parts of the world around us? There
is still a gap between what we really know in physics, and what we see
in life; there are many prerequisites we must master first before our
guesses about this are worth much. I have been working very hard on
those prerequisites.... and I do hope others will be able to continue
that after I die of old age.

Best regards,

        Paul

======================
======================

Added later:

As I think further about this example of seeing in the dark on the ship...
I naturally think about what it would take to "to see in the dark" in Washington DC,
in the murky world of complex decisions and murky motives and so on.
It reminds me of an ingredient which I took for granted in the dark room of the ship at night --
the Will to See. Of course, that will was there, and very intense, when I did not want to bump my foot or make a noise which would wake someone up. The Will to See is not always present in DC. In fact, people often quite willfully work to keep their eyes shut, for fear of what they might see. It is worse than what Greeley described,
in his really important report "Are We a Nation of Mystics?"

But even I have my limits, when I know it is not time to receive additional information, because I am not yet ready, and because I have a lot of other stuff I must cope with first. In working on physics challenges, I am often very conscious about structuring my focus, on one issue at a time, to prevent overload... within a context which still includes the other stuff, but focuses very hard. But.. a few days ago, I withdrew at another level, in a way I haven't since graduate school (a brief incident I never wrote down).

A few days ago... when trying to understand how calcite polarizers work ... I decided to put my little $20 calcite crystal on the night table next to my bed. Why not? And when my mind reached a "cosmic consciousness" level
in my usual nightly meditation in bed, and I was thinking in a more normal way about the issue of how light travels in these crystals (and how to model it)... I decided why not pick up that crystal, and look for a moment from a different perspective, and try to get another angle into how it works. I did get to the answer I was looking for (briefly summarized in the extended appendix of my new vixra paper)... but to my surprise I saw a bit more.
The powerful additional image... well, it reminded me of where Icelandic spar actually comes from. 
(Volcanoes in Iceland, I think.) But then I was also quite aware of time symmetry at the time, and the flow of two directions... but I didn't want to get from.

---

What was the thing that happened in graduate school? One of many things that happened, but unique in its way.
For a couple of years, I lived in a graduate student dormitory, Child Hall, on the second floor. My room was on the side away from Harkness Common, where I went to eat and have tea with my friends. The dorm also had a small open common room (a bit like the reception areas in wings of NSF, where there are just a couple of couches where you can wait when you enter). It was decorated by a big color map of temperature variation,
showing how the gap between high and low temperatures in Boston was very extreme, "second only" to Siberia,
which was also on the map.

One evening, I was deep in conversation with a couple of friends in the Vedanta Society and with another friend,
Leo Cohen, in the clinical psychology PhD program, when the conversation got so deep... yet fuzzy in a way, because it was very late... when it seemed my consciousness was beginning to slip directly from my body to one of the others. THAT I recoiled form before it happened. I have at times wondered what would have happened if I had not recoiled.

Last night I had an assumption/materialization experience which was more interesting, but perhaps a bit much even for an obscure blog. BUt why not a very crude summary? OK -- assumption into student wanting help
in an ecological university of the future (whose very existence even as a possibility is somewhat cheering),
all goes well; then he comes back, meets female friend in his room, decides it is time for me to go. But she decides otherwise, creating what I now analyze as a conflict of wills. So I just plain materialize as I am, an old man, sitting on the couch, a third person, with even some echoes of other intellectual old men in the background. Not at all a ghost scene (something I have seen before, albeit more from the ghost perspective); the only lack of perception  of me on their part was lack of clearly seeing I am an old man compared to them.

Whatever. Can't prove anything of course, and don't ask for anyone else to take it seriously. Could be like the last part of Solaris, which we watched again yesterday. (Luda and I watched it... our first time in decades.)
Who knows? But I do wonder, as there have been veridical aspects in previous experience with assumption.
Actually, the most logical interpretation for me is that this was all at an "astral" level, a kind of simulation
within the noosphere, where future possibilities (with later veridical content) can play out in surprising detail,
and where assumption certainly can occur, sometimes at four levels at once in my experience. But is it that simple? For now, our hard core physics needs to hang on very tight to 3+1 dimensions, because we need to understand 3+1 dimensions better than we do; however, the larger reality might or might not be so simple.
We do not yet know what time games might ultimately teach us.  

What happens to the souls of spiritual couch potatoes?

As I write, it is a beautiful calm Christmas morning. As I eat some delicious duck soup and milk… I feel called to pass on a few things from our family get-together yesterday for Christmas Eve. Last night, a friendly relative (let’s call her “Kitty”) from a “red state” asked good questions – which is an important spiritual activity in itself. And so she evoked some candid truth.

First – the tale of the spiritual couch potato.

Decades ago, I was one of the people who set up a new Quaker school focused heavily on three key goals – to nourish and strength the full power of children’s brains, bodies and souls. What would happen to our physical bodies if we treated them the way some people treat their souls?

Imagine a kind of lodge or living room for people dedicated to physical fitness. Physical fitness is the supreme goal they pursue in their lives. Imagine them all sitting on a gigantic couch, drinking beer, in front of a gigantic TV screen. They don’t just watch football – they dedicate their lives to watching football. They feel proud that they are devoted to physical fitness and to football, and that they have tremendous loyalty to their team. But the only exercise they get is screaming for their team and against the other team.  Their bodies become hopelessly fat, diabetic, diseased… and prematurely dead, in the end. One day, when a guy walks into the lodge with a normal body shape, sweating and a bit quite after a grueling fifty mile hike, they all look at him – even scream at him – with contempt. Where is his loyalty to the cause of physical fitness, as witnessed on the TV? To his team… And as for exercise, that is heresy, except for the one exercise of screaming… which really isn’t the best path to health.

Not that exercise of the soul is easy or trivial. (Nor is exercise of the brain or body.) It was a major large effort in setting up that school. Beyond the scope of this post.

Kitty pressed hard to everyone in the room at one point: “Do you really believe in the existence of a higher, greater intelligence?” After she and the younger generation stared at each other, I said: “Please forgive… but it’s time to tell a joke. It’s really not true but it feels right for this moment: For my part, I really do believe in a higher intelligence, but I am deeply troubled by the question of whether it runs on Linux or on the Mac operating system. It couldn’t be running Windows, because if it were lots of people would have hacked the universe by now.”

Later, more quietly, I felt she deserved a better answer. “To be honest, Kitty, I was convinced that all that spiritual stuff is totally absolute nonsense, until I was 19.  But then … “ I told her the Mao/newspaper story (see http://www.werbos.com/Space_personal_Werbos.htm). “After that, I decided I would be 50-50 about the possibility that life is more than it seems. I was NOT convinced to just reverse my thinking, but I was convinced that I should be open-minded and open eyed… and look very intensely to try to see what’s going on. The effect of that over a few years… was pretty heavy.

“I remember going home to my family then… My mother was an intense Catholic, but my was never part of that when I was young.  I told my father that I was  changing my views of life… and I wondered whether he would say I was losing it. I was a bit surprised when he said: ‘We were wondering when you would finally start to grow up. What do you think both sides of your family have been doing for centuries? And what do you think my business is based on? For many years, my clients have learned that if they take me out for lunch and have enough beer… I can tell them their future.  And…’  I asked him why he never told me all this before. He replied: ‘Because it has to come from inside of you. If it comes from some kind of belief or ideology from outside you, it turns into a useless fantasy, or worse. It blocks you from seeing  or appreciating the real thing.’”

But Kitty was still not satisfied. (Good for her!). “But you still haven’t told me. Do you believe in a superior being or not. You told me about Quakers, but what do Quakers BELIEVE?”

I did mention how Quakers in this area can generally be clustered into Christocentric Quakers (who view themselves as a sect of Christianity) versus Quaker Universalists (which is where I would put myself here). I said... for people rooted in experience, experience is complex, and we hesitate to try to reduce it to a few simple words which we expect people could misunderstand one way or another. "But... I can tell a story which gives some feeling for it. I remember years ago when a woman named Mary Lord got up and spoke in Meeting.  You should understand – people are not supposed to get up and speak in Meeting unless they feel they have really heard an authentic voice of the spirit, what you might call ‘the Voce of God.’ Mary had spent years exercising the meditation practice of Quakerism, and in working for world peace in a serious diligent way. And as she did so, she began to appreciate the importance of world environmental problems, and the Gaia movement, and the spirit we share in common on this earth. So she spoke in Meeting: ‘I realized the importance of better tuning into our mother, the earth, but it didn’t come naturally to me in my practice, and others I talked to could not help me with that kind of real spiritual attunement. Who could introduce me to our mother? And so I realized – who knows our mother? Our Father of course. So I asked him, and he took care of it, and it worked.”

“That’s a pretty personal way of looking at it,” said the uberMarine sitting next to me on the other side.  “Yes… real life IS personal.” More precisely – that which is alive has personality (unless you count the universe itself, which is not “alive” in the way we usually use that word). I view “Gaia” as a kind of popularization or shorthand for the concept of “noosphere,” which I have talked about in a more detailed technical way at times in this blog.

So that’s the basic story, but there are a few postscripts.

One time, when we had a meeting of Quakers and parents to discuss setting up the new school, we had some discussion of things we could do to exercise the soul.

At one point I said: “Posing a really hard math challenge is one way to do it.”

I remember the face expression of the woman (a parent) who looked puzzled and then said: “I guess I can see that. If the math problem is hard enough, you could generate some really intense sincere prayer..” I felt a bit like laughing. That was valid, but it wasn’t what I was thinking. I was thinking of… something I would now call.. the pure clear light of truth… an exercise of the whole mind, freeing itself from the usual invisible Lilliput ropes of society and thought which ties us down.. a hard exercise, like climbing a mountain,  but an invigorating and healthy one too.

I was very happy on Christmas Eve to receive an email from good old Eshua of the House of David, saying he liked my latest venture in pursuit of the clear light of truth… in foundations of quantum theory, a subject he is getting into more himself.

The newest paper is supposed to be posted on arxiv.org today – and my next homework assignment is to explain how to CONNECT the two new papers, the methods for discrete and continuous variables. Bouncy basins of attraction and all that…

A couple of other minor notes…

We showed videos of our road trip last summer

http://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2013/09/family-road-trip-to-battlefields-art.html,

including West Point. “I was surprised that West Point was founded on almost the same three points as our Quaker School! But for development of the soul, they mainly chose football..”

And: I mentioned how a woman asked me this week: “Are you a Believer?” I didn’t say much in response.. but perhaps the real answer is “I am less of a Believer than anyone you have ever met in your life. It is better to see than to believe… and it is better to face up to uncertainty when you do not see or know…” (Though facing up to uncertainty does Not mean acting like a jellyfish or picking negative extremes.)

Yet… a certain kind of “faith” in staying alive and moving?

There are a lot of things in life today which require a whole lot more of what some folks call “faith,” keeping at it… as the old Disney children’s films used to emphasize. In discussing that with Luda this morning… it reminds me of the time I walked from a waterfront town in Italy, called Moltrasio (sp?), towards the Swiss border. The walk started with a stretch of trail I found very hard at the time, labeled with The Twelve Stages of the Cross.  If you think of the goal of getting to the end of the trail, you could fall into despair.. . but if you focus on one stage at a time, you can see that despair is not needed or rational. I was worried at the time, because I knew the whole trail was much longer... but somehow, after the top of the twelve stages, the clearer air invigorated me and it was easier to go much faster. With so many big challenges today, there are people who think of the big challenge and get lost and confused… and others stuck in the mud who make no real progress… but seeing what the stages are ahead, and how they fit together, and struggling for one at a time… well, it sounds pretty easy, but for most of the challenges I deal with most people have freaked out, given up, or otherwise lost their way.

But next… one of those, the hybrid quantum optics things…

Merry Christmas

The next round of shutdown and deep sequestration cuts

January 15 is the scheduled time for the next round, and it's pretty serious.

Here are some thoughts I posted to the Lifeboat list about what's going on... from what it means to
how it might be contained:

================================
=======================================


About two weeks ago (see nss.org/EU), I expressed great excitement
about the POSSIBILITY that a new DARPA program, XS-1, and follow-up on
a recent NASA-funded
study (see link posted at nss.org/EU) could restore our hopes of
getting affordable energy from space, and many other activities based
in space.

There are many threats or obstacles to making that real. The one which
worries me the most right now is sequestration. See:

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/11/budget-deal-hopes-are-growing-100102.html?hp=t1_3

The current sequestration path would imply VERY deep cuts in all of
DOD, NASA, as well as DOE, NSF, education and food for hungry
children. Budget negotiations which do not include entitlements or
taxes would basically revisit the same old budget space, and be
unlikely to change much on a partisan basis. Mitch McConnell says
there WILL NOT
be another shutdown in January... but folks said that kind of thing
before the last one, too.

With the same players in motion, and with the Tea Party encouraged by
recent polls on the President's popularity, there is not a strong
logical basis for ruling out another shutdown, followed by the same
old sequestration trajectory  and the nasty irrational politics about
specific budget items which deep cuts are likely to entail. CBO, for
example, has begun circulating the idea of just zeroing out humans in
space.
(Will humans on earth be far behind?)

... So... it begins to get beyond my field (let alone what any of the
organizations I work with take a stand on)... but it begins to seem to
me that new balanced nonpartisan actions EITHER on Obamacare plus
Medicare (aimed at  preventing future cost growth
and maximizing efficiency, so as to minimize the payment by taxpayers
plus patients for the same level of medical benefit overall), OR on
tax reform, are pretty much the best hope of averting this kind of
disaster. A friend noted that this would cause elimination of some
jobs in healthcare (since improvement in efficiency would require
that, as well as cut some profits)... but the only alternative is to
cut jobs in the other areas, given the deficit constraint.

I have heard that there are certain changes and efficiencies which the
president really wanted for himself at the start, which he didn't push
because stakeholders would object;
however, a quietly arrived at deal between both parties would be freer
to allow more of that, so long as the ideological center of gravity is
not moved. (For the conservative side,
I could envision more opportunity for midwives and home births, and
less for unnecessary Caesarians, and also a prohibition on funding
through these venues of deep brain stimulation in medical treatment of
humans. My libertarian side was really
alerted by:
http://www.tvworldwide.com/events/bioethics/130819/ . Yes, there are
folks chomping at the bit of a huge new gravy train... but in a time
of triage, there are many many reasons** not to
prepare to pay for that.) (On the technical side, I see lots of emerging possibilities for new "five cents" types of tests to displace "$200 tests priced at $2,000.")

Just two months... I do hope they can do a whole lot better than what
the URL above suggests! Otherwise a lot of us will be in trouble,
especially at the cutting edge.

Best of luck,

     Paul

** I have heard many stories from people in a position to know about
how Parkinson patients, the group with the best claim to benefit, have
had brains fried by their implants.
For the general case... if you went to an auto mechanic, and he said:
"I have no idea how
your engine works, but I have a big hammer, and if you pay me I can
make a bigger one.
Just pay me, and I will take a big swing at your engine..." Like
frontal lobotomies of old.
Many people trust doctors much more than they trust auto mechanics
(though not everyone these days), so people have gotten away with
that... but I would hope
instead for a major research push to actually UNDERSTAND that essential system,
the brain, far more than we do today. A long story... but efficient
focused R&D need not be anywhere near as expensive as what people want
for DBS deployment.


=======================
========================

For those who want to dig even deeper:

-----------------------
Towards the end of the discussion, people raised a point: ANY system
which reduces the combined payment by taxpayers and patients for
medical care will end up cutting costs which take the form of jobs.

I thought of an extension of the image of "ten people to screw in a lightbulb."
One screws in the light bulb. Four act as advocates for now allowing
it, hassling both doctor and patients. Four act as advocates and
record keepers for the action. The tenth person, who would normally
oversee many light bulbs, has to be full time on this one, to keep on
top of all nine other people.

But what of the lost jobs if we streamline this and only use one person?

A key point we didn't get to in the discussion:

To a first approximation, ANYTHING we do to reduce the deficit results in a loss
of jobs SOMEWHERE. If there is no deal between Administration and
Republicans to reduce costs in a technical way for Obamacare and
Medicare, there will still be deficit reduction...  by sequestration.
So an "equal number' of jobs will be lost anyway -- in
sectors like defense and research and education (not to mention food
for the poor), where
the damage will be more than just the jobs. That's VERY real as we
look ahead to January 15. (Indeed, that's why I hope for serious
action on this front, or on tax reform, or both, by January 15.)

Cutting out all funding for deep brain stimulation under Obamacare and
Medicare, by contrast, would mainly cut the growth of NEW JOBS in that
sector. Of course lots of folks are salivating over the hope of lots
of new money... but that's exactly what national budget planning needs
to worry about.

=======

However... to honest, that is all just a first approximation. I have
looked a lot more deeply into the technical economics of this,
especially when I worked in Specter's office in 2009,
and was asked to give a Congressional briefing on the job impacts of
different climate bills.

IN THEORY, we could meet the deficit targets WITHOUT reducing jobs at
all (maybe even adding some) by exploiting what I call an "x-y"
strategy. Some government commitments (spending or tax breaks)
generate a lot more jobs (x) than the usual, while others generate a
lot less (y).  Thus by expanding x and cutting back y, at least for
the duration of high unemployment rates, we could increase jobs while
not affecting the deficit (if we start from a base of adequate deficit
reduction).

But the practical problem is that x-y is too high level math for a lot
of key people
in the US, and the specific elements of x and y are highly political.
For example, many
tax breaks today (especially oil breaks) are of the y variety, passed
on more like Christmas presents, not really changing actions or
investments to a measurable degree.
On the other hand, the old "cash for clunkers' program had a big x
(because it was like a MATCHING fund eliciting legitimate private
sector investment); the "White House of Japan" developed a program
"Three Pillars of Eco-Economy" which they estimated would have three
times the multiplier effects of ordinary spending or public debt,
building on the clunkers idea, with matching fund incentives of
various kinds, moving in directions we know we need to move into
anyway.

Still, if we cut out inefficiencies, there is hope that the Fed or
fracking will result in enough new jobs to keep us from going bust
altogether as a result of deficit reduction.
It scares me that this is only a hope... but... one day at a time.