Live from Austin!

Let’s enjoy a few compassionate thoughts from the right-wing libertarians. First, Becky Akers, columnist for Lew Rockwell of the Center for Libertarian Studies:

The day after the hurricane, Louisiana’s Governor Kathleen Blanco ordered New Orleans evacuated—again. Yep, folks facing a flood several fathoms deep without electricity, potable water, or food are too stupid to leave on their own. Good thing the Nanny Kate tells them what to do. [...]

Nanny’s sending buses, boats and helicopters after all the silly little citizens who didn’t know enough to come in out of the rain. Whatever happened to bunking in with friends and families? I’ve experienced several hurricanes; on hearing that an especially dangerous one was heading my way, my first thought would be: “Time to visit Dad.”

Oh yes, those silly poor people. Why didn’t they just hop in the SUV and spend the weekend with daddy in the Hamptons?

General Ralph Lupin of the National Guard whined, “We’re doing everything we can to keep these people comfortable. We’re doing our best. It’s not getting any better, but we’re trying not to let it get any worse.” Alas, running hotels and restaurants isn’t easy, though entrepreneurs make it look that way every day. Their skills provide clean beds and rooms, private baths, delicious meals ? all the miracles that Leviathan desperately longs to reproduce. And can’t. Nor ever will.

Yes, those silly poor people. They should have just checked in to one of New Orleans’ many fine hotels, all of which are still open through the miracle of private enterprise.

Over to Justin Darr at Alan Keyes’ RenewAmerica site:

The reality is that the poor residents of the New Orleans could have evacuated the flood zone on a public bus before the hurricane for about the cost of a bottle of water. The total disabled population of New Orleans who might not have been able to evacuate is estimated at around 55,000 residents. So, the question must be asked why up to half a million people did not evacuate the city. The sad answer is that many of these residents remained because they where waiting for the government to aid them.

Check out NASA’s before and after photos and note the scale of the destruction. The flooded areas are a good 40-50km across. I guess that seems plausibly like a $2 bus ride if you’re a wealthy white libertarian who’s never ridden the bus in his damn life.

In a culture where all the comforts of life have been provided to people as entitlements, their sudden absence has unleashed a violent backlash against the society these people feel has let them down. In other words, if some people do not get what they feel they are entitled to get, then something unfair must have happened, so now they have the right to go out and take it.

Yes, damn those looters for not obeying the god-given laws of the free market. Don’t they know that price gouging is good and that nobody deserves food or shelter unless they can pay for it at the prevailing rate?

Meanwhile at the Mises Institute, no theory is too crackpot for institute president Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr:

After evacuations, the looting began and created a despicable sight of criminal gangs stealing everything in sight as the police looked on (when they weren’t joining in). Now, this scene offers its own lessons. Why doesn’t looting and rampant criminality occur every day? The police are always there and so are the hoodlums and the criminals. What was missing that made the looting rampage possible was the bourgeoisie, that had either left by choice or had been kicked out. It is they who keep the peace. And had any stayed around to protect their property, we don’t even have to speculate what the police would have done: Arrest them!

Yes, when the wealthy white people lived in the city, everything was good. After they left, there was rioting and disorder. Therefore post hoc ergo propter hoc it’s the wealthy white people who actually preserve law and order in society, not the police. OK, there was that weather thing, but no, that couldn’t be anything to do with it, could it?

Over at The “Intellectual” Activist, Robert Tracinski spews out the familiar “blame the victims and rescuers” spin:

My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage one night on Fox News Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling.

Oh, what a surprise, they get their information from FOX News.

What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape?

[...]

There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit?but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals—and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep?on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.

Yes, anyone who has to fall back on welfare is a vicious wolf just waiting for the chance to descend into raping and pillaging.

The welfare state?and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages?is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans.

So, what explains the moral ugliness of all these right-wing libertarians?

So it’s a total disaster in New Orleans. Three levees are breached, one of them has a hole over 150 meters across. 80% of the city is under water up to 6 meters deep. The entire city is without electrical power or water supply. It’s estimated that it will be 9–12 weeks before they can even get rid of the water, much less get the city habitable. Interstate 10 is broken chunks of floating concrete; there’s no route into the city for trucks and other major vehicles. Mississippi reports at least 110 dead; Louisiana hasn’t even begun counting—but there are bodies floating in the water-and-sewage filled streets. It’s estimated that up to 100,000 people were unable or unwilling to leave the city. The death toll could be in the tens of thousands by the time it’s all over. The official message is simple: everyone must leave New Orleans.

The Red Cross has around 40,000 people in emergency shelters. Another 25,000 are going to be sleeping in the Houston Astrodome. They won’t be going home any time soon, as once the water is drained from the streets every building will have to be checked for structural soundness and shored up; every sewer line will need to be inspected. Then, of course, there will be the electrical infrastructure to replace, and the leaking gas lines to fix. In the mean time, some of the people left alive in the city are looting. Police are finding it hard to stop them, what with meters-high piles of debris that they have to cut through with chainsaws even to be able to patrol on foot.

So the residents of New Orleans who evacuated might get to go home to a ruined shell of a home with no electricity, by Christmas if they’re lucky. But right now, the water’s still rising… the Army engineers who were trying to repair the levees have been forced to abandon the city. The National Guard is facing the problem that most of its members were shipped out to Iraq to make up for low troop numbers, so the city is basically lawless at this point.

The New Orleans aquarium is gone; sealions are wandering the empty space where it used to be. The President’s Casino is missing too. The public library is paper maché. Boats weren’t safe either, with an 8 meter wall of water hitting the coast.

It’s not just New Orleans either. The BBC have a photograph of an oil rig that was smashed into the Cochrane Bridge in Mobile, Alabama. Most of Mobile is apparently without electricity too. Biloxi, Mississippi is without electricity, water and sewerage.

Damage estimates so far are around $25 billion, it’ll probably be the worst hit for the insurance industry ever. Since the worsening storms over the last few years had already brought many insurance companies close to bankruptcy, I imagine a few will collapse this year.

2004’s hurricane season was close to the worst ever. This year’s hurricane season is only half over and has already surpassed it. It appears that the severity of hurricanes may be directly linked to global warming, while the frequency of them is rising with the natural periodic rise in ocean surface temperature. Combine the two and you have a deadly combination. Katrina was more than 300 km across, and meteorologists say things could have been much worse. If you think the Kyoto protocol would harm the US economy, that’s nothing compared to what a decade of steadily-worsening hurricanes will do to it.

Now let’s set the wayback machine to February 2005:

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has identified millions of dollars in flood and hurricane protection projects in the New Orleans district.

Chances are, though, most projects will not be funded in the president’s 2006 fiscal year budget to be released today.

In general, funding for construction has been on a downward trend for the past several years, said Marcia Demma, chief of the New Orleans Corps’ programs management branch.

In 2001, the New Orleans district spent $147 million on construction projects. When fiscal year 2005 wraps up Sept. 30, the Corps expects to have spent $82 million, a 44.2 percent reduction from 2001 expenditures.

Of course, all the levee construction in the world wouldn’t have saved New Orleans from this disaster—but it might have reduced the death toll and damage a bit. But hey, at least we all got our wartime tax cuts, right?

Will this tragedy be enough to silence the people who say that everything is OK, that global warming is a myth, that it’s a good idea to send the National Guard to Iraq, that we should keep cutting spending on infrastructure and emergency planning so we can finance a war and still have tax cuts?

I’m betting it won’t. They’ll keep shrieking their denails, and ultimately they’ll get away with it because their beliefs are so much more palatable than the unpleasant reality. I predict that the Climate Change Science Program and NASA’s studies of climate change will still get their budget cut next year. Why even study whether global warming might be causing these disasters, when you can just choose to believe it isn’t?

And remember, this is not a partisan issue. Democrats supported the major budget cuts for the US Army Corps of Engineers in New Orleans, and the cancellation of a study into what would happen if a hurricane hit the city. Democrats voted for the war in Iraq. When the Senate voted 95-0 against the Kyoto protocol on the grounds that it would result in economic harm to US industry and would exclude some nations (Senate Resolution 98 in 1997), those voting included John Kerry and Ted Kennedy.

New Orleans in particular is a problem people have known about for a long time. It was just waiting to happen, like the big earthquake in San Francisco, or Mount Rainier showering Seattle with ash and red hot debris. The big question in my mind is whether people will learn, or whether they’ll carry on as before and build a New New Orleans right where the last one was. Either way, I never got to see New Orleans, and now I never will.

Tom Tomorrow has his panties in a bunch over the outrageous behavior of Internet users. He was shocked this week to discover that some people were reading his published web log using special purpose web log browsing software (aka “news aggregators”), rather than the software he wants them to use (a web browser). Worse still, the miscreants were skipping the ads! Quel horreur!

It rather reminds me of the CEO of Turner Broadcasting, who declared that skipping TV ads using fast forward was “stealing the programming”.

Here’s the deal: if you publish or broadcast something, you don’t get to control how people choose to read or watch it.

If I want to watch Cartoon Network on an HDTV and chop the logo off the bottom of the screen, I can. If I choose to read AOL Time Warner’s web sites using a non-AOL web browser, I can. If I want to block your ads or change the layout of your web site using a local style sheet, tough luck, you can’t stop me.

I think the argument that it’s rude for me to skip TV or web ads is ridiculous. However, you may disagree, in which case here are some rules which may soon appear in the Tom Tomorrow Guide to Etiquette.

• When viewing television, politely sit and watch every TV ad. Do not go to the bathroom or fetch a snack. If you must use a VCR to time-shift, do not fast forward through the ads. What, you expect the TV companies to let you watch that programming as you wish?

• Make sure you are careful to read every ad on every page of the newspaper. If you must throw away a section of the paper, be sure to read every advertisement first. Otherwise, you are automatically skipping a big chunk of ads which helped pay for the newspaper you enjoyed, and that would be quite literally stealing content from the newspaper, wouldn’t it?

• Make sure you open and read every single piece of junk postal mail you receive. The postal service you use is heavily subsidized by the money it makes from bulk advertising mail. To toss junk mail in the trash automatically without opening and examining the ads would be taking advantage of something without paying for it. That would be stealing, wouldn’t it?

• When you’re listening to the car radio, never change the station during an ad break. The ads pay for the radio transmitter and the electricity used to broadcast the music. If they couldn’t advertise to you, why, the radio station would go away entirely. So if you skip the ads by pushing a button, you’re obviously human scum.

• You know those advertising inserts in magazines? They’re there because the publisher wants you to have to look at them and move them aside to read the whole article. If you rip them out so you can just read the entire article without seeing the ad, well, you’re stealing. What, you want the content handed to you on a silver platter?

Meanwhile in the real world…

People skip ads all the time. Sometimes manually, sometimes automatically, but mostly without thinking or even registering the presence of the ad. Our daily environment is so ad-infested at this point that even the advertisers are admitting that it is becoming harder and harder to ‘reach’ people (where by ‘reach’ they often mean ‘interrupt’, ’distract’ or ‘annoy’).

If people’s desires and behavior make advertising ineffective, that’s just tough luck for advertising. If technology makes it easy for people to skip ads and people want to skip ads, then people will skip ads. You can rant all you like, but the world was not designed for the express purpose of advertising, and there’s no guarantee it will stay amenable to your marketing messages.

In fact, the Internet was never designed to be friendly to advertising. The fact that you can advertise on the web at all is accident. The Internet existed before web advertising, and will probably still exist in some form when capitalism has collapsed on itself and mass marketing is something kids are asked to read about in history textbooks. If my skipping ads breaks your business model, you need to find a new business model.

And now it’s disclosure time. I’m one of those evil RSS-readin’ web-aggregatin’ freeloading varmints. Except that I have bought a bunch of Tom Tomorrow books, and I wear a baseball cap with Sparky the Wonder Penguin embroidered on the front, purchased from you-know-who’s web site. (As an aside: I wish Ted Rall was still selling embroidered caps in custom sizes, I could totally go for an El Busho cap too, but One Size Does Not Fit All.)

I think I’ve demonstrated that I’m responsible and adult enough to make my own moral choices, so I don’t particularly appreciate being told that I’m “human scum” because I choose not to look at ads every day, and only go browse them when I feel like getting a new T-shirt or some bumper stickers.

People often wonder if they should turn their computer off, or leave it on but put it into “sleep mode”. I decided to do some analysis a while back, here are the results.

If you look up the specs, a Sawtooth Power Mac G4 in deep sleep uses about 4 watts of electricity. In MA you pay $0.04823 per kWh, so it costs 4 / 1000 kW * 24 hours * 365 days * $0.04823 = $1.68 per year to leave a Mac sleeping instead of turning it off. So, it’s not going to break the bank.

Heat-wise, conservation of energy tells us that no more than 4W of heat is being emitted by the machine. Compare that to the average human body, which radiates 50-100W (estimates vary, Google if you feel the need to check). So, the G4 isn’t going to heat up the room significantly when it’s asleep either.

What about the environment? Well, let’s assume the worst possible case, that your electricity is all coal-generated. That means emissions are around 0.43kg per kWh of electricity used by the consumer. So in a year of sleep, your Mac would cause the emission of 15kg of CO2. Sounds pretty bad, doesn’t it? Well, according to space research you produce 1kg of CO2 per day by breathing, or a massive 365kg per year. So the Mac is 20x better for the environment when asleep than you are.

What about the hardware? Well, in deep sleep almost all the hardware is powered down exactly as if the machine was turned off. The hard drive, which is the piece most likely to wear out, is powered down. The CPU and RAM are incredibly unlikely to wear out even if you run them 24×7 for the next ten years, at which point the machine will be so obsolete it’s worthless. So turning the Mac off won’t make it last any longer or protect your ‘investment’.

So, I conclude that there is absolutely no economic or environmental need to turn your Mac off. If you have a UPS, you may as well leave the Mac asleep when you’re not using it.

Of course, if your computer is a PC which doesn’t have an Energy Star “deep sleep” mode, the above calculation may be off by a factor of 10 or more. However, most PCs are now Energy Star.

To finish off the day, we had a power cut at around 22:30. It continued until 05:30, so we had to try and sleep through one of the most stiflingly hot nights this year without the benefit of any air conditioning.

Consequently I am feeling a little delicate this morning.

As a response to the (deliberately manufactured) energy crisis in California, some of the electricity distribution companies began offering special contracts to encourage corporate customers to be more efficient. The deal was: They’d get a cheaper electricity rate, if they agreed to cut their usage by 15% when asked to do so during peak time shortages. If they failed to do so, they’d have to pay extra-high premium prices.

This is, of course, rational market-based pricing of goods—as the theory goes, people who need lots of electricity when it’s in short supply should pay more, and the way to encourage efficiency and flexibility is to give it a financial incentive.

Well, as a result many big corporations are now deliberately consuming 15% more electricity than they need, so that if they’re asked to cut usage at peak times, it’ll be easy to do so. Bwahahaha, another victory for the free market.

Well, here I am in San Francisco. Or at least, the Sheraton near SFO. Tomorrow I get to go to a meeting, then back to the airport. At least this hotel has high speed Internet access. It even has electricity, for the moment at least.

Still, it’s weird to be here. Lots of things look like they do on TV. The license plates, the palm trees, the big flat buildings that almost appear to have congealed on the sides of the hills, the scattered pieces of retrofuturistic architecture, the spaghetti tangles of freeway…

Part of the problem is that I’m tired, and when I get tired pieces of my brain forget that I live in America, and get all surprised about it. Hearing people talk about places like Martinez and Orinda is odd too. I know all these names from listening to Negativland albums over and over again, and now here they are on road signs.

Atlanta was pretty much as I remembered it. I called a friend, who much to my surprise wasn’t working and offered to meet me at the airport. We talked about her recent career change from “dancer” to “restaurant consultant”. Running a bunch of Subway stores is apparently hard and frustrating work, but I’m told that it beats dancing naked on tables. Of course, this is somewhat academic for me, as I don’t really have what it takes to dance naked on tables for money.