The Greatest Happiness Principle

60 Minutes: Happiness


We could learn a lot from the Danes (and all Scandinavians for that matter). A new study shows that they are the happiest people in the world.

I consider myself a Utilitarian in this sense: we should strive to create the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. I am not a purist, mind you. There obviously are values that would more important (where it would conflict with Justice, for instance), but in a broad sense I find this principle to be the correct one.

The Air Car

Talk about environmentally friendly! It only goes 200 kilometers on a tank (about 125 miles), but it is filled up with air. The first video is a BBC news report.



And here is an Australian report:

American Gata Kamsky Wins FIDE World Cup Chess Championship

Shirov and Kamsky discuss the final game post-mortem.
From ChessBase.com: American GM Gata Kamsky has won the FIDE World Cup.

Normally, the winner of the FIDE World Cup would be crowned the FIDE World Champion, but ChessBase.com reports that last year FIDE changed the rules so that the winner of the World Cup would have to play the previous winner -- Bulgaria's Veselin Topalov -- to become FIDE's World Champion. The match may end becoming something of a spectacle if Gata brings his dad, Rustam, along. Rustam was well-known during Gata's early years. From ChessBase.com:

A number of readers have suggested that the Kamsky-Topalov match could become really exciting if the American reactivates his famously belligerent father Rustam, to counter the activities of Topalov's manager Silvio Danailov. "That would be a wonderfully thrilling matchup," wrote one wag, "with explosive off-the-board play. We look forward to daily blow-by-blow reports on your news page."

I remember seeing Rustam at the 1993 FIDE candidates in Biel/Bienne Switzerland during a weekend that I took off while I was at Oxford University. I still have a picture of Gata playing against a long-haired Vladimir Kramnik. Maybe I will scan it in and post it sometime. I don't remember Rustam causing any trouble at the tournament; but there was always the fear that he would. I had a lot of great memories of that tournament. Every morning I would have breakfast with many of the Grandmasters all sitting at the same table. During one breakfast, German GM Eric Lobron animatedly explained his preparation in his win over GM Judit Polgar. I also had dinner with Former many-time U.S. Champion Yasser Seirawan and French GM Joel Lautier and Lautier's father. But I digress.

In any case, it is exciting to have an American at the top of Chess World again. Maybe this will spur some interest chess in the United States unlike we have seen in quite a while.

If I get a chance to talk to Gata between now and the match with Topalov, I will try to post that, too.

Chess World Cup Update: Kamsky Wins Game 2

American Gata Kamsky won the second game of the finals match over Spain's Alexei Shirov for the FIDE World Cup Chess Championship. The first game was drawn. With two regular games yet to be played, Kamsky is in a very strong position as Shirov will have to win one of them to send it to a playoff. Kamsky started out with the black pieces and won his game today while playing the white pieces.



You can see the full report with an analysis of the game by Grandmaster Dorian Rogozenko at ChessBase.com.

An American Reaches the Finals of the FIDE World Cup Chess Championship

ChessBase.com reports that Gata Kamsky, who took a long sabbatical from competitive chess to obtain a law degree, has knocked out Norwegian wunderkind Magnus Carlsen to reach the finals of the FIDE World Chess Championship.


I have little doubt that the talented Norwegian will become World Champion himself someday. Having just turned 17 years old, he still has plenty of time to hone his skills.






Gata will face either another child prodigy, Ukrainian Sergey Karjakin, or Spanish GM Alexei Shirov.

Karjakin is already saying it is his generation's turn.

New "Elephant" Oil Field Discovered in Brazil

From Business Week:

Petrobras announced Nov. 8 it has found between 5 billion and 8 billion barrels of light oil and gas at the Tupi field, 155 miles offshore southern Brazil in an area it shares with Britain's BG Group and Portugal's Galp Energy. Tupi is the world's biggest oil find since a 12 billion-barrel Kazakh field was discovered in 2000, and the largest ever in deep waters. Perhaps more important, Petrobras believes Tupi may be Brazil's first of several new "elephants," an industry term for outsize fields of more than 1 billion barrels.

Initially, Tupi will produce about 100,000 barrels a day but may ramp up to as much as 1 million before 2020—more than the biggest U.S. field in Alaska's Prudhoe Bay, says Hugo Repsold, Petrobras' exploration and production strategy manager. "It's monstrous," says Matthew Shaw, a Latin America energy analyst at consultant Wood Mackenzie in London.

The oil industry is known for its "boom and bust" cycles. There is little doubt that the high oil prices are fueling the current boom. Although the article touts that this kills the idea of "peak oil," in reality it doesn't completely disprove the theory. The real idea of peak oil -- as I understand it -- is that oil will become increasingly expensive to extract.

Furthermore, the increasing use of hydrocarbons produce other environmental challenges due to the pollutants its use creates. These costs are externalities and cannot easily be quantified.

The high oil prices will also spur investment and study into alternative sources of energy. This will also reduce demand for oil as these alternative energy sources come into use. So far, the biggest impediment to alternative energy uses has been the NIMBY problem and (up to now) relatively large start-up expense. The latter issue is quickly resolving itself; what remains is to convince the public that some scenic views may have to be sacrificed, and (in the case of nuclear energy, if needed) that disposal of nuclear waste will have to be effected.

At some point, we will need to consider public financing of infrastructure to support the alternative energy sectors. I would find an analogy in the creation of railroads and highways. The real problem is how to avoid the problems of the past, namely: private profits underwritten from the socialization of costs.

The Next Gold

With the advent of global warming, potable water will become an increasingly scarce commodity. As the arctic and antarctic ice caps begin to melt in summer, sea levels will begin to rise. Couple this with poor urban planning (much like what is happening in Atlanta right now) and you have the makings of a potential crisis for millions of people.

There is one thing America is known for: ingenuity. We need to apply our ability to come up with innovative solutions to known water problems. An idea that I think should be given consideration is building desalinization plants along the coasts and pumping converted sea water into potable -- or at least non-potable, but usable -- water.

Certainly the main obstacle to such a project is its capital-intensiveness. And critics could argue against it either because the cost is perceived to be prohibitive and unnecessary based on the premise that global warming doesn't exist (the conservative argument) or because it could become just another case of private profits and socialized losses.

Something that many people don't know is that in the Native American tradition, things that are produced by the earth or nature belong to everyone and should not inure to the benefit of private companies or individuals. The question that begs to be asked in this line of thought is this: Who made the water? Who made the air we breathe? Who made the soil? (Did man make the water, air or soil -- and by extension, the minerals produced by natural processes?) It goes to the heart of property rights that have formed the basis of our legal system.

Ultimately, we must recognize that we owe it to our country -- and our world -- to make the best use of our natural resources. The implementation of a water supply from converted sea water will take many years to implement. The point in its favor, however, is that the need is foreseeable years -- even decades -- in advance.

Obviously, there are other problems related to increasing use and need for other commodities. Energy demand is growing every day, not only due to developing economies in Asia (which, long term, may end up becoming the center of the next empire), but also due merely because of an increasing global population and the energy needs to grow crops to feed them. Overfishing is causing a natural food supply to become more scarce and innovative techniques are needed there as well. That will require a non-polluting and renewable energy source.

As a result of these challenges, we need to create a national energy policy based on sustainable technologies. This problem, too, is foreseeable. There are many technologies based on sustainable energy: wind, solar, hydroelectric, tidal and geothermal. The effectiveness of each of the natural energy supplies vary depending on location. What is needed is a national program to maximize the use of these various natural energy supplies.

I haven't been writing much lately. I told you I've been thinking a lot. See what happens when I do that?

How To Spot A Scam, Part 4

As a follow-up to my post on How To Spot A Scam, here is a link to a website dedicated to helping potential victims spot fake checks: FakeChecks.org.

Here is a PSA advertising the site:



There are more videos here.

Garry Kasparov on Real Time With Bill Maher

This one has real substance discussed. Maher's comment about needing the KGB at the beginning referred to a group of protester's at his show disrupting the program. They were conspiracy theorists who allege that the World Trade Center's tower #7 had to have been brought down by demolition explosives and Maher had called these people crazy on a previous program. Maher had to have security people called in to remove them.

Garry Kasparov on the Colbert Report

Not much of substance was discussed.

Best line:

Kasprov: "In chess there are rules. In Russian politics there are no rules."

Both Stephen Colbert and Garry Kasparov have new books on the market.

Myanmar's Atrocities Exposed

Back in February, I wrote about human rights abuses against the Christian minority in Myanmar in my post Myanmar: The Other Killing Field. Now, according to reports on CNN, it appears that abuses are happening even to Buddhist monks.

Thankfully, Anderson Cooper with his 360° program has been bringing these activities to light (and CNN in general). He also has been reporting about abuses in this country by auto insurance companies against their insureds. This isn't the first time that Anderson Cooper has reported about hardball practices by auto insurance practices.

Thank you, Mr. Cooper, for bringing these issues to light.

Garry Kasparov on 60 Minutes

The Kasparov Revolution.

World chess champion Garry Kasparov is leading the political opposition against Vladimir Putin's government. It may be his hardest match ever. Steve Kroft reports. Click on the link above to watch the video.

Iranian TV Shows Holocaust Movie

It wasn't that long ago that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad held a conference suggesting that the Holocaust never happened. How things have apparently changed in Iran so quickly.

From Iranian TV shows Holocaust movie at Talking Points Memo:

Yet the series titled "Zero Degree Turn" is clearly sympathetic to the Jews' plight during World War II. It shows men, women and children with yellow stars on their clothes being taken forcibly out of their homes and loaded into trucks by Nazi soldiers.

"Where are they taking them?" the horrified hero, a young Iranian diplomat who works at the Iranian Embassy in Paris, asks someone in a crowd of onlookers.

"The Fascists are taking the Jews to the concentration camps," the man says. The hero, named Habib Parsa, then begins giving Iranian passports to Jews to allow them to flee occupied France to then-Palestine.

Though the Habib character is fictional, it is based on a true story of diplomats in the Iranian Embassy in Paris in the 1940s who gave out about 500 Iranian passports for Jews to use to escape.

The show's appearance now may reflect an attempt by Iran's leadership to moderate its image as anti-Semitic and to underline a distinction that Iranian officials often make _ that their conflict is with Israel, not with the Jewish people.

The show is reportedly wildly popular among the Iranian public and people are watching the state-run show instead of watching satellite TV.

It raises a lot of questions given the Bush White House's insinuations of intentions to attack Iran.

Whitewash

Seymour Hersh recently wrote an article in The New Yorker wherein he reports on what General Antonio Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal, found during his limited investigation.

But even with the limited investigation, General Taguba doesn't believe the official story that the soldier's were renegades acting outside the military command:

“From what I knew, troops just don’t take it upon themselves to initiate what they did without any form of knowledge of the higher-ups,” Taguba told me. His orders were clear, however: he was to investigate only the military police at Abu Ghraib, and not those above them in the chain of command. “These M.P. troops were not that creative,” he said. “Somebody was giving them guidance, but I was legally prevented from further investigation into higher authority. I was limited to a box.”

And from a report in the Washington Post:

In interviews with New Yorker reporter Seymour M. Hersh, Taguba said that he was ordered to limit his investigation to low-ranking soldiers who were photographed with the detainees and the soldiers' unit, but that it was always his sense that the abuse was ordered at higher levels. Taguba was quoted as saying that he thinks top commanders in Iraq had extensive knowledge of the aggressive interrogation techniques that mirrored those used on high-value detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and that the military police "were literally being exploited by the military interrogators."

Taguba also said that Rumsfeld misled Congress when he testified in May 2004 about the abuse investigation, minimizing how much he knew about the incidents. Taguba said that he met with Rumsfeld and top aides the day before the testimony.

"I know that my peers in the Army will be mad at me for speaking out, but the fact is that we violated the laws of land warfare in Abu Ghraib," Taguba said, according to the article. "We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and we violated the core of our military values. The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe, even today, that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable."

Not allowed to ask questions that will get to the ultimate truth of the matter? Sounds like whitewash to me.

***Update***

Here is a video report:

Help Stop Teenage Affluenza

I found this funny video on YouTube that has a serious message. The spot might have shown on Australian TV.



Here is the website: 40 Hour Famine. You won't hear this message very often in America, so I will do my best to spread the word via my humble blog.

American Embassy In Baghdad Built With Slave Labor?

In a compilation of news and commentary, a post over at Daily Kos alleges that the American Embassy in Baghdad was built with forced labor.

(sarcasm) Yeah, that's what we want America to stand for. (/sarcasm)

From a story at MSNBC.com:

Whistleblowers who worked on the embassy have told officials at the State and Justice departments, as well as NBC News, that the contractor, First Kuwaiti International Trading, had brought workers, mostly South Asians and Filipinos, to Baghdad under false pretenses, then abused and threatened them while there.

Then the Bush Administration's State Department did an "investigation" and found "no wrongdoing":

The State Department inspector general, Howard J. Krongard, found no wrongdoing last year in what he describes as a "limited investigation" but acknowledges the company knew he was coming three months before he arrived. Still, his report states: “Nothing came to our attention as a result of the foregoing procedures that caused us to believe that TIP (Trafficking in Persons) violations … occurred at the NEC (New Embassy Complex).”

And the Bush Administration's Justice Department is seeking to wash our hands of it:

In addition, two lawyers in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, Andrew Kline and Michael J. Frank, have been talking to former First Kuwaiti employees about the charges. U.S. officials tell NBC News that they have not decided whether Justice even has jurisdiction in the case since the alleged violations occurred overseas.

The Middle East Mess

Today in the New York Times, Thomas Friedman in his column entitled What a Mess lays out the conundrum in the Middle East:

Just look around. Gaza is turning into Mogadishu. Hamas is shelling Israel. Israel is retaliating. Iraq is a boiling pot. Iran is about to go nuclear. Lebanon is being pulled apart. Syria is being investigated for murdering Lebanon’s prime minister. I could go on. Yes, this mess is so big and so tall. Who knows where to pick it up at all?

In Israel, officials are mulling all alternatives — from the Saudi peace initiative to negotiating with Hamas to opening talks with Syria to reoccupying Gaza to looking for a “trustee” for the West Bank — because no one is sure anymore what to do.

That is, the Left’s way — land for peace — was discredited by the collapse of Oslo. The Right’s way, permanent Israeli occupation of all “The Land of Israel,” was made impossible by Palestinian demographics and two uprisings. The third way, unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon and Gaza, has been discredited by Hezbollah’s attack from Lebanon and the Hamas rocket attacks from Gaza.

“Israel is in a place it has never been before,” said Moshe Halbertal, a Hebrew University philosophy professor. “It does not have a picture of where to go and how, so people are looking for a fourth way.”

...

Israel’s real choice is between dealing with a Hamas-led Palestinian Authority or watching it collapse into little pieces, which Israel would have to pick up. (Think Iraq and Somalia.) West Bank and Gaza unemployment is now around 40 percent. Talking with Palestinians in Ramallah, the phrase I heard most was not “Israeli occupation” but “Palestinian disintegration.”

Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki told me that as bad as things are today, his polls show most Palestinians still don’t blame Hamas. They blame Israel and America for withholding funds from the Hamas government that Palestinians elected. The best way to diminish Hamas’s influence, or to moderate it, is by forcing it to assume responsibility. Ask it: “Do you want Palestinians to be able to work in Israel? Then sit down with Israel and work out the details.” We need to “force Hamas through a corridor of difficult decisions,” said Israeli strategist Gidi Grinstein. If America can talk to Iran, Israel can talk to Hamas.

Second, Hamas says it will only offer Israel a long-term cease-fire. Fine, take it. Fact No. 1: the real history of Israeli-Arab relations is: war, lull, war, lull, war, lull — from 1948 until today. Fact No. 2: “Since 1948,” said Mr. Yaari, “the Jews have always made better use of the lulls than the Arabs.” Israel doesn’t need Hamas’s recognition. It needs a long lull.

The third new reality is that Hamas’s shelling of Israel from Gaza means Israel can never hand over the West Bank to the Palestinians, without an international trustee — because from there Palestinians could close Israel’s airport with one rocket. Only Jordan, or an international force, can be that trustee.

Bottom line: I don’t know if there is a fourth way, but, if there is, it will have to include these new realities. Otherwise, this mess will get even bigger, deeper and taller.

Thomas Friedman is right: what a mess!

Is Saudi Arabia Running Out of Oil?

In a report over at The Oil Drum, blogger Stuart Staniford argues that the Ghawar oil fields are starting to get depleted and that this accounts for the recent rise in oil prices. The post comes with a lot of maps, charts and technical analysis. I am reproducing some of them here with some of his analysis.


Visualization of oil saturation in Ghawar, with focus region on 'Ain Dar and Shedgum regions at northern end. This is the "Linux Supercluster" picture (finder's credit Bob Shaw), showing a simulation visualization of the state of Ghawar at some year, probably but not certainly 2004. I have color reversed the original picture so that in this version, the red areas are interpreted to represent dry oil in the reservoir. The dark blue areas are water below the oil. The pale blue areas are interpreted to be swept, with most oil that can be removed already gone. Source: Figure 3 of Linux Clusters Driving Step Changes in Interpretation Simulation (pdf).

Mr. Staniford then asks:

Here the question is: is this an accurate picture of the state of recent depletion of Ghawar? (Ghawar is the world's largest oil field, and source of over half of the oil produced by Saudi Arabia).

And if so, then the second question arises: does that depletion have anything to do with this picture?

Saudi Arabian oil production, Jan 2002-Jan 2007, average of four different sources. Annotations show important events causally influencing production, including all documented megaprojects for new supply in the the time period. Graph is not zero-scaled to better show changes. Click to enlarge. Source: US EIA International Petroleum Monthly Table 1.1, IEA Oil Market Report Table 3, Joint Oil Data Initiative, OPEC Monthly Oil Market Report, Table 17 (or similar) on OPEC Supply.

In particular, Saudi oil production has been falling with increasing speeed since summer 2005, and overall, since mid 2004, about 2 million barrels of oil per day in production has gone missing (about 1mbpd in reduction in total production, and about another 1mbpd in that two major new projects, Qatif and Haradh III, failed to increase overall production). That's 2.5% of world production and, if that production hadn't gone missing, gasoline in the US likely would still be somewhere in the vicinity of $2/gallon instead of well over $3.

I will analyze six or seven separate lines of technical evidence, and argue they all point to a consistent picture, which says that the answer to both questions is "Yes". Yes, the northern half of Ghawar is quite depleted. And yes, this probably explains at least part of recent production declines. Furthermore, it is likely that more declines in Saudi production are on the way.

I don't know if this is disinformation just meant to create panic (and therefore drive up the price of oil), or if the shortage due to this one region is just temporary. I can just tell you that the general feeling is that cheap oil is starting to run out. In any case, I think that the link at the top is worth a look.

Before I go on, I think I should give a disclaimer (which I am borrowing, for the most part, from Mike Shedlock's site):

The content on this site is provided as general information only and should not be taken as investment advice. All site content, including advertisements, shall not be construed as a recommendation to buy or sell any security or financial instrument, or to participate in any particular trading or investment strategy (or an endorsement or recommendation of any product on any ad). The ideas expressed on this site are solely the opinions of the author(s) who may or may not have a position in any company or advertiser referenced above. Any action that you take as a result of information, analysis, or advertisement on this site is ultimately your responsibility. Consult your investment adviser before making any investment decisions.

If Saudi Arabia is truly starting to run out of oil, then we here in America need to get cracking developing technology to make our use of oil more efficient and develop alternative forms of energy. Most of our electricity comes from burning coal; and while we have a 250-year supply of it, it burns very dirty. Different areas of the country are more suitable to other, cleaner, forms of energy production: solar, wind and hydro power. Each of these are renewable and relatively clean forms of energy production. While current technology does not allow for these forms of energy production to be used widely, it would be wise for Americans to put our smartest minds to work creating more energy-efficient automobiles and buildings. Rather than looking toward converting food crops into more oil for our cars, we need to focus on making our cities more fuel efficient and develop more mass transit lines so that we can cut unnecessary oil usage.

It is my feeling that we, here in America, need to use our strength of innovation to solve our energy problems rather than looking for ways to produce more energy. Our real problem is that we are wasting too much energy that we have access to now. Reducing the demand on oil by conserving and increasing energy efficiency would be the smartest and most effective method of driving down our energy costs.

The Ubiquitousness of Poverty

Today I read a book review by Nicholas Kristof of Poor People by William Vollmann. I found these paragraphs disquieting:

One measure of the ubiquity of these tradeoffs is that today, as every day, 30,000 children will die of hunger, disease, and other consequences of poverty, according to UNICEF. In many cases, those will be daughters, because parents (particularly in South Asia) don't have the resources to keep all their children alive, so they put a finger on the scales on the side of their sons. In India alone, among children aged one to five, girls are 50 percent more likely to die than boys—meaning that 130,000 Indian girls are mortally discriminated against each year.

Poverty both in the US and around the world remains a central fact of twenty-first-century life; a majority of the world lives on less than $2 a day, one common measure of who is poor. Yet we manage, pretty successfully, to ignore it and insulate ourselves even from poverty in our own country. When it pops out from behind the screen after an episode like the Watts riots of 1965 or the New Orleans hurricane of 2005, then we express horror and indignation and vow change, and finally shrug and move on. Meanwhile, the world's five hundred wealthiest people have the same income as the world's poorest 416 million.

I have been thinking about all of the wars that take place in the world today. I have often wondered how many of those wars are fought over such simple things as access to clean, potable water? Many wars, historically, are fought over access to natural resources.

It makes me wonder: how much money it would cost to provide clean, potable water to everyone in the world? How many needless deaths can we prevent just by expanding access to water? Water is life. Where you find water, you find civilization. Many of the diseases that Bill Gates and Warren Buffett want to eradicate probably start from unclean water supplies. I don't think it is enough to go after the diseases themselves. We need to go after their root causes.

How does this tie in to my post? Most of these people cannot afford individually -- even collectively -- to build water treatment plants. They cannot build wells deep enough to reach potable water and bring it to the surface. Some countries might be able to utilize water from the sea if they could afford desalinization plants.

This is the sort of problem that truly does need cooperation from everyone in the world and funding primarily from wealthy countries and individuals.

China vs. India: Can America Compete?

Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times has a video report on his theory of who will be the world leader economically in 2100. In it, he details how people in rural India are lagging behind: no electricity, schoolteachers who leave their students uneducated and sex slavery that does not seem to be abating for poor and unfortunate girls. Kristof says that China suffers the same problems in rural areas, but that the Chinese educate all their children in math and science very well. Therefore, Kristof says, he is betting on China to be the world leader in 2100.

Kristof says that he is teaching his children Chinese because of his theory.

A lot of writers have theorized that the United States will not be a world power 100 years from now. I have my doubts about that theory. We are an educated country, and the democratization of information through this medium called the internet is also to our advantage. Almost all of the world's patents are created here in the U.S. We still have a good education system and we have a political system that allows us to adapt to a changing social, economic and political landscape. Don't write the U.S. off just yet.

I have said for many years that it is important that every American child learn English and a second language fluently. English is our national language by custom and tradition. But in a world made smaller by instant communication ("flattened" as Thomas Friedman has argued), I think it is important that every American child learn how to communicate with others around the world.

There are multiple reasons for this:

1) Think how much better we could fight terrorism around the world if we had enough Americans who could speak directly to people (and translate for intelligence services) in those languages where terrorists come from (at this time in history that would mainly be Arabic). It wouldn't solve all of the problems, to be sure, because some of the problems are based on religious and cultural differences as well. But being able to speak the language would help break down some of the barriers that we currently have.

2) Learning a language helps break down misunderstandings created by mistakes in translation. There are subtleties in languages that cannot be explained by simple transliterations of words or phrases. Language differences are a natural barrier to trust, friendship and commerce.

3) Speaking a second language would expand our marketability and market share around the world -- increasing our political and economic power. Speaking to someone in their own native language lessens tensions that can be created by being an outsider.

Right now the U.S. does not have the ability to teach every child a second language fluently. But, if we were to set our minds to it and put our money where our minds should be, we could bring people here from all over the world to teach us their language. Doing so would help us fight terrorism, improve international relations and increase our marketability around the world.

I have to admit that I don't speak a second language fluently, but I wish I did. Nicholas Kristof is doing the right thing teaching his children a second language. Now we need to implement that same idea for every American child so that they will be able to compete in the new markets of the future.