Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.
I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here.
John Quiggin 
The whole world is running late, John.
From a comment by Harry Clarke in the Dutton nuclear thread, but could have been from any placid delayist:
“It seems to me that further cost-benefit studies are worth doing.”
Actually, no, they are not. Massive electrification through WWS (wind, water, sun) is now the only game in town for the energy transition. It’s feasible in a short timetable, and nothing else is.
Allow me to make a rather different proposal to Australians: a war dictatorship to achieve net zero by 2030. I picked the date with a pin as a proxy for “the soonest technically feasible year regardless of cost”. The model is not based on any current policy, even the aspirations of the Paris Agreement, but the successful war economies of the Allies in 1940-45. The USA moved almost 40% of its GDP to war production in four years, Britain somewhat more over a slightly longer period. I have no data on Australia but let’s assume it was parallel to the USA. The current global capacity for PV solar production, heading for 1 TW/year by the end of 2024, is much closer to what’s needed than Allied war production was in 1939, and the need is much better defined, so let’s say we need a shift of 15% of the economy in 6 years (order-of magnitude guess). The war economies generally left productive assets in private hands, just subjecting them to a layer of temporary socialist planning, through state orders and controls of scarce inputs, labour, banking and prices. Government became largely dictatorship by consent, with significant but partial limitations on speech and assembly to preserve national security. It all looks doable again given the will.
What sort of policies are we looking at? Full nationalisation of fossil fuel assets is needed to plan their controlled phaseout, respecting existing international but not domestic contracts. The compensation won’t be much if you price carbon emissions at the IEA’s $130 a tonne. A very large public fund, say A$100bn – another order-of-magnitude guess – , is needed to secure the large new investments. Unless other countries follow, you would probably need to reimpose capital controls. Inflation could initially be high as the fast switch would create supply bottlenecks. I’m surely leaving out a lot of other important things.
A Committee for Climate Safety would have wide powers to requisition resources and suspend or modify regulations, including planning controls, as well as controlling expenditure from the Fund. A collective body is probably better than a one-person Roman dictatorship as there is no obvious single candidate like Fabius Verrucosus or Winston Churchill. The USA in WW2, and all countries in WW1 apart from Russia, operated by collective leadership. Fabius’ disfiguring warts and Churchill’s alcoholism and very dubious policy record show that you may have to discard conventional criteria for selection to find people who can do the job in hand.
This proposal will of course be dismissed as ravings from an old guy on the other side of the planet. But consider two things. One is that the general rule in optimising a plan of any sort is not to start from the inadequate BAU, since there is no assurance than any incremental changes will be adequate. Instead you start from a scheme you know can do the job, and tweak it to lower the costs and risks, or otherwise make it more acceptable. * Perhaps you don’t need to sacrifice so much democracy or market freedom.
A grisly anecdote from the Punic Wars. After the calamitous defeat at Cannae, with 48,000 Roman soldiers killed according to Livy, Hannibal failed to march on Rome, as he expected that the Romans would be sensible and sue for peace. They did not. They did not just reelect Fabius to a second dictatorship, but resorted to the long-disused practice of human sacrifice, immuring four foreign prisoners to die of starvation. At this point the Romans did not really believe this would secure divine assistance. They did it to declare to Hannibal, to their wavering Italian allies and most of all to themselves that there was nothing they would not do to win.
As I write this, the forecast for today is that temperatures will reach 43 degrees C in Seville and other Andalusian cities, 42 degrees in Rome. Seville has started giving heatwaves names like hurricanes: this one is Iago. Heatwaves like this kill, and in quite large numbers. Citizens everywhere have been reduced to numbed passivity in the face of denialist propaganda and “practical” half-measures. I predict they will soon wake up, and the Overton window will slide. The pendulum will swing from passive acceptance to panicked demands for drastic action, now. The risk is less that bold proposals like mine will still be ruled out as crazy, than that support will swing behind bad nostrums. Human sacrifice and the old standby of blaming the Jews may be unlikely, but hydrogen for everything has attracted far too much enthusiasm, and geoengineering is waiting in the wings.
* Harrison’s marine chronometer of 1761 is a good example. He did not start from existing, not very accurate marine clocks and watches, and try to improve them. Instead he designed a movement that was accurate, even it was a large and fragile desktop device, and then shrank it into a practical form factor:
H1:https://collections.rmg.co.uk/media/714/547/l5695_001.jpg
H4: https://collections.rmg.co.uk/media/450/724/f7024_001.jpg
H4 worked fine but cost about as much as the rest of a typical ship. Harrison’s inventions had been publicly funded through a large prize, so IIRC he did not have patent rights. Other clockmakers piled in to the terrific business opportunity he had opened up, and quite quickly developed improvements that lowered the cost dramatically for the same performance. My Climate Safety Commission will need powers to suspend or seize IP, and enforce compulsory licensing.
James, Following my initial question about whether cost/benefit studies included storage and distribution costs for renewables the message I got from you was that the costs of renewables double with storage costs and the cost estimates for nuclear are a guess. The evidence on “learning by doing” in nuclear power generation was also disputed.
Hence I said, yes, “further cost-benefit studies are worth doing”. I’ll stick with that. If it is all so obvious the main issues should be easy to resolve.
I will do a re-post from the last Monday message board. It is very topical.
It is a good thing that Victoria has cancelled its hosting of the Commonwealth Games. Much needed state government money will be saved from being wasted on an event which that state cannot afford. This IMO is a sign of things to come. States are realizing that they cannot afford such wasteful extravaganzas as they struggle to meet basic expenditure needs.
It is to be hoped that the hosting of the 2032 Olympic Games will also be cancelled in Queensland. I think this is quite likely given the way things are going globally. Multiple global crises are coming to a head. Here in Australia, we need to concentrate on the basics where we are failing abysmally; namely health, welfare, education, housing, environmental action and climate change prevention and mitigation. These areas are all in dire need of resources. We cannot afford to waste resources on foolish and unnecessary extravaganzas be they sporting or cultural. There is too much basic need which is not being met in this country.
The human world and not only the human world is heading towards a total existential crisis. Previous ways of living are no longer appropriate, no longer viable. This includes all those expenditures of an era where the parties, events, extravaganzas, spectaculars and indulgences mentality dominated people’s thinking. Those days are over. Life for almost all citizens of the world is rapidly becoming a grim battle for basic survival. Westerners will not be spared from this grim battle as the globe heats and burns. The more we hang on to old failed ways and waste our remaining time and resources, the more all of us will suffer and many (globally in the billions over the next decades) will meet a premature death.
People are fiddling while the world burns. When will they wake up?
The “Yes” and “No” cases for the Voice referendum are now available at the AEC website.
JQ has previously written on his Substack blog that the Albanese Government needed to announce a model for the Voice in order to improve the prospects of the referendum being carried. I have come to think that this is correct, at least in terms of the Government putting forward the basic operating structure and principles of the Voice that it would seek to legislate if the referendum were carried.
The “Yes” and “No” cases tend to confirm this view. The “Yes” case does a good job of explaining how knowledge and perspectives from local First Nations communities can improve, and have improved, policy on matters affecting them. What is missing, in my view, is an explanation of how it would be ensured that those local perspectives and bodies of knowledge would be transmitted to the elected members of the “committee” to be called the Voice, and thence transmitted to government. I think this is probably a consequence of the government’s reluctance to clearly state what model for Voice it has in mind.
Much of the “No” case is the usual alarmist mendacity that one encounters in “No” campaigns in referendums. However I think it does skilfully exploit the omission on the government’s part that I have commented on above.
Nonetheless, I will be campaigning and voting for “Yes”.
It seems increasingly likely this month (Jul 2023) could breach the +1.5 °C warming threshold as a monthly average. Perhaps that may extend into August 2023?
Planet Earth has been for the last 15 consecutive days (up to and including Mon, 17 Jul 2023) at record global surface air temperatures, likely the hottest 15 days in the last 100,000+ years.
It looks increasingly likely that the record daily 2 m air mean Temperature World (90°S–90°N, 0–360°E) of 17.23 °C, set on Thu, 6 Jul 2023, could perhaps be exceeded within the next few days.
https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/t2_daily/
The daily 2 m air mean Temperature Northern Hemisphere (0–90°N, 0–360°E) reached a record high of 22.34 °C on Mon, 17 Jul 2023.
The daily 2 m air mean Temperature Tropics (23.5°S–23.5°N, 0–360°E) is at record seasonal highs (up to and including Mon, 17 Jul 2023).
The daily mean Sea Surface Temperature (SST) World (60°S–60°N) has been at record seasonal high levels for at least 4 months (up to and including Mon, 17 Jul 2023), and increasingly likely to soon exceed the 21.1 °C instrumental record established in Apr 2023.
The daily mean Sea Surface Temperature (SST) North Atlantic (0–60°N, 0–80°W) has been at record seasonal high levels for more than 4 months (up to and including Mon, 17 Jul 2023), and increasingly likely to soon exceed the 24.9 °C instrumental record established in Sep 2022.
https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/
Paul Norton says:
“However I think it does skilfully exploit the omission on the government’s part that I have commented on above. “Nonetheless, I will be campaigning and voting for “Yes”.”
*
Thanks and me too.
The Voice, (as has been floated by unnamed senator’s (Qld)) is able to be nobbled / altered / deleted by future governments by a simple majority. No elected official is forced to even take into account any Voice communications.
Remember The Climate Council anyone? They resigned, including JQ. Doesn’t this rhyme with The Voice … JQ said: “The government’s refusal to accept the advice of its own [Climate] Authority, despite wide support for that advice from business, environmental groups and the community as a whole, reflects the comprehensive failure of its policies on” …
https://johnquiggin.com/2017/03/23/my-resignation-from-the-climate-change-authority/
I don’t understand those who don’t understand – The Voice is at the whim of current and any future government.
Perhaps this is a feature “If/ when Referenda passed” – the current government sets all parameters.
Perhaps this is THE bug, which the No campaign exploits “we don’t know the model!”. FUD.
Yet I am mindful of;
“The Voice to Parliament referendum is in danger of defeat”
JQ – JANUARY 16, 2023
“But, in the context of an Australian referendum, any ambiguity will be resolved by voting No. If there isn’t a clearly described model on offer, people will imagine the version they like least, then vote for or against that. I’m a Yes, pretty much regardless of the model, but I don’t think I’m representative of a majority of voters in a majority of states.”
https://johnquiggin.com/2023/01/16/the-voice-to-parliament-referendum-is-in-danger-of-defeat/
And our own semi electoral college where the States get a vote too. Wrong! Archaic. Left over colonialism. People only + sortition please.
The FUD merchants are mendatious in the extreme, as they know they get to have control over the Voice.
It is that simple and bald faced.
*
Q1. What am I missing?
Q2. How is it possible for the AEC to allow lies in The Voice pamphlet?
“‘Deeply misleading’: legal expert furious no campaign used his previous voice concerns in pamphlet
“Prof Greg Craven will complain to electoral commission after being quoted in no pamphlet despite writing to Peter Dutton’s office last week”
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/jul/18/indigenous-voice-to-parliament-greg-craven-no-campaign-misleading-previous-concerns
KT2, if as you write: “The Voice, (as has been floated by unnamed senator’s (Qld)) is able to be nobbled / altered / deleted by future governments by a simple majority. No elected official is forced to even take into account any Voice communications.”
If that is so then why not legislate it? You would get almost 100% backing for that, including from Peter Dutton. If the Voice is completely malleable as you suggest and able to be bent to the will of any government then it cannot force anything. Lydia Thorpe is correct. It is largely a token effort with no power at all.
But the fact is that your premise is incorrect. If the power to make “representations” is enshrined in the constitution then it does have power and the protection of Administrative Law. The High Court will determine the Voice’s power. It will not be malleable and disposable. This is risky.
I am voting “no” as it seems are most Australians. I want a colourblind Australia where race does not determine rights and where indigenous Australians play a full role in our modern society. I don’t want indigenous Australia identified as a “social problem”. That is paternalistic and inaccurate.
If it is at all politically feasible to do what James suggests, then I hope you-all will do it. I wish we in the US weren’t so politically bleeped in the head, or we’d be doing it too.
Although, perhaps a real conservative will show up. That would be super helpful. (I know there are a good chunk of cons who are environmentalist – it is just that I guess they tend to not speak up.)
Because otherwise I do agree that at least here, there is a high risk of people making stupid choices. And I agree also that the evidence is to the point where we are all getting ready to say that Something Must Be Done.
Bill Mitchell writes:
“RBA interest rate rises are inflationary and neoliberal privatisations have reinforced that”
https://billmitchell.org/blog/?p=60991
He’s right on the money.
“Kathryn Campbell first senior bureaucrat suspended (from her AUKUS plum job) after Robodebt royal commission” – ABC News website.
Her appointment to that new job after her Human Services and Robodebt debacle was another scandal in itself and directly attributable to Albanese and his government. The way Kathryn Campbell was given her plum and no doubt meaningless AUKUS job when under such a massive cloud was egregious and disgraceful to the worst degree.
https://michaelwest.com.au/kathryn-campbell-from-robodebt-ignominy-to-plum-defence-job/
And now she is on to suspension without pay. Finally, some justice.
Scott Morrison and his cabinet were not fit to govern. Neither are Anthony Albanese or his cabinet fit to govern. It’s a conga line of fools and poltroons. I fear for the future of Australia.
KT2 asks “Q2. How is it possible for the AEC to allow lies in The Voice pamphlet?”
Because the AEC has no power to disallow lies in the referendum pamphlet. Under the relevant legislation the content of the pamphlet is determined by the committees established by Parliament for that purpose.
My limited understanding is that the constitution is the place where you define something, you create it, and you establish the elemental relationships with the other entities also defined in the constitution. Even our manner of choosing the Prime Minister is not a matter for the constitution but for the parliament, acting under the convention that the Royal Representative (King/Queen) accepts the recommendation of her Governor General of Australia, who takes advice from the ministers. If the K/Q wished, they could intervene, *but by convention* do not.
If not even the Prime Minister model is enshrined in our constitution, indeed if the very model of the Cabinet is threadbare, it is rather presumptuous and unreasonable to insist on a model of how the Voice would work in detail, for that is not the purpose of a referendum. The purpose is to give basic existential answer, and the elemental relationships with other entities (if applicable) that are identified in the constitution.
So, I do not have grave concerns over whether the mere existence of the Voice is a problem. It depends on the government of the day, operating through the usual parliamentary processes, to issue a bill that adds the meat to the bones. If people don’t like what a particular government has legislated (and in current times, it usually requires a level of bipartisan or tripartisan support to pass a bill), we get the opportunity to vote for a different government with a different view of how it should work, *and they can change* the legislation by putting up a bill to the parliament of the day.
To one point that Harry Clarke made, and it is an important one in all fairness, once there is legislation, the High Court as the court which would hear cases of an Australian Constitutional nature, may through their rulings make the legislated model for the Voice a bit “sticky,” meaning that as case law builds up, there is an edifice beyond the initial model, matters of interpretation that become clarified. Even then, legislation can be enacted that essentially repeals the former legislation *and hence the High Court’s precedents* set by cases heard and decided are are rendered null and void. No doubt there are some legal issues, as with all such scenarios that face the High Court every day; the existence of the (over time accumulation of) cases heard that relate to the Voice might dissuade some ministers from considering the effort of essentially tearing it up and starting again, this is true of much of our legislation. It isn’t a bug, it is a feature that gives some level of stability.
The real issue for me is that when the time comes for the bill or bills that scope out the role and limits of the Voice and all that, that we have a parliament and senate that is not full of children.
Maybe it won’t work. Maybe it will turn into just another tokenistic gesture. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe there will be too many fingers, too many cooks in the kitchen. Maybe. Or maybe it finally leads to avenues for getting some important work done, for treating remote Indigenous towns/settlements with the same level of respect we historically have for entirely white Australian remote settlements. Having seen the gap, I simply disagree that being colorblind (in the American sense) will make any good difference. Australians as a rule have potential, but what our unfortunate history has baked in is that the access and opportunity to realise potential is not an even playing field, not by a long stretch.
In any case, what is being proposed is not unprecedented; even in notionally colorblind America they have treaties with the Indigenous peoples they had sorely mistreated (to put it politely). What the Voice is in my understanding is not remotely of the level of a treaty, nor does it in any way open a door to treaties, for that door is already open—any prior or present Cabinet could (have) consider(ed) and put up a treaty bill to our parliament to debate, vote for or against. No Cabinet has done so to my knowledge.
Punic war PS
Assuming the human sacrifices made no difference, what was it the Roman Republic did that enabled them to recover from Cannae (216 BCE) and eventually defeat Carthge, after another 15 years of war? Fabius’ defensive hedgehog strategy bought time in Italy, but could not by itself bring victory. I’m no expert on this, but a couple of things stand out.
One is the full mobilisation after Cannae. Wikipedia: “Despite the multiple catastrophes Rome had suffered, the Senate refused to parley. Instead, they redoubled their efforts, declaring full mobilization of the male Roman population, and raised new legions, enlisting landless peasants and even slaves. So firm were these measures that the word “peace” was prohibited, mourning was limited to only 30 days, and public tears were prohibited even to women.” Defeatism in the face of imminent climate catastrophe should not be tolerated.
The second is the general Scipio. Spain was the obvious theatre for an aggressive strategy as it gave the prospect of cutting Hannibal’s land line of communication from Italy. In 210 BCE the charismatic firebrand was given command of the Roman army there at the age of 25 or 26, though he had never held a consulship, the usual precondition for field command. He disagreed with Fabian caution, and was personally motivated by the deaths of his father and uncle, the previous commanders in Spain. Scipio took four years to achieve complete control of Spain, cemented by his no-breakfast victory at Ilipa in 206 BCE (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Ilipa). Scipio went on to take the war to the Carthaginian homeland, and negotiate a pretty generous peace in 201 BCE.
The appointment was still a remarkable gamble. Rewind the tape to 216 BCE, when the very large army lost at Cannae was raised – with two generals, Varro and Paullus. Wikipedia again: “Ordinarily, each of the two consuls would command his own portion of the army, but since the two armies were combined into one, Roman law required them to alternate their command on a daily basis. ” Presumably this crackpot arrangement was justified by a mortal fear that a successful single general could use his fame to seize power, and return the republic to autocracy. This fear was not stupid. A string of successful warlord generals, attracting fervent personal loyalty from their troops, did in fact destroy the Roman Republic a century and a half later: Marius, Sulla, Pompey, and finally Caesar. We have a marching song of Caesar’s legions, Caesar’s more than Rome’s:
Ecce Caesar nunc triumphat qui subegit Galliam.
Still, all that was in the future. After Cannae, the Republic made its pact with the Devil, took the political risk, and gave the critical command to Scipio, the guy who could do the job.
James Wimberley,
Interesting history. Of course, events in the real world, especially historical events, are influenced by multi-factor causation. All of our narratives, histories and models fall short of the near infinite complexity involved, especially when there are millions of human actors involved. Personally, I think it is a mistake to only analyze history from the “great man” perspective. The actions of the masses need to be considered and not only the actions of humans but also the actions and impacts of plants, animals, insects, pathogens and natural forces. These all profoundly affect human history.
That said, I agree that defeatism or something like it – fatalism perhaps – swirl around our current failures to address climate change and the pandemicene. I would go further, it is like addiction plus fatalism. We are addicted to all our current consumer goods, services and comforts and we can’t give them up. Our fatalism involves the idea that we aren’t strong enough to give up our consumer addictions, that we can’t modify our current version of capitalism and that it is impossible to take collective action, even to save our species and the relatively benign Holocene climate and ecology on which we depend. Only existential terror, it appears, will provide that motivation now. Well, the existential terror is coming, for certain, so we will see what happens then.
What Don said,
(I’ll just quote your comment now.)
July 20, 2023 at 7:55 pm
Don: “… it is rather presumptuous and unreasonable to insist on a model of how the Voice would work in detail, for that is not the purpose of a referendum. The purpose is to give basic existential answer, and the elemental relationships with other entities (if applicable) that are identified in the constitution.”
Don: “I simply disagree that being colorblind (in the American sense) will make any good difference. ”
Colourblind – for those who want to see:
HC: “I want a colourblind Australia where race does not determine rights”
James Comey says, and I agree;
“In fact, we all, white and black, carry various biases around with us. I am reminded of the song from the Broadway hit, Avenue Q: “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist.” Part of it goes like this: Look around and you will find. No one’s really color blind. Maybe it’s a fact. We all should face. Everyone makes judgments. Based on race.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/James_Comey
“Color-blind messages may thus appear to function effectively on the surface even as they allow explicit forms of bias to persist.”
“In Blind Pursuit of Racial Equality?”
~ Evan P. Apfelbaum et al
“… and argues that discourses of “color blindness” hinder, rather than advance, dialogue about race in the United States. Illustrations from efforts of one university campus to foster dialogue and to build a welcoming and diverse community illustrate subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which a color-blind stance can narrow the discursive space in which interracial dialogue might occur.”
https://academic.oup.com/ct/article-abstract/18/1/139/4098710?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Cost curve?! $130-311 /Mwh. Mire like a cost spectrum.
^1. CSIRO: “In contrast, SMRs come in at $130-311 per megawatt hour.”
^2. Los Alamos real world example:
“NuScale had informed members of the group, …the estimated costs of building the six 77-MW reactors had risen by more than 50 percent to $9.3 billion. … translated into a jump in the cost of energy from $58 to $89 per megawatt-hour
*
^1.
From CSIRO:
“The question of nuclear in Australia’s energy sector
“In Australia’s transition to net zero emissions, the energy sector has a major role to play. But does nuclear power have a place in our future grid?
11 MAY 2023
“Key points
● Nuclear power does not currently provide an economically competitive solution in Australia.
● Lead author of Gencost, Paul Graham says the main area of uncertainty with nuclear is around capital costs.
● There is a lack of robust real-world data around small modular reactors (SMRs) due to low global use.
…
“Using the standard formula for levelised costs plus the additional calculations specific to storage and transmission, wind and solar come in at a maximum of $83 per megawatt hour in 2030. This is a useful point in time for comparison because this is the earliest date at which nuclear SMR could be built in Australia.
“In contrast, SMRs come in at $130-311 per megawatt hour.
…
https://www.csiro.au/en/news/all/articles/2023/may/nuclear-explainer
^2.
NuScale cost +50%.
…
“This month, Los Alamos and other local utilities across the West were facing a weighty decision: whether to pull the plug on their nuclear dream. NuScale had informed members of the group, Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems, or UAMPS, that the estimated costs of building the six 77-MW reactors had risen by more than 50 percent to $9.3 billion. For Garcia, that translated into a jump in the cost of energy from $58 to $89 per megawatt-hour
FEB 27, 2023
“The Dream of Mini Nuclear Plants Hangs in the Balance
…
“A cluster of reactors that are just 9 feet in diameter is supposed to start a nuclear energy resurgence. Mounting costs may doom the project.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-dream-of-mini-nuclear-plants-hangs-in-the-balance/
“God’s weapon” … “But since “winners are not judged,” Russia would ultimately be forgiven for having broken the eight-decade-old nuclear taboo.”
~ Sergey Karaganov
Only in megalomaniac Sergey Karaganov’s mind would I forgive Russia for “having broken the eight-decade-old nuclear taboo.”
God! Winners not judged. Total triabal delusion.
SMR’s and proliferation of nuclear power is a stalking horse. SMR’s to “God’s weapon”
~ Sergey Karaganov… “He is also the dean of the Faculty of World Economy and International Affairs at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics.” Wikipedia
Quotes from:
“THE WEST CANNOT CURE RUSSIA’S NUCLEAR FEVER
HANNA NOTTE
JULY 18, 2023
…
“The “Karaganov Debate”
“The recent Russian debate was triggered by prominent intellectual Sergey Karaganov. In an article entitled “A Difficult But Necessary Decision,” Karaganov argued that, should the United States and Europe fail to stop supporting Ukraine, Moscow would ultimately have to resort to preemptive nuclear use against Western countries. He conceded that the employment of “God’s weapon” would entail “grave spiritual losses” for his country and that Russia’s non-Western friends — chiefly China and India — would be abhorred at first. But since “winners are not judged,” Russia would ultimately be forgiven for having broken the eight-decade-old nuclear taboo.
…
https://warontherocks.com/2023/07/the-west-cannot-cure-russias-nuclear-fever/
Author Hanna Notte.
“UC Fellow – St Antony´s College, University of Oxford
“Hanna Notte is a Senior Associate (Non-Resident) in the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at CSIS and a senior non-resident scholar with the James Martin Center For Nonproliferation Studies (CNS), focusing on arms control and security issues involving Russia, the Middle East, their intersection, and implications for US/European strategy and policy.
…
https://uc.web.ox.ac.uk/people/hanna-notte
The Extinction Tournament
2100. 95% CI.
– Catastrophic – 9% Superforecasters 20% experts.
– Extinction – 1% Superforecasters, 6% experts.
*
“The Extinction Tournament
…
“In most risk categories, the domain experts predicted higher chances of doom than the superforecasters. No amount of discussion could change minds on either side.”
…
“Extinction” meant reducing total human population below 5,000 (it didn’t require literal extinction). This is very hard! Nuclear war is very unlikely to do this; people in bunkers or remote islands would survive at least the original blasts, and probably any ensuing winter. Even the worst pandemic might not get every remote island or uncontacted Amazonian tribe. Participants assigned the highest literal-extinction risk to AI, maybe because it can deliberately hunt down survivors.”
…
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-extinction-tournament
Data & Results
“The Extinction Tournament
Click to access XPT.pdf
Economist.com have run a piece on the Voice on Facebook; the comments are largely supportive with a clear majority saying Yes!
All this noise from 9entertainment and Murdoch is distracting, although I do think that Pauline Hanson’s disgraceful outbursts would do far more to swing voters away from the negative.
This is a weapon!
“‘Condor Galaxy’ Network of AI Supercomputers: 36 ExaFLOPS”
36 ExaFLOPS!
Compared to “As of May 2022, the fastest supercomputer on the TOP500 supercomputer list is Frontier, in the US, with a LINPACK benchmark score of 1.102 ExaFlop/s” Wikipedia Supercomputers.
Gobsmacking stats and computing power.
US$900m compute service for LLM training.
“54 million AI-optimized compute cores”.
With such immense compute power, Australia & JQ et al could conceivably run live – real time – market vs 2nd lesson vs rates vs policy nudges. And generate AI model for society.
Select market segment.
All decisions of agents fed into “Cerebras ‘Condor Galaxy'” JQ-AI.
Effects shown in real time.
“Setting up a generative AI model takes minutes, not months and can be done by a single person. CG-1 is the first of three 4 ExaFLOP AI supercomputers to be deployed across the U.S. Over the next year, together with G42, we plan to expand this deployment and stand up a staggering 36 exaFLOPs of efficient, purpose-built AI compute.”
Results able to be voted on this evening. Change model weightings.
See market changes tomorrow.
Scary!
exa-E1018- 1000000000000000000
peta-P1015-
1000000000000000
Got fibre?
Bet you don’t get 388 Tb/s!
Perhaps Watson at IBM was correct after all. The world only may need 6 of these.
(Only joking – we’ll all have 100 ExaFLOPS phones, when we crack quantum and fusion – next year!).
*
The humongous ‘Condor Galaxy’
“It supports up to 600 billion parameter models, with configurations that can be expanded to support up to 100 trillion parameter models. Its 54 million AI-optimized compute cores and massive fabric network bandwidth of 388 Tb/s allow for nearly linear performance scaling from 1 to 64 CS-2 systems, according to Cerebras.
Cerebras to Enable ‘Condor Galaxy’ Network of AI Supercomputers: 36 ExaFLOPS for AI
https://www.anandtech.com/show/18969/cerebras-to-enable-a-network-of-ai-supercomputers-36-exaflops-for-ai
With the decline in economics study in the schools and with the dominant role in universities now in the main being worthless business and finance studies, Australians are moving further and further away from rational economic thinking based on opportunity cost. There is less trust in basic economics than since the big tariff reforms of the 1970s..
In fact this is a worldwide trend that is also emerging in the US and, of course, in Europe.
The decline in economic rationality is clear in the climate area where proposals for a sensible carbon tax that will send out the right investment signals have been replaced with foolish subsidy and public investment schemes. An instance is the silly Labor proposal to produce solar batteries here rather than have them produced in cheaper international destinations. In fact, government’s sometimes supports Productivity Commission reports when it suits them but on batteries definitely not. Trade union officials encourage local production of batteries because they sense lucrative sweetheart deals between government and workers. Some on the left of the Labor Party describe opposition to home production as “1980s neocon” views. This is just so, so foolish.
The task of moving toward a carbon-free energy system needs to be done at minimum cost or close to that. Even then it is a massive set of investments that cannot be made less confronting by mere hand-waving. Better to leave investment plans, in the main, to markets than to Labor pollies who have never had a job outside politics and who are borderline economic illiterates. The Productivity Commission, in fact, get it right, let comparative advantage decide how things will be done.
https://www.afr.com/policy/economy/labor-s-battery-dream-to-cost-taxpayers-more-than-it-earns-20230719-p5dpiu
I don’t use Twitter any more except occasionally as a not-signed-up user. This is in the attempt to see what the few non-denialists are saying about Covid-19. However, Twitter is completely broken. Is it any different for signed-up people these days? Why would anyone pay a red cent for any Twitter service, user or advertiser? It has to be the most broken and mismanaged app on the internet. I’d say the investors in Musk’s Twitter, including Musk himself, are well on the way to losing all their money. The incompetence is staggering.
Footnote to above. I guess this article says it all about Twitter.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/05/twitter-elon-musk-verge-of-collapse
I don’t distrust Economics, I distrust Political Economics, of which we are inundated. We can argue all we like, but the existence and relentless use of economic arguments to advance a particular political agenda is so common, we.are almost innured to it. We seldom do this with pure mathematics, for instance. The simple and unpalatible fact is that people panic over money, in a way they don’t panic over scarcity of some products, vegetables, at the local supermarket. If vegetables that are staples and their scarcity fails to provoke much action, it’s pretty clear that there is more to scar than just price and local demand.
No Twitter, no Facebook, no tiktok; sounds boring, right? No, it’ s just less to deal with. And therein lies the problem of the massive media corps. They are more than capable of manipu1lating weaker corps to behaving the way they want . Or else.