Sirs,
Having followed the news reports and editorials concerning the ongoing DEHP scare for a week, I am frustrated by the fact that two crucial points remain conspicuous by their absence.
First, how was the revelation that Yu Shen Co (昱伸香料有限公司) had used the prohibited plasticizer DEHP brought to light? Was it the result of random FDA inspections? Were the FDA tipped off by a competitor, either to Yu Shen or to those manufacturers whom Yu Shen supplied? Could the revelation have come from a "whistle-blower" either within Yu Shen or within the FDA (or elsewhere)? Cue bono? I have nowhere seen an answer on this score, yet what are reporters for if not to find answers to just such questions as this?
Second, given the possibility of marketizing food safety regulation through the brand strength of testing and certification companies, what purpose does the FDA's existence serve? How many food scares has the FDA prevented? From reading the reports and editorials on the ongoing DEHP scare, the FDA does at least seem to serve one purpose: that of strengthening an Orwellian double-think reflex among the public - namely, the premise that only government is capable of regulating food safety, even as it conspicuously fails in the instance in question. Quelle surprise: quelled critique.
I have seen plenty of reports quoting DPP legislators in their failed attempts to be subtle whilst political point scoring against the KMT administration, yet where are the reports informing the public of possible flaws in the FDA's approach to regulation? Where are the editorials critical of the institutional design of the DOH and FDA?
Yours freely,
Michael Fagan.
(Sent Tuesday 31st May 2011. Unpublished by the Taipei Times)
Tuesday, 31 May 2011
Quelled Surprises
On the continuing DEHP case, I can't seem to find it clearly and categorically stated anywhere whether the DEHP-tainted emulsifiers used by Yu Shen (昱伸香料有限公司), Pin Han (賓漢香料公司) and Hong Shing (宏星製藥) were manufactured in Taiwan or China. From reading the initial reports, I was led to believe that either the DEHP additive, or the final emulsifier product itself had been imported to Taiwan from China as the owner of Yu Shen, a Mr Lai, was said to own a "high-capacity manufacturing plant in Dongguan, Guangdong Province". More recent articles however, such as this one, seem to imply that the fault lies on the Taiwan side of the supply chain.
In noting that the Taipei Times has refused to publish my most recent, and highly topical letter, I wonder whether my reference to China had something to do with it: perhaps they now know that this was in error but are reluctant to admit it?
At any rate, the reaction by the government in having certain suspects detained and their property and assets seized disgusts me, not because I have any particular sympathy for Mr Lai Chun-chieh (賴俊傑), but because it illustrates the strength of the whip-like reflex from the premise that only the State can exercise effective responsibility over food safety regulations when, in my opinion, it is precisely that blind spot that needs to be brought into focus. The random inspections and licensing system carried out by any government agency would most likely be far more limited in comparison to that which could conceivably run for a profit by a certification company (e.g. similar to SGS). Could a marketized system of food regulation really work better? The phrase that comes to my mind isn't so much "quelle surprise!" as... "quell surprises!".
An entirely predictable, yet nonetheless unforgiveable aspect to this ongoing saga is that the premise of State regulatory power, the reflexive application of which is alreadly being brought to bear right now with seemingly little sense of measure, finds its most strenuous pulse, not among the governing KMT administration, who may be expected to benefit from such, but among members of the DPP; the party that would claim to be the voice of rational opposition. I agree entirely with the KMT Legislator Lin Yi-shih (林益世) when he says, as quoted in that Taipei Times headliner...
In noting that the Taipei Times has refused to publish my most recent, and highly topical letter, I wonder whether my reference to China had something to do with it: perhaps they now know that this was in error but are reluctant to admit it?
At any rate, the reaction by the government in having certain suspects detained and their property and assets seized disgusts me, not because I have any particular sympathy for Mr Lai Chun-chieh (賴俊傑), but because it illustrates the strength of the whip-like reflex from the premise that only the State can exercise effective responsibility over food safety regulations when, in my opinion, it is precisely that blind spot that needs to be brought into focus. The random inspections and licensing system carried out by any government agency would most likely be far more limited in comparison to that which could conceivably run for a profit by a certification company (e.g. similar to SGS). Could a marketized system of food regulation really work better? The phrase that comes to my mind isn't so much "quelle surprise!" as... "quell surprises!".
An entirely predictable, yet nonetheless unforgiveable aspect to this ongoing saga is that the premise of State regulatory power, the reflexive application of which is alreadly being brought to bear right now with seemingly little sense of measure, finds its most strenuous pulse, not among the governing KMT administration, who may be expected to benefit from such, but among members of the DPP; the party that would claim to be the voice of rational opposition. I agree entirely with the KMT Legislator Lin Yi-shih (林益世) when he says, as quoted in that Taipei Times headliner...
“The DPP caucus wants to elevate an issue to a matter of national security at the slightest [controversy]...They want to pin everything on Ma — it’s an absolute case of political manipulation.”That's nothing but the truth, even if it did come from a KMT legislator.
Monday, 30 May 2011
Sunday, 29 May 2011
Roofwork Quilt
Saturday just flew by with barely a minute online. Houses, dogs, woman-I-know, camera stuff, dogs again, Indian curry house, more camera stuff, more woman-I-know, and dogs again - and plenty of driving throughout. Knackered.
Friday, 27 May 2011
Letter On DEHP Scare
Sirs,
If the now already infamous DEHP is "potentially" harmful to the human body, as described in Thursday's editorial, then is it not fair to say that today's headline piece indicates a potentially hysterical over-reaction, facilitated by apprehension regarding the manufacturer's location in China? Curiously, the absence of any clear evidence of DEHP's toxicity to the human body in the relevant ppm concentrations (2 to 34 I believe), was not mentioned in today's headline piece.
Supposing however, for the sake of argument, that DEHP at such concentrations was proven to be harmful; the salient question would therefore be how best to prevent its use by unscrupulous manufacturers. Under Taiwan's current regulatory system run by the FDA, manufacturers are handed a list of prohibited substances and told to comply under threat of legal action. Enforcement of FDA regulations is achieved by means of inspections, which may either be targetted or conducted at random, but which in either case, are limited to a relatively small percentage of food products. That this inspection regime is limited in scope is a natural consequence of the scale and consequent costs of the task to a government agency with a limited budget.
Is it really so surprising that a few well-dodgy items may slip under the poor FDA's radar seemingly every year? I think not. Can this system be improved upon? I think so...
The consumer electronics industry in the U.S., offers an historical example of high standards of safety achieved by a marketized system of regulation. Companies such as Underwriter Laboratories were expressly set up in order to verify the safety of electronics products - and to do so at a profit derived from the fee which manufacturers willingly pay UL in order to enter the market with the UL brand and the consequent confidence of consumers. The importance of brand reputation for a company such as UL is paramount since a single high-profile failure could be disastrous for their market position.
Were an analogous system allowed to develop in Taiwan, then a well-run regulatory company (or several) could eventually put itself in a position to reliably verify the safety of the vast majority of imported food products, since that company would have a profit incentive to expend far greater resources doing this than those available to the FDA. This profit incentive would be significantly augmented by the policies of retailers such as supermarkets and convenience stores to only stock food products licensed by those regulatory companies with the best market reputations. A government agency faces no such incentive but rather a mountain of costs for which they need to plead to central government for an increased budget.
However, since value trade offs and human error are ever present aspects of life, it is fair to say that no system of regulation will ever be perfect. Perhaps, however, a better system would spare us the continuing scare stories, panic and mistrust of all things Chinese.
Yours freely,
Michael Fagan.
(Sent: Friday 27th May 2011. Unpublished by the Taipei Times.)
Note: I had to struggle a bit to get this thing down to 499 words (my first draft was nearly 600 and I think it read better).
If the now already infamous DEHP is "potentially" harmful to the human body, as described in Thursday's editorial, then is it not fair to say that today's headline piece indicates a potentially hysterical over-reaction, facilitated by apprehension regarding the manufacturer's location in China? Curiously, the absence of any clear evidence of DEHP's toxicity to the human body in the relevant ppm concentrations (2 to 34 I believe), was not mentioned in today's headline piece.
Supposing however, for the sake of argument, that DEHP at such concentrations was proven to be harmful; the salient question would therefore be how best to prevent its use by unscrupulous manufacturers. Under Taiwan's current regulatory system run by the FDA, manufacturers are handed a list of prohibited substances and told to comply under threat of legal action. Enforcement of FDA regulations is achieved by means of inspections, which may either be targetted or conducted at random, but which in either case, are limited to a relatively small percentage of food products. That this inspection regime is limited in scope is a natural consequence of the scale and consequent costs of the task to a government agency with a limited budget.
Is it really so surprising that a few well-dodgy items may slip under the poor FDA's radar seemingly every year? I think not. Can this system be improved upon? I think so...
The consumer electronics industry in the U.S., offers an historical example of high standards of safety achieved by a marketized system of regulation. Companies such as Underwriter Laboratories were expressly set up in order to verify the safety of electronics products - and to do so at a profit derived from the fee which manufacturers willingly pay UL in order to enter the market with the UL brand and the consequent confidence of consumers. The importance of brand reputation for a company such as UL is paramount since a single high-profile failure could be disastrous for their market position.
Were an analogous system allowed to develop in Taiwan, then a well-run regulatory company (or several) could eventually put itself in a position to reliably verify the safety of the vast majority of imported food products, since that company would have a profit incentive to expend far greater resources doing this than those available to the FDA. This profit incentive would be significantly augmented by the policies of retailers such as supermarkets and convenience stores to only stock food products licensed by those regulatory companies with the best market reputations. A government agency faces no such incentive but rather a mountain of costs for which they need to plead to central government for an increased budget.
However, since value trade offs and human error are ever present aspects of life, it is fair to say that no system of regulation will ever be perfect. Perhaps, however, a better system would spare us the continuing scare stories, panic and mistrust of all things Chinese.
Yours freely,
Michael Fagan.
(Sent: Friday 27th May 2011. Unpublished by the Taipei Times.)
Note: I had to struggle a bit to get this thing down to 499 words (my first draft was nearly 600 and I think it read better).
Thursday, 26 May 2011
Unnecessary Errors
Whenever I come across yet another bit of flag-waving over the independence vs unification issue, the result is instant eye-rolling boredom and revulsion for the simple reason that the premises from which the issue is discussed all presuppose the State as the locus of action. This letter from Huang Jei-hsuan of Los Angeles, published in today's Taipei Times, was no exception - despite its' rhetoric.
"It would be a breath of fresh air if a “Taiwanese constitution” could replace independence vs unification as the main focus of discourse in the coming election season."Hardly, as the very notion of preparing a new constitution directly impinges upon the issue of independence vs unification; the preparation of a new constitution presupposes de facto independence, which is precisely what the PRC is working day and night to undermine (moreover, the design of a new constitution could be pursued in such a way as to deliberately create institutional obstacles for any eventual unification - which is an argument I have made previously). A new constitution could not possibly be neutral in regard to the independence vs unification question, nor should it, and nor should anyone pretend otherwise. Besides, to the limited extent to which a proactive attitude can be taken toward the future, I think it is far more important to consider preparation for alternative institutions outside the purview of the State as the collapse of current political economy approaches in both China and Taiwan. Detlev Schlichter has a very beginner-friendly piece up in which he uses the "blue-pill vs red-pill" metaphor of The Matrix film to illustrate the contrast between the mainstream and Austrian analyses of what is happening. Yet I preferred the passage which describes the situation in very straightforward, non-metaphorical terms:
"The result of such distorted market signals is the accumulation, over time, of a tremendous cluster of errors, visible in the form of unsustainable asset prices, excess levels of debt, and an under-collateralized pile of inflated paper assets."It's a very good piece for other reasons also, including the fact that it touches upon the matter of intellectual framework and the immunity of the mainstream presumptions to refutation by either logic or fact - which is what Nietzsche would have called the "necessary errors" of those whose careers are built upon the premise of political management of economic activity.
On The DEHP Scare
The leading editorial in the Taipei Times today is a response to the recent revelation that a drinks manufacturer in China had been adding the plasticizer DEHP to its' products (some of which, e.g. Sunkist juice, I have myself drank). The plasticizer is apparently a cheaper alternative to act as a "clouding agent" than palm oil (it is not soluble in water). Turton pulled a table from somewhere listing the names of the drinks and their respective DEHP content in parts per million - the range is between 2ppm and 34ppm, which seems very high in comparison with the U.S. EPA's limit for DEHP in drinking water as a tiny 6ppb (parts per billion). I don't know anything about the toxicity to the human body of DEHP at these concentrations, so it could be that there is a real danger or it could be that the danger is exaggerated if the regulator's limits are set hysterically low. Some brief googling turns up an abstract for a study indicating that DEHP ingested by pregnant rats produces some damage to the liver, kidneys and testes of their litter. However, the conclusion to another paper states that...
Under a marketized system of regulation (i.e. companies expressly set up in order to verify the safety of food items), such as has existed in the electronics industry more or less since the beginning with UL and others, these problems would largely disappear since the value to importing manufacturers of their products being able a trusted food safety brand would surely outweigh the cost to them of submitting product samples for testing. The regulatory company would thus be in a position to reliably verify the safety of the vast majority of imported food products, since they have a profit incentive to expend the resources doing this - an incentive which would no doubt be significantly augmented by the policies of retailers to only stock food products licensed by those regulatory companies with the best market reputations. A government agency faces no such incentive but rather a mountain of costs for which they need to plead to central government for an increased budget.
Of course, under both systems it is true that manufacturers exporting food products to Taiwan would have an incentive to comply with the respective food safety regulations. Likewise, it is also true that under both systems there may occassionally be unscrupulous manufacturers who will try to evade the regulation. However, this must be judged against the fact that the current system seems to experience this sort of problem annually, and the larger resources that a marketized system of regulation could likely bring to bear on the problem. On purely utilitarian grounds, I think such a market system of regulation trumps the government agency model.
Yet I think it should also be noted that since human error can never be mitigated or eradicated completely, and since the management of risk typically involves some trade off between values, it is fair to say that no system of food safety regulation will ever be perfect. Perhaps, however, a market system would spare us the continuing scare stories and the growing tendency toward public panic and distrust of both the market and all things Chinese.
"The general view of DEHP toxicity is therefore that mechanisms for adverse effects do exist in rodents, but that these do not appear to be of great significance in non-human primates and that the evidence that such mechanisms could be operative in humans is lacking."So from these two papers, it seems that both the banning and strict limitation of DEHP in drinks is due to a "better safe than sorry" policy, rather than certain knowledge of its' toxicity to humans. Can anybody improve on that conclusion?
"Indeed, the latest incident exposed not just the shocking news of potentially harmful chemical additives in beverages and dairy products, but also suggested the existence of loopholes in the nation’s food safety system."OK so potentially harmful chemical additives. Well I think we're potentially looking at an hysterical over-reaction here, fuelled in part, no doubt, by the mere fact that the drinks manufacturer is located in China - as in Turton's snark:
"Wouldn't the list of poisons not found in food products coming out of China be shorter?"Yet supposing, for the sake of argument, that DEHP at these concentrations does indeed pose a serious health risk to the human body, the salient question is surely how to best prevent its use by potentially unscrupulous manufacturers. In regard to this question, does the existence of legal loopholes in the Taiwan government's food safety regulatory regime actually surprise anyone? It seems to me that there are one or two similar food scares just about every year. Moreover, the enforcement of these regulations has to be done through inspections, which can never be carried out on more than a small proportion of imported goods simply due to the scale and consequent cost to a government with a limited budget. Consequently, should it really be so surprising that now and again a few dodgy items slip by the regulatory regime unnoticed? I think not.
Under a marketized system of regulation (i.e. companies expressly set up in order to verify the safety of food items), such as has existed in the electronics industry more or less since the beginning with UL and others, these problems would largely disappear since the value to importing manufacturers of their products being able a trusted food safety brand would surely outweigh the cost to them of submitting product samples for testing. The regulatory company would thus be in a position to reliably verify the safety of the vast majority of imported food products, since they have a profit incentive to expend the resources doing this - an incentive which would no doubt be significantly augmented by the policies of retailers to only stock food products licensed by those regulatory companies with the best market reputations. A government agency faces no such incentive but rather a mountain of costs for which they need to plead to central government for an increased budget.
Of course, under both systems it is true that manufacturers exporting food products to Taiwan would have an incentive to comply with the respective food safety regulations. Likewise, it is also true that under both systems there may occassionally be unscrupulous manufacturers who will try to evade the regulation. However, this must be judged against the fact that the current system seems to experience this sort of problem annually, and the larger resources that a marketized system of regulation could likely bring to bear on the problem. On purely utilitarian grounds, I think such a market system of regulation trumps the government agency model.
Yet I think it should also be noted that since human error can never be mitigated or eradicated completely, and since the management of risk typically involves some trade off between values, it is fair to say that no system of food safety regulation will ever be perfect. Perhaps, however, a market system would spare us the continuing scare stories and the growing tendency toward public panic and distrust of both the market and all things Chinese.
Wednesday, 25 May 2011
The Rise Of The Hive
Andrew Orlowski has a semi-interesting interview with filmaker Adam Curtis at the Register over the latter's new documentary: "All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace": community hive, all whilst clamouring for the further and further concentration of political power (which must not be confused with the mere quantity of law and regulation). Here is the trailer...
"Behind all this... is the idea that you're nodes in a system, and 'our job' is to keep things stable..."What he is talking about there is the collectivist view held by technocratic pragmatists on the Left like Turton; that the State exists to "manage" society, which necessarily presupposes "market failure" just as Christian theology presupposes "the fall", which pressupositions themselves depend on a view of human nature as inescapably corrupt, rather than contingently corruptible.
"Ever since the 1990s we've had this idea of connectivity - we're all connected. You meet [it] in all sorts of areas. You meet it in talks about the global economy, we're all connected in a global world. You meet it in talks about nature - we're all interconnected in our world. And you meet it in utopian theories about the web... So I decided to trace those ideas back to their source. It leads you back to an absolutely fascinating area, which you can loosely call cybernetics, and also information theory."More specifically, tracing those ideas back leads to Charles Sanders Pierce, William James and John Dewey: they lead you back to American Pragmatism. That is why someone so apparently committed to the people of Taiwan as Michael Turton, may nonetheless show no compunction at all about publicly playing with the hypothetical idea of selling out the people of Taiwan in order to prevent further PRC expansionism. It is because he is a pragmatist. It is the sort of mindset which conceives of its' own existence as a nodal point within a collective
Seizure & Obfuscation
"To hear John Morton and other proponents of domain seizures talk about it, it's "easy" for the owners of seized sites to protest and file suit against the government over the seized sites. Tragically, the reality has turned out to be quite different. Many of the sites were not even officially notified about the seizure until months later. Prior to that, they weren't even told what the sites were accused of, let alone who was doing the accusations. You try responding to a government action against you completely blind. You don't know who you're suing or for what."Mike Masnick at Techdirt on why there have not yet been any lawsuits against the Feds for seizing domain names: the justic department doesn't want to see those lawsuits.
Tuesday, 24 May 2011
Parsing The Confession
"Ideally, shut down all coal plants within the next five years, everywhere on earth..."Turton confesses to the logic of his ideals (that's ideology for you): government with the power to violate and/or rescind property rights anywhere in the world at whim.
"For what we have spent needlessly on the military over the last two decades we could have purchased wind for the whole earth...."That royal "we" renders all U.S. taxpayers into the active subject, which, in strict stipulation to the fundamentally individual nature of human agency, must be declared false. The money was taken from U.S. citizens via the implicit threat of institutionally leveraged violence: the citizens themselves have not "spent" that money. As to whether it was "needless" - the truth of that depends upon whose needs are in reference. In the space of the first nine words of that first clause, Turton has revealed the predatory nature of his political premises: not only does he conceive of other people's agency through their coercive sublimation to the collective ("we have spent"), but that values exist independently of valuers ("needlessly..."). The fig leaf of "democratic representation" won't cover this up either - for the essential reasons that Lysander Spooner laid out in his "No Treason" essays.
"Termination of all subsidies to fossil fuel production and transportation."Under free market conditions, such subsidies aren't necessary anyway; demand for energy will always be there and fossil fuels, due to their chemistry, are among the most efficient ways of fullfilling that demand.
"Massive subsidies for solar and wind power production, sale, installation, and regulation."That is a public call for theft (excused by Turton only because it is government theft) on a "massive" scale which would also have the effect of driving up electricity prices and thereby inflict economic suffering upon poor people - like me.
"Upgraded/crash research programs in power transmission, storage batteries, thorium nuclear plants, crops effective in reducing Co2 and CH4, carbon capture and storage, and similar."The efficiency of electrical current transmission (not power) would surely be more likely to improve under market competition. Research on batteries has been going on for decades with only marginal improvements - spending more money probably isn't going to improve this trend. Thorium nuclear plants? Sure - but let private investors do this. Crops? Not interested; largely because I don't buy the hyperbolic CACC (Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change) Turton squeezes out. I'm sure his high-in-Climate-Progess diet keeps him regular.
"Re-regulation of the power network to maximize wind transmission capabilities."Grid reform is an interesting topic and one deserving of some good essays. I don't know which regulations Turton is referring to, and so I ought to read up on this at some point.
"National ecological programs to convert fallow land to CO2 amelioration, preserve and expand wetlands, and so on."Remove that "national" and I can agree with the gist of that; private ownership (or stewardship) of ecological parks is an ethical necessity for my agreement - whether they would in fact be managed more efficiently than State nationalized parks I don't know as this sort of thing depends very much on the commitment and intelligence of the people who assume the responsibility of running them, and not just upon the boundary conditions within which they act.
Bully For You
"And amid the anti-bullying sentiment I read about almost daily in the Taipei Times, I think these people should be named and shamed."Agreed. Here's the first name I recommend for that "name and shame" list:
Torch Pratt.
Monday, 23 May 2011
Sunday, 22 May 2011
等待 我
I'm having some Blogger problems - either someone is trying to phish my Blogger account or someone is trying to have me banned. Not a maintenance issue.
To whomever it was who clicked the "report abuse" button - let me quote to you from Google's own Blogger Content Policy:
Nonetheless, as I said in my most recent letter, I believe this "hate speech" notion is an incursion on freedom of expression - where it is done by the State. Yet Google is not the State and, it's Blogger templates are private property: it is therefore free to set any terms for use of these templates it likes.
To whomever it was who clicked the "report abuse" button - let me quote to you from Google's own Blogger Content Policy:
"We want you to use Blogger to express your opinions, even very controversial ones. But, don't cross the line by publishing hate speech. By this, we mean content that promotes hate or violence towards groups based on race, ethnicity, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status or sexual orientation/gender identity. For example, don't write a blog saying that members of Race X are criminals or advocating violence against followers of Religion Y."I have never done that: read through my entire posting history, you will not find a single instance of me advocating violence or of classifying people as criminals by virtue of their race, ethnicity, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status, or sexual orientation/gender identity. Not Guilty.
Nonetheless, as I said in my most recent letter, I believe this "hate speech" notion is an incursion on freedom of expression - where it is done by the State. Yet Google is not the State and, it's Blogger templates are private property: it is therefore free to set any terms for use of these templates it likes.
Letter Against Scanlon
Sirs,
Michael Scanlon writes that Carol Nichols' use of the phrase "homosexual agenda" was, quote: "...not only especially hateful (and hate-filled) and repugnant, it is also groundless and unbecoming of someone who claims to be either a proper parent or a legitimate teacher." Perhaps however, Scanlon's inference as to Ms Carols "hate" arises from nothing more than his own preconception as to the nature of Ms Carols attitude. To infer from Ms Carol's stated opposition to gender education in schools that she must therefore hate homosexual people is, ahem, groundless.
Moreover, with reference to the same quotation from Scanlon's barb, I say that his conjugated use of the term "hate" indicates an hypocrisy unbecoming of someone who would defend Taiwanese freedom; has not Scanlon himself written several "hateful" (and "hate-filled") letters against both the KMT and President Ma?
In stipulation to the virtues of honest criticism, surely the necessary conclusion to draw is that "hate", as an increasingly common touchstone for the dismissal of arguments and criticisms which one doesn't want to hear, is a false, fatuous and dangerous tactic that should not be encouraged.
Arguments must be met with arguments, not with childish smears.
Yours freely,
Michael Fagan.
(Sent: Sunday 22nd May 2011. Unpublished by the Taipei Times)
Michael Scanlon writes that Carol Nichols' use of the phrase "homosexual agenda" was, quote: "...not only especially hateful (and hate-filled) and repugnant, it is also groundless and unbecoming of someone who claims to be either a proper parent or a legitimate teacher." Perhaps however, Scanlon's inference as to Ms Carols "hate" arises from nothing more than his own preconception as to the nature of Ms Carols attitude. To infer from Ms Carol's stated opposition to gender education in schools that she must therefore hate homosexual people is, ahem, groundless.
Moreover, with reference to the same quotation from Scanlon's barb, I say that his conjugated use of the term "hate" indicates an hypocrisy unbecoming of someone who would defend Taiwanese freedom; has not Scanlon himself written several "hateful" (and "hate-filled") letters against both the KMT and President Ma?
In stipulation to the virtues of honest criticism, surely the necessary conclusion to draw is that "hate", as an increasingly common touchstone for the dismissal of arguments and criticisms which one doesn't want to hear, is a false, fatuous and dangerous tactic that should not be encouraged.
Arguments must be met with arguments, not with childish smears.
Yours freely,
Michael Fagan.
(Sent: Sunday 22nd May 2011. Unpublished by the Taipei Times)
Saturday, 21 May 2011
Puppies
Well, my trip to Lioujia will have to wait until tommorow. Looking after the three (formerly four) strays in the park, in addition to my own dog, is quite enough but then this afternoon somebody only went and dropped seven little puppies in the park, including three that seem to be labrador / golden retriever mixed pups. The other four include two brown pups, a black pup (who has a few skin problems) and a tan coloured pup.
This just had to happen right after the Tainan city government built a roller-skate bowl in the park (which was formerly used mostly by dog owners). This is not going to go down well for the three dogs who were already living in the park, never mind seven new arrivals: it will be used as yet another excuse by those unmentionables who do not like dogs to try to have the government come and remove (i.e. eventually murder) them.
It's a little awkward for me at the moment because I have multiple issues in the process of being resolved, but I'm giving some thought to adopting one or two of them; the labrador-retrievers were immediately all over me and the camera as soon as I arrived. And a certain woman I know is badgering me to get one because she likes golden retrievers.I'll think about it.
Back From The Vet
I brought Black & White back to the park from the vet today. Curiously, it was a very low key reunion among the dogs; Black & White growled at little Meimei and when Picky approached there was clearly a bit of aggro between them even though they hadn't seen each other for a week. Of course, my dog Tinkerbell was all over her straight away without any hesitation! After a half-hour or so, they all went off to pursue their own seperate interests and then go to sleep in their different spots. Of all four dogs, Black & White is always the one I find most difficult to take good pictures of; she rarely looks straight into the lens (or when she does, she moves) - it's almost as if she's camera shy. 
Anyway, while I'm waiting on other things, I might try to re-shoot that temple in Lioujia during the dusk light. Previously I've tried shooting it at night, but that's very difficult. Here is a crop of a previous effort... I found that messing with the exposure and tinting edits doesn't really improve it so I'll just have to keep shooting the thing under different lighting conditions until I get a good 'un. It's one of those places which, if you go there on your own at night will give you the creeps; as soon as you pull in off the mountain road, the totalitarian aspect of this thing immediately looms* right across your entire peripheral vision. *Its' facade is about 300m across, yet your position is only a couple of meters from the road. The effect is chilling.
Friday, 20 May 2011
Thursday, 19 May 2011
Gadfly, Not "Troll"
There are individuals who appear on blogs from time to time who post gratuituously irrelevant and/or nonsensical comments. Such people used to be commonly identified as "trolls" (luckily I have never had any here on my blog). What has happened at these sorts of places however is that the use of the term "troll" has been generalized to encompass those posters whose comments are substantially relevant to the discussion but which explicitly challenge either the premises, arguments, claims or conclusions of those hosting that discussion. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm all in favour of the right to property and its' application in prohibiting people from posting, but what I despise is the basic dishonesty of deliberately conflating a relevant, substantive, rationally argued challenge, which naturally evokes some emotional discomfort, with the gratuitous and irrelevant nonsense actually intended to inflame for no other reason than entertainment. That conflation is an evasion of intellectual responsibility, an evasion of the imperatives demanded by the virtues of accuracy, sincerity and integrity to Socratic dialectic. Call them on it every single time.
Monsieur Defraud
Turton's keeping a list of names apparently...
"BTW D, one of the reasons the discussions on this blog are of a reliably good level and the commenters so intelligent is because I don't permit the trolls to post here. Most of the people that I don't permit to post here are/have been banned on Forumosa (which is in many cases where I first met them)."So intellyquent are they, that Turton protects them from debate with me (to whom the Forumosa reference is not directed). Forgetting something about "CRU coding" are we Mr Compromise?
Q & A: Free Speech
Question:
Answer:
In a free society ("pluralism" is the language of superficial fools and postmodern communists*), the right to free speech is limited only by its' intersection with other negative rights; the right to life and the right to property. See here for further reading.
*Why? Because the application of "plural" is not to individuals, qua individual character and behaviour - but to membership of superficially designated statistical groups (e.g. nationality, ethnicity, language, "socio-economic status", marital status, gender, age and so on) identified as targets for tactical predation in a competitive social democratic politics.
"How far does freedom of speech extend in pluralistic societies?"So asks Albert Shihyi Chiu (邱師儀), assistant professor in Tunghai University’s Department of Political Science.
Answer:
In a free society ("pluralism" is the language of superficial fools and postmodern communists*), the right to free speech is limited only by its' intersection with other negative rights; the right to life and the right to property. See here for further reading.
*Why? Because the application of "plural" is not to individuals, qua individual character and behaviour - but to membership of superficially designated statistical groups (e.g. nationality, ethnicity, language, "socio-economic status", marital status, gender, age and so on) identified as targets for tactical predation in a competitive social democratic politics.
Wednesday, 18 May 2011
Alex Raymond & Anti-KMT Protests
Alex Raymond as quoted by Turton:
*A U.S. citizen I believe - I think he may even have once viewed my old apartment in Kaohsiung when I was looking for new tennants (this would be in the summer of 2008). I might be wrong however; both "Alex" and "Raymond" are fairly common names.
Update: interestingly, Turton appears to have pulled that first part of his post wherein he passes on the Taipei rally news and quotes Alex Raymond. However, some of the comments testify to the fact that it was there.
"...there's going to be a rally tomorrow in Taipei involving more than 100 cars... At the rally they will call for the KMT to go back home to China and for Taiwan to become independent under the name Formosa."Where do I start with this? First, telling the KMT to "go home" to China reflects a nationalist sentiment which is not only at odds with supposed democratic values, but is heavily ironic if these are the same people who, at other times, criticise the KMT for their nationalism. These people are, at best, hypocrites. Second, Alex Raymond is a foreigner*, and as such, he's living in a glass house here - and we all know what people who live in glass houses should not do... Third, the issue is not really independence, let alone the comparative triviality of altering the name of the island from "Taiwan" to "Formosa" (although I like both names, and use them interchangably). The real issue is the threat to the principles of a Liberal social order from the governments in both Beijing and Taipei (even if that latter government is run by a DPP administration). However, even this threat is a derivative: the psychology and culture which sanctions the use of coercion and aggression as principle constituents to a way of living is what must be challenged. Those people protesting against the KMT up in Taipei are idiots.
*A U.S. citizen I believe - I think he may even have once viewed my old apartment in Kaohsiung when I was looking for new tennants (this would be in the summer of 2008). I might be wrong however; both "Alex" and "Raymond" are fairly common names.
Update: interestingly, Turton appears to have pulled that first part of his post wherein he passes on the Taipei rally news and quotes Alex Raymond. However, some of the comments testify to the fact that it was there.
Tuesday, 17 May 2011
Tofu For All
"Let’s be clear about this, there is no logical argument whatsoever for the “decarbonisation” of the British economy. The case for CO2 as a catastrophic driver of Man-Made-Global-Warming remains, at best, unproven. The idea that Britain – producer of barely 2 per cent of Anthropogenic CO2 emissions – could significantly ameloriate the “problem”, even if that “problem” were actually to exist, is self-evidently fatuous."That's Dellers on British PM David Cameron's recent decision to press ahead with the carbon reduction program advocated by Chris Huhne, the tofu secretary, and the UK's committee on diet change.
Idle Free Taipei
Today's Taipei Times contains a letter by one John Fleckenstein, who has apparently set up a website: Idle-Free Taipei. The gist of the letter is an argument for people to shut off their scooter engines whilst idling at red lights on account of the wasted fuel and air pollution thus generated. The proposition itself is as sensible as it is simple, and I often switch off my own engine at red lights (though it depends on the circumstances). However, some of the language used in the letter reveals exactly the wrong sort of perspective from which this argument is being made.
Update (Monday 23rd May): "Engelbert Altenburger" writes:
"I have recently started a campaign directed at those who use their scooters to commute and seemingly will do so forever, regardless of improvements and expansions made to public transportation."Right from the off, I didn't like it; the language here is that of the military metaphor - and that's distinctly uncivil. I don't care that you think other people should use public transport rather than their scooters - what ought to be made salient to you Fleckenstein, is the impertinence of your criticism: you don't get to set other people's priorities for them. Only they get to do that.
"...the mission is for drivers to turn off their scooter engines at all of those seemingly endless red lights... With the help of a friend, I found that this idea has already been discussed, even with the prospect that it might one day become a law."I imagine that with some imagination and application of effort, this could be a "mission actually possible", and thus the question of introducing yet another law is, at best, out of place. All a new law would succeed in doing is generating more income and paperwork for the traffic police.
"For the past two months I have been driving all around Taipei during the morning and evening rush hours with a watch and a camera trying to get a better idea of how much idling occurs. I found that at a single traffic light, the cumulative stoppage for scooters can be up to, and even more than 80 minutes."Eh? The relevant data would surely be the ratios of stoppage times to distances per different parts of the city. In any case, the numbers aren't really necessary to surmise the point - people spend a fair bit of time stuck at red lights. Granted.
"In addition, the average time spent waiting at a traffic light is 63 seconds, which means that for every 1km driven, the typical scooter is idling for approximately 86 seconds (which averages to about 35 percent of the total commute time)."So "total commute time" is about 4 mins - but total commute time for whom? Is this supposed to be an average for all of Taipei's scooter drivers?
"Once you take the number of scooters in Taipei and multiply it by the average commute distance, it is easy to see how much idling is really going on."Well what is the average commuting distance for scooter drivers in Taipei? I don't actually know.
"...scooter commuters are burning an obscene amount of fuel every minute, let alone every day."Obscene? Bit too strong; at least they're doing their bit to feed the plants with nutritious C02...
"If there is anything that can be done to help promote this cause, it would be greatly appreciated."Yes - argue your case on its' own merits without the fallback to Statist "solutions" like passing a law and punishing the plebs with fines. I'm sympathetic to the argument, but not to the premises in which it is couched.
Update (Monday 23rd May): "Engelbert Altenburger" writes:
"Taiwan’s seemingly helpless Ministry of Transportation and Communications has never tackled the issue.... It’s the duty of everybody to raise these standards."Put those two sentences together and the likely implication ought to be clear, which was why I made my criticisms of Fleckenstein.
Monday, 16 May 2011
FAO Commenter "Readin"...
"You could learn something about tolerance from this parent."Ha! Well I hope you have just learned something about Turton in his response to you. My take on Ms Nichols' letter is here, whilst my own letter which went unpublished in favour of hers is here. If you're going to challenge Turton further, the principle element on which to focus is the issue of force, to wit: why should some parents be forced by the likes of Turton, via the State, to have their children learn about "gender issues" at the tender age of ten? Turton's all about "using the force".
Later...
Turton writes: "...and it was progressives armed with empirical science who stopped all that [birth control, abortion and eugenics - ed]." Yet the progs were precisely the ones who needed "empirical evidence" to decide their view on a matter of moral principle - they were pragmatists, just like Turton.
Later still...
It's not a question of "respect", Turton, it's a question of tolerance. That being the case, it would be tolerant to allow parents and schools to make up their own minds about what is taught to their children instead of progressive pragmatists like you calling for the forcible engineering of children's minds.
Trip To The Vet
Today (Sunday, although I'm writing this in the wee hours) I took Black & White to the vet after she sliced her front left paw open on what I can only assume was one of the few remaining pieces of broken plastic mold left lying around in the park by the roller-rink builders. They were as sharp as knives. She'll be stuck in a cage at the vet's for a couple of days until her paw heals sufficiently, but me and Wang will go and see her in the morning.
The day they finished that stupid concrete box was the day that Didi got run over. I spent some time after I got back from the vet looking for more such pieces of sharp, broken plastic and I'll have another look tommorow morning. I hope the other two haven't cut themselves on anymore plastic in the meantime.Update: We saw her this morning, and took her for a gentle walk around the block at the vet's place. Put a fresh dressing on her paw and let her play with my dog a little. I'll bring her some chicken this afternoon - the other dogs there will love some of that too I should think. There are some pitiful little kittens in the cages at that place.
Sunday, 15 May 2011
"Settled Science"
"On the science, there was little disagreement over the basics, such as the physical properties of CO2, but the degree to which it drives the larger climate was greatly disputed, because the larger system remains a mystery. Even the basics of how different clouds affect temperature is guesswork: water vapour feedback may have a slight negative cooling feedback, or it may have a large positive warming feedback. These must be guessed at, or imagined, through models."Over at The Register, Andrew Orlowski has a report up describing the recent meeting of academics on climate change that took place at Cambridge University earlier this week.
454g Of Tofu
"I'd be celebrating if I thought this was an actual change of direction by Cameron, or if I thought he'd tell them to FOAD. But I think he'll fold and the greenies will get theirEdward King remarks on news that Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the RSPB have written a letter to Downing Street to warn the UK government that it "is in danger of losing its way on environmental policy." Apparently, the executive director of Friends of the Earth said that the government's refusal to enforce drastic carbon reduction targets set by the climate change committee was due to considerations of "stone age economics". Actually, Mr Atkins, since the study of economics is a-priori, it is timeless, whereas your premise of scientific management reeks of nineteenth century hubris. You ought to be at the back of the line when they start rationing the tofu.pound of flesh454g of tofu."
Via Brian Micklethwait's post at Samizdata.
Carol Nichols
This is what got published today instead of my recent letter on the same topic.
"First, as an American, I am aware that in many of our school districts, such teaching has begun at the kindergarten level."Is Ms Nichols referring to school districts in the U.S. ("as an American") or is she referring to school districts in Taiwan? And if the latter, then why on earth is her being American relevant?
"Although the current proposal stipulates that it should begin at the fifth-grade level in Taiwan, the door would be open to lowering the age of the children subjected to a homosexual agenda."I would think that's probably true, since the decision to target 5th grade children appears to have been made for no other reason than the calculation that that's the youngest age TAPCPR think they can get away with (because it was done in Canada, so it should also therefore be done in Taiwan). Is Ms Nichols correct to call it a "homosexual agenda"? I don't know, but in any case, I agree with her when she says this:
"I think that within the educational system, the less emphasis on the entire subject of sexuality, the better, at least until students reach high school."In fact, if I was responsible for sex education - I'd make sure the entire syllabus was condensed into less than a minute in order to save time for real subjects like history, commerce, science, mathematics and literature.
"Second, I believe we should differentiate between respect for others (whether they are of different races, religions, or sexual orientation, to name a few differences found among members of the human family) and total acceptance of behaviors that most people find morally wrong."Sorry, no. The issue is not one of respect, the issue is one of tolerance: these are basic concepts. I tolerate homosexuality in other people but I do not respect them because they are homosexual - that would be like someone telling me I have their respect merely on account of my blue eyes. Ridiculous. Moreover, the assertion that "most people" find homosexuality to be morally wrong - whatever its' empirical merits - is entirely irrelevant to the ethics here: it's nobody else's goddamn business if two bean flickers want to get it on in privacy. Just last night, the last thing that dreadlocked, Proust-quoting dude said before he left was "fuck, breeders man!". No - I am a "breeder" and I reserve the right to tell people who don't like this fact to go forth and wanktify themselves in their vaunted, anti-capitalist sexuology elsewhere. Two people's sexuality is nobody else's business (i.e. all public expressions of moral judgement are impertinent) unless there is coercion involved or one of them is a child.
"I am totally opposed to name-calling, alienation or any cruel behavior by any individual to any other person for any reason."I'm not - some people deserve to get called certain names (e.g. Bruno Walther deserved to be called an "eco-fascist") because those names either describe what they are, what they do or what they advocate with the appropriate connotation of contempt or disapproval beyond mere contempt. Having said that, I'm not a bully and I don't approve of such behaviour - when it is uncalled for.
"Furthermore, emphasis on sexual diversity issues is not the business of public education. Parents are children’s most important teachers; they should be the ones to deal with their own children when questions naturally arise during childhood."Agreed. Just earlier tonight as I was walking the dogs I almost decided to intervene with a spoilt brat who was kicking and screaming wildly at his elder brother and sister for some reason whilst his mother walked away ignoring him. I would never have carried on like that at his age simply because I'd have got a clip round the ear without a second warning.
"I hope Taiwan’s education leaders will sort through the issues carefully and teach respect, not sexuality, to our children."I hope not - I hope they have a road to Damascus conversion, turn around and become advocates for free markets in education. Pigs do sometimes fly after all.
"Government Needs Inflation Plan"
"This year, Taiwan, along with many Asian economies, is again facing higher consumer inflation, driven by a steady increase in food and energy prices."No it isn't - the inflation is driven by low interest rates. The aggregate prices of other goods are only being driven up because the market continues to receive so much artificially cheap credit as to retard consumer reaction to increases in food and energy prices.
"However, using a strong NT dollar to partially offset the gains in imported commodities has its limits, because this measure could harm the competitiveness of Taiwanese exports."That conflict between exporting and importing businesses over currency value only occurs because the value of the NT dollar is a political instrument. The currency is not neutral, and consequently there will always be conflicts of interest over monetary policy.
"In fact, the most effective way to fight price pressure is for Taiwanese consumers to minimize their use of imported commodities, look for cost-efficient substitutes and carefully consider their options to cut costs."That depends; the people selling goods at newly inflated prices now are also consumers - consumers whose incomes and consequent spending would suffer were that advice to be taken (although for people such as myself, it may well be good advice).
"The government can help by making the market more fair and transparent as well as by better informing the public about the latest price changes."The government could help even more by getting itself out of the business of monopolizing the money and credit system.
Saturday, 14 May 2011
Apprehending The Thief
So last night I was sitting at the bar with my gin & tonics, my camera and a copy of "Civil Disobedience" chatting away with a couple of locals, when this dreadlocked guy walks up to the bar, sits down perpendicular to me, sees the book and strikes up a conversation. At first he comes across all smiling saluts as we move from Thoreau to the prose of eighteenth century writers, to Hitchens, to the size of U.S. government spending and debt. At some point I drew the "taxation is theft" equation to which he responds with..
I get this sort of encounter once every few months: it usually ends like that - the thief gets to leave empty handed, (and perhaps also empty headed and out of pocket) and I get to finish my gin and tonic.
Error correction: Proudhon, not Proust.
"No! Property is theft!"Proudhon's classic stolen concept. He even had the cheek, right after decrying the Lockean derivation of property rights as "arrogant", to offer me a reading list - I was urbane enough to let that pass. Anyway, by the time I challenged him to cite a single instance of either corporate or colonial exploitation which was not backed in some way by the State, he was cooked; he downed his Boddingtons, tried to evade the question, and then made his excuses to head off for the next bar.
I get this sort of encounter once every few months: it usually ends like that - the thief gets to leave empty handed, (and perhaps also empty headed and out of pocket) and I get to finish my gin and tonic.
Error correction: Proudhon, not Proust.
"Embrace Default!"
"Our great crisis — astronomical debt — is one of will, not resources. We have the capital but not yet the sense of urgency to pay down our trillions, something we could do in a mere four or five years, without a traumatic loss of lifestyle, should the country find the courage to do so."His promulgation of that Royal/Federalist "we" aside, Hanson is surely correct that the debt could be "paid down" in a few years - but certainly not paid off. Unless the current administration is removed in next year's election, I don't see how it will even be paid down since the Left will no doubt defend their SS programs to the hilt even though the Right will probably bow to further cuts in defense. Yet even if I am wrong about that, paying down the government debt in the next few years won't really attack the source of the problem - which is the propensity toward government spending as the now well-toned reflex rippling to the logical and Marxist-myelined impulse of Statist premises. That's ideology for you.
I'm with Schlichter and Zarathustra: "O my brothers, am I then cruel? But I say: That which is falling should also be pushed!"
The Conviction Of Lars Hedegaard
A story I missed earlier this month was that Lars Hedegaard, the President of the Danish Free Press Society was convicted on a charge of "hate speech". He will now appeal the ruling and take the issue to the European Court of Human Rights if necessary. I quote here part of his reaction:
"My crime is to have called attention to the horrific conditions of Muslim women and for my audacity the court has now enabled my detractors to label me a racist... Our authorities and their allies among the pc elites have chosen sides in the struggle between the forces of freedom and the forces of darkness and so opted for the oppressors of their own people and against those deserving of their protection."It is the ideologically diseased wing of the Left that is responsible for this disgusting injustice. The young people of Taiwan and other young democratic societies in Asia look up to the political authorities in Europe, the U.S. and Australia - the Left must not be allowed to get away with this latest disgrace.
Fighting Fear With Fear
"Still, I was nervous. Terrified, actually. And I had no idea what I should do. I called Charles and Dan, told them what happened, and said I needed a drink. We met at a bar a few minutes later. Dan was concerned. Charles was furious.An excerpt from self-supported journalist Michael Totten's new book, "The Road To Fatima Gate". That passage reminds me somewhat of an interesting encounter I had in Taipei a couple of years ago; I shan't say with whom it was, and no words were exchanged, but the eye contact alone spoke volumes: fear.
“You need to threaten him back,” he said.
“What?” I said. “Threaten Hezbollah? Are you joking?”
“No,” he said. “I’m not joking.”
“I can’t do that,” I said.
“Sure, you can,” he said. “You can’t imagine how paranoid Hezbollah is. You’re an American. Not only do they dare not touch you; they are afraid of you.”..."
Blogspot Blackout
That glitch in the Blogspot platform this week was interesting. After a day I started thinking Chinese DDoS, a la what happened to Wordpress a couple of months ago. However, searching turns up nothing and there was a little short in this morning's paper under the heading of "Site Wasn't Hacked: Google" which seems to refer to the same glitch as resulting from maintenance issues rather than a DDoS.
Thursday, 12 May 2011
Didi & Meimei
I'm gutted. For the past three months or so, me and a Taiwanese girl have been taking care of two abandoned white puppies at the park, a brother and sister. In fact I was just carrying the little brother around with me last night when me and the other dogs were walking around the park. This morning the brother - Didi - was run over by a car at about 9am. We found out this afternoon. Here he is on the right. 
Apparently, Didi had run into the road after being chased by Black & White to whom he must have done something annoying (I guess that might have been sniffing too close to her when she had a bone or something). It's unusual because the other two dogs very rarely show anger to the two puppies - and a sharp word from me is enough to stop them. I wish I'd been there this morning to stop whatever it was that really happened. Anyway his sister - Meimei - is left on her own without him and only the other two fully grown dogs, Picky and Black & White for company. That's Meimei in the second picture above - she is white whilst her brother was more tan. It's going to be very hard on her, because she's already flighty and nervous with people and I don't think she can be adopted (unless possibly by my friend Wang).
Ambassador "Freeman" Is Full Of Sh*t
"The idea that the US is "provocative" and poor China is the helpless victim of Washington's provocations is, again, absurd in two ways. First, since China determines what is "provocative", by making strategy based on the fear of provoking China, you essentially hand off control of your foreign policy to Beijing. Second, Freeman elides the whole problem of how China provokes the US -- in these pro-China presentations China is always the victim and its agency is limited."Turton's remarks against U.S. Ambassador Chas Freeman. I despise Turton, but his analysis is basically correct here.
Torch Pratt On Gavin Lee
The aptly named Mr "Pratt" in the Timid Times today:
"According to recent filings from the Taiwan Stock Exchange, Motech Industries Inc, the nation’s largest solar panel maker, reported yet another devastating drop in sales, while the average selling price for solar wafers is at a historic low."Tough shit Torch: if enough people judge solar cells to be too expensive to be worth it, then a drop in sales is a just outcome and all the green sloganeering in the world won't change that.
"The KMT administration could easily support the industry by mandating that all rooftops at elementary and high schools be covered with solar panels, thereby getting them “off the grid” and providing an emergency option during natural disasters or power outages. They could simplify the procedures whereby people could slash their electricity bills by installing solar panels on their rooftops or exterior walls, but they won’t."What "procedures" might he be referring to there I wonder? The availability of subsidies, or surplus electricity purchases at higher rates?
"This is all part of their plan to hollow out Taiwan’s industrial core and relocate all the high-tech industries to China."Oh really? Or is it just that solar power is a bit lame? Ockham's razor, Pratt.
"I appreciate Lee’s “youthful” energy and his quest for “innovation,” but if he is holding his breath for the KMT administration to actually get serious about reducing Taiwan’s carbon emissions and embracing green energy, he’ll probably turn blue and pass out."Which is ironic since in years to come, people in the U.S. and Western Europe will no doubt turn blue and "pass out" because their governments embrace green energy.
Wednesday, 11 May 2011
Contra Gavin Lee (李佳達)
No time for wallowing in my own errors: get on with making the arguments that need to be made...
Sirs,
Gavin Lee (李佳達), in an editorial published on Tuesday, claimed that "For solar energy to take the place of nuclear power in Taiwan is not only possible, but could be done straight away." As I have written previously, to replace nuclear power in Taiwan (>40 TW hours per year) solar photvoltaic arrays would need to be built on an enormous scale.
Taiwan receives an estimated average of 1644 hours of direct sunlight per year, with the best of it falling here in the South. The concentration of that sunlight will never be more than 1 KW per m2, and is most likely substantially less than this most of the time. Solar cell companies in Taiwan currently produce PV arrays that can convert <20% of that 1 KW per m2 into electricity. With those numbers, we can calculate that, over 1 Km2, such an array, assuming 20% conversion efficiency, would produce 328 GW hours of electricity per year. In order to match the output of Taiwan's three nuclear plants at 40 TW hours per year, the scale of this installation would need to be increased to cover an area of 121 Km2. At a conversion efficiency of 15%, that surface area would need to be increased to 162 Km2, which is bigger than Kaohsiung City.
The capital and land costs of such a project would be enormous, and there would be further costs associated with load management problems. The high costs of solar cells are what prevent ordinary people from installing them on their houses and factories - any attempt to solve this problem on a large scale through subsidies or surplus purchasing schemes (such as in Germany and elsewhere) would likely raise the cost of electricity to everyone else, effectively transferring money away from the poor to the rich. That is not "capitalism", that is cannibalism.
Under free market conditions, the premium that consumers would need to pay for solar-cell electricity might well be enough to ensure that the cheaper and more convenient technologies of gas and nuclear remain dominant. Get the State out of the business of subsidizing energy and allow producers and consumers to discover the most effective solutions for themselves.
Yours freely,
Michael Fagan
(Sent: Wednesday 11th May 2011. Unpublished by the Taipei Times)
Sirs,
Gavin Lee (李佳達), in an editorial published on Tuesday, claimed that "For solar energy to take the place of nuclear power in Taiwan is not only possible, but could be done straight away." As I have written previously, to replace nuclear power in Taiwan (>40 TW hours per year) solar photvoltaic arrays would need to be built on an enormous scale.
Taiwan receives an estimated average of 1644 hours of direct sunlight per year, with the best of it falling here in the South. The concentration of that sunlight will never be more than 1 KW per m2, and is most likely substantially less than this most of the time. Solar cell companies in Taiwan currently produce PV arrays that can convert <20% of that 1 KW per m2 into electricity. With those numbers, we can calculate that, over 1 Km2, such an array, assuming 20% conversion efficiency, would produce 328 GW hours of electricity per year. In order to match the output of Taiwan's three nuclear plants at 40 TW hours per year, the scale of this installation would need to be increased to cover an area of 121 Km2. At a conversion efficiency of 15%, that surface area would need to be increased to 162 Km2, which is bigger than Kaohsiung City.
The capital and land costs of such a project would be enormous, and there would be further costs associated with load management problems. The high costs of solar cells are what prevent ordinary people from installing them on their houses and factories - any attempt to solve this problem on a large scale through subsidies or surplus purchasing schemes (such as in Germany and elsewhere) would likely raise the cost of electricity to everyone else, effectively transferring money away from the poor to the rich. That is not "capitalism", that is cannibalism.
Under free market conditions, the premium that consumers would need to pay for solar-cell electricity might well be enough to ensure that the cheaper and more convenient technologies of gas and nuclear remain dominant. Get the State out of the business of subsidizing energy and allow producers and consumers to discover the most effective solutions for themselves.
Yours freely,
Michael Fagan
(Sent: Wednesday 11th May 2011. Unpublished by the Taipei Times)
Mea Culpa...
I have to own up to my mistakes, however much of an idiot I may look.
I owe an apology to everyone who reads this blog: it is of course possible to replace nuclear power in Taiwan with solar power, contrary to what I mistakenly claimed below. What galls me about that mistake was two things: first, it was such a stupid, sub-schoolboy error of failing to do squares properly and second, I had even answered the very same question correctly in a previous letter that was even published in the Taipei Times. I am f*cking appalled at myself.
Reason is not automatic. What now? Gin and a listen to the Kinks...
I owe an apology to everyone who reads this blog: it is of course possible to replace nuclear power in Taiwan with solar power, contrary to what I mistakenly claimed below. What galls me about that mistake was two things: first, it was such a stupid, sub-schoolboy error of failing to do squares properly and second, I had even answered the very same question correctly in a previous letter that was even published in the Taipei Times. I am f*cking appalled at myself.
Reason is not automatic. What now? Gin and a listen to the Kinks...
Tuesday, 10 May 2011
So You Don't Have To...
Taiwan receives an average of 1644 hours of sunlight a year. The concentration of that sunlight yields an average ratio of approximately 1 KW per square metre. The combined surface area of all of Taiwan's cities (including Taipei County) is 3,422 km2, although only perhaps a third of that (1,140 km2) will take the form of building rooftops. The best commercial solar photovoltaic cells in the world convert about 22% of the light that hits them into electricity. I believe those used at the Lhuju pilot plant in Kaohsiung County (pictured above) convert something like 15%. Let's imagine that conversion was 100% and let's pretend you could build solar cells on that total area of 3,422 km2 and do the math...1 KW multiplied by 1644 hours yields 1.644 MW hours per m2, per year.
1.644 MW hours per m2 multiplied by 1,000 yields 1.644 GW hours per km2, per year.
1.633 GW hours multiplied by 3,422 yields 5.625 TW hours per year.
So that's less than 6 TW hours per year from solar photovoltaic cells assuming 100% conversion of light into electricity (instead of the current state of the art rate of 22%) and further assuming that such solar photovoltaic cells are fitted to every rooftop of every kind of building in Taiwan in addition to the construction of multiple solar power plants and solar "trees" such as this one in Keelung above. The energy output of Taiwan's three aging nuclear power plants is >40 TW hours per year. Therefore anybody who claims that solar power can replace nuclear power in Taiwan, such as Gavin Lee (李佳達), is either a fool or a liar and I don't give a damn whether they are affiliated with Harvard or any of the other bullshit factories.
Gavin Lee (李佳達)
"For solar energy to take the place of nuclear power in Taiwan is not only possible, but could be done straight away."That's not true to any truthful understanding of the term "replace" (i.e. >40 TW hours per year). In fact its' distance from the truth is so stupendous that unless it can be shown that Gavin Lee (李佳達) was temporarily insane when he wrote it, I think I could only conclude that it is an outright lie.
Even if solar PV cells could convert 100% of the light that hits them into output electricity (and I doubt they'd ever get beyond 29% at most), and even if you covered every single rooftop in Taiwan with them, you'd still only get a tiny fraction of the energy required to replace nuclear plants: even with the most extravagantly generous assumptions, I couldn't estimate more than perhaps 15 TW hours per year.
Monday, 9 May 2011
Letter On "Gender Education"
Sirs,
Lee Shao-fen (李韶芬) and Victoria Hsu (許秀雯), of the "Taiwan Alliance to Promote Civil Partnership Rights" assert that both children and "society at large" need to be educated about gender diversity. I protest: the only "needs" evinced in their editorial piece published on Monday were their own.
They began with a spectacular non-sequitur: that the belief that 5th grade children are too young to learn about homosexuality is wrong merely on account of the Canadian government's say so. I would quote them in their own words, but their assertion was blurted out over several paragraphs. If this is to be taken of evidence of their own powers of reasoning, then it strikes me that neither Shao-fen nor Hsu ought be teaching gender diversity or anything else; they ought to be studying basic syllogistic reasoning.
The salient question is not even whether the enforcement of legislation they advocate will solve the problem of bullying (I doubt it), it is a question of priorities. Every hour spent watching a video about transgender issues, is an hour that could have been spent on the history of Taiwan, or on algebraic equations, or on basic physics. That different parents will prioritize such alternatives differently is simply another argument for the liberation of the education system from political control. If parents want their children to learn about transgender issues at the age of ten - let them be free to find a school that will offer them that service; the liklihood that they won't find one is no excuse for politicists like Shao-fen and Hsu to have the State bully parents as to what their children will be taught. Who could possibly fail to see the irony here?
Finally, editorials on education surely ought to be framed by the broader context of spending cuts necessitated by the recent revelations over Taiwan's national debt. In the U.S., where the national debt of $14.3 trillion amounts to almost 100% of GDP, this is such a huge issue that it already overshadows all of U.S. politics. In Taiwan, by contrast, the figure given by the IMF of approximately NT$21 trillion is nearly 200% of Taiwan's GDP, yet one barely hears a word about this amid all the infernal noise over Tsai Ing-wen and Ma Ying-jeou. As the largest item in the government's annual budget at NT$357 billion this year alone, spending on education must be cut and surely "gender education institutes" ought to be obvious choices as the first things to be cut; serious fiscal and monetary reform will be vitally important for the people of Taiwan in the next few years - "transgender issues" will not be.
Yours freely,
Michael Fagan.
(Sent: Monday 9th May 2011. Unpublished by the Taipei Times)
Lee Shao-fen (李韶芬) and Victoria Hsu (許秀雯), of the "Taiwan Alliance to Promote Civil Partnership Rights" assert that both children and "society at large" need to be educated about gender diversity. I protest: the only "needs" evinced in their editorial piece published on Monday were their own.
They began with a spectacular non-sequitur: that the belief that 5th grade children are too young to learn about homosexuality is wrong merely on account of the Canadian government's say so. I would quote them in their own words, but their assertion was blurted out over several paragraphs. If this is to be taken of evidence of their own powers of reasoning, then it strikes me that neither Shao-fen nor Hsu ought be teaching gender diversity or anything else; they ought to be studying basic syllogistic reasoning.
The salient question is not even whether the enforcement of legislation they advocate will solve the problem of bullying (I doubt it), it is a question of priorities. Every hour spent watching a video about transgender issues, is an hour that could have been spent on the history of Taiwan, or on algebraic equations, or on basic physics. That different parents will prioritize such alternatives differently is simply another argument for the liberation of the education system from political control. If parents want their children to learn about transgender issues at the age of ten - let them be free to find a school that will offer them that service; the liklihood that they won't find one is no excuse for politicists like Shao-fen and Hsu to have the State bully parents as to what their children will be taught. Who could possibly fail to see the irony here?
Finally, editorials on education surely ought to be framed by the broader context of spending cuts necessitated by the recent revelations over Taiwan's national debt. In the U.S., where the national debt of $14.3 trillion amounts to almost 100% of GDP, this is such a huge issue that it already overshadows all of U.S. politics. In Taiwan, by contrast, the figure given by the IMF of approximately NT$21 trillion is nearly 200% of Taiwan's GDP, yet one barely hears a word about this amid all the infernal noise over Tsai Ing-wen and Ma Ying-jeou. As the largest item in the government's annual budget at NT$357 billion this year alone, spending on education must be cut and surely "gender education institutes" ought to be obvious choices as the first things to be cut; serious fiscal and monetary reform will be vitally important for the people of Taiwan in the next few years - "transgender issues" will not be.
Yours freely,
Michael Fagan.
(Sent: Monday 9th May 2011. Unpublished by the Taipei Times)
Against "Gender Education"
"Recently there has been much vocal opposition to teaching about homosexuality in elementary and junior-high school based on the firmly held belief that fifth and sixth graders are too young to learn about such things...Who can follow the absurd reasoning there? According to the authors of this ridiculous editorial, Lee Shao-fen (李韶芬) and Victoria Hsu (許秀雯), the belief that fifth and sixth graders are too young to learn about homosexuality is both incorrect and harmful because the Canadian government says so. This display of absurd reasoning ought to be sufficient grounds on its own to ensure government funding for "gender education" in Taiwan is cut entirely.
...The experience of the Canadian government shows that such fears are not only unwarranted, they are in fact harmful. Beginning in 1994, the Public Health Agency of Canada published the Canadian Guidelines for Sexual Health Education...
...These guidelines have now been in circulation for 17 years — not only have they not been discarded, they have been further enhanced...
...This is ample proof the Canadian government and public do not think that elementary school students are unable to understand gender diversity and homosexuality, or will become sexually confused as a result of such education."
Besides that, the relevant question is not whether such programs actually work in preventing bullying (I doubt it), but at what cost - not simply financial, but also in terms of time and opportunity. Every hour spent watching a video about homosexuality is an hour that could have been spent on teaching algebra, history, or reading literature. Of course that issue of opportunity costs leads directly to the question of removing the State in order to allow a free market in education - which, though typically and wrongly dismissed as "unrealistic"*, is what ought to be the salient topic for education editorials given the broader context of Taiwan's national debt (NT$21 trillion) standing at nearly 200% of GDP (NT$12.5 trillion). There must be spending cuts and this "gender education" nonsense surely ought to be one of the first things for the chop.
I say gender education is "nonsense" not only because the State ought to be removed from the business of education on general Liberal principles, but also because gender education is the most explicit attempt at social engineering:
"Simply issuing empty calls for respect while stopping children from learning about homosexuality is hypocritical because social relations based on true respect and equality cannot be created out of thin air."What is wrong with this is the unspoken assumption about who would be issuing "calls for respect". Of course the State cannot simply command people to respect homosexuals - but neither can it engineer such respect, unless it be a false, coerced "respect" imposed 1984-like at the cost of incurring further public contempt for the education system. True respect cannot be commandeered by the State, but neither can it be engineered by the State: true respect can only emerge from a society of free association and free exchange.
At the age of ten I wasn't interested in girls, I was interested in books and chess. I didn't need to know about gays and lesbians, I needed to know about algebraic equations, the revolutions of 1689 and 1789 and the history of money. During the entire time I spent in the compulsory State school system, I only got the first of those and even then I had to wait until I was thirteen. Important things like Money and Commerce were never taught at school, History and Geography were a joke of an hour on Wednesday afternoons and only English and Science really motivated me. I remember the face of a woman teacher we had (forget her name, but she had vaguely Margaret Thatcher like hair) for a subject on "business" - it must have been hell for her, struggling against the entire school culture.
Those were betrayals I will never forgive.
*It is wrong to say that a free market in education is "unrealistic" for at least two reasons. The first is that what is typically meant is that the likelihood of successfully establishing such a free market given the present reach of the State into eduction is improbable. The second is that the obstacles to establishing a free market have nothing to do with what reality will allow and everything to do with human thought and will.
Note: I later corrected some minor typos and syntactical slips in this piece.
Sunday, 8 May 2011
Morning And Night In Kaohsiung
Last night on my way into Kaohsiung, I pulled over on the flyway to shoot some pictures of CPC's petrochemical plant in Nanzih and, although the light suffered from the humidity, I was at least lucky enough to catch this train...
... and the return service below. One problem I have with night photography is that my tripod simply isn't good enough to support anything other than the 18-55mm lens. I tried getting some close ups of the gas flares at this plant last week using the long lens and I ended up having to use my hands, it was ridiculous. I'm not about to blow a wad of cash on a good tripod though.
This is the "50 tower" (五十 大樓) in Kaohsiung City this morning taken at just after 5.30am. It is prefaced in the foreground by a police radio tower. Notice the mix of pink and yellow in the sky (I ought to have had filters with me), which is toward the east and contrasted enormously with the straight blues to the south west which you can see in the next shot. Last night when I arrived in Kaohsiung and drove around CC lake out at Niaosong, I stopped to set up the tripod for some shots of 50 tower with its' "Gotham City" lights on. It completely skipped my mind that those lights are set to go off at midnight - which is exactly what happened the moment I moved the tripod into position...
During my second year in Kaohsiung I used to live in the apartment complex right next to 50 tower. It was across the street from this building where I saw my first example of very strange police behaviour in Taiwan (it's a story in its own right).
And this is of course, Kaohsiung City's distinctive "85 Sky Tower" taken at about 5.40am this morning - which, since this picture was taken on the Boai-Jongshan road bridge, is about the only time anyone could realistically take a picture of it from this elevation at this angle without causing a pile up (there's no parallel public walkway - which is a shame). Notice the straight blues in the sky in contrast to the yellow-pink over the 50 tower (although I was also using different F-stops). There is also a singular, small, slightly pink cloud floating toward the camera to the top right. I've always loved this view of 85 大樓; I used to see it nearly everyday on my way to work when I lived in Kaohsiung. This section of Jongshan road is a reasonably smooth ride these days, but a few years ago, this was a hellish road with the MRT construction, the traffic, and the already extremely poor road surface. A lot of the shops on this section of Jongshan road have changed in the last three or four years, such that when I pop back down to Kaohsiung these days I'm not always certain that particular places will still exist. One thing that is still there though, is a picture of my good self at the age of 25 outside one of the buildings along that road. I took some pictures of it a few weeks ago with a friend with me standing next to it: I'm bigger, heavier and have longer hair now.
... and the return service below. One problem I have with night photography is that my tripod simply isn't good enough to support anything other than the 18-55mm lens. I tried getting some close ups of the gas flares at this plant last week using the long lens and I ended up having to use my hands, it was ridiculous. I'm not about to blow a wad of cash on a good tripod though.
This is the "50 tower" (五十 大樓) in Kaohsiung City this morning taken at just after 5.30am. It is prefaced in the foreground by a police radio tower. Notice the mix of pink and yellow in the sky (I ought to have had filters with me), which is toward the east and contrasted enormously with the straight blues to the south west which you can see in the next shot. Last night when I arrived in Kaohsiung and drove around CC lake out at Niaosong, I stopped to set up the tripod for some shots of 50 tower with its' "Gotham City" lights on. It completely skipped my mind that those lights are set to go off at midnight - which is exactly what happened the moment I moved the tripod into position...During my second year in Kaohsiung I used to live in the apartment complex right next to 50 tower. It was across the street from this building where I saw my first example of very strange police behaviour in Taiwan (it's a story in its own right).
And this is of course, Kaohsiung City's distinctive "85 Sky Tower" taken at about 5.40am this morning - which, since this picture was taken on the Boai-Jongshan road bridge, is about the only time anyone could realistically take a picture of it from this elevation at this angle without causing a pile up (there's no parallel public walkway - which is a shame). Notice the straight blues in the sky in contrast to the yellow-pink over the 50 tower (although I was also using different F-stops). There is also a singular, small, slightly pink cloud floating toward the camera to the top right. I've always loved this view of 85 大樓; I used to see it nearly everyday on my way to work when I lived in Kaohsiung. This section of Jongshan road is a reasonably smooth ride these days, but a few years ago, this was a hellish road with the MRT construction, the traffic, and the already extremely poor road surface. A lot of the shops on this section of Jongshan road have changed in the last three or four years, such that when I pop back down to Kaohsiung these days I'm not always certain that particular places will still exist. One thing that is still there though, is a picture of my good self at the age of 25 outside one of the buildings along that road. I took some pictures of it a few weeks ago with a friend with me standing next to it: I'm bigger, heavier and have longer hair now.
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