John McVey

For a human being there are no such things as automatic values for the simple reason that all of our values are predicated on the choice to live. If a particular man decides that life is no longer worth living then that's the end of values for him, no matter what his body's cells are programmed to do. As outsiders we can formulate our opinion regarding whether he is rational to make that decision or not, but even if we determine the latter we cannot say that he should value this or that. If a man does choose to live then even then he has a wide variety of options to choose from. All that his physical condition does is influence the content of that array of options. The choice among those options is his to make. Consequently, values do not exist for a man until they are made by him as a result of a cognitive process that he volitionally undertakes. There is no sense in trying to separate the issue of biological needs from moral needs. They are all predicated on the same one choice: to live or not? Morality is just a code for satisfying worldly needs, including the biological, to be adopted because he is born without knowing how to live - all of which presupposes that the actor chooses to continue to exist in this world. If his choice is to live, then moral precepts become potential values, but they too must be discovered and adopted by him, just as for any values whatever. Even without getting into the epistemological nitty gritty of concept-formation and measurement processes, it is clear that once you accept the existence of volition, of the power to choose thoughts and hence actions, then the whole idea of innate knowledge - including innate values and hence innate moral ideas - is thrown out the window. JJM

In what time-frame?? A massive amount can change in the space of even just a generation or two. Witness, for instance, the total shift in social attitudes on pre-marital sex and child-birth. I have even seen Christians genuinely feel no guilt for pre-marital sex and the prospect of parenthood accordingly! You would never have seen anything of the like fifty years ago. I think you're confusing compromise in the nasty philosophical sense with negotiation and deal-making on the premise of the principle of trade. I see the US as the premier land of the latter, not of compromise. Negotiation and deal-making are perfectly legitimate, and part of the positive sense of life that must be nourished and supported. The underlying principle of lets-make-a-deal is part of the way in to saving the US, not an impediment. Whoever said anything about converting all that many? There is no need to anyway, as what counts is putting good people into positions of influence over the culture. You'd be surprised how effectual that can be. Indeed, our enemies themselves have used that fact - there are far fewer Tooheys in the world than you might think. For all his other faults I hear about, Malcolm Gladwell's book "The Tipping Point" concretises the power of the few, whose thesis by implication supports Miss Rand's call for new intellectuals. If the US were to collapse into a theocracy within the next 100 years then no place on Earth will be safe, with no hope for humanity for who knows how many generations. Any nation whose culture represented a threat to that of the theocrats will be marked for invasion or destruction - worst case is a religion-inspired "Moonraker" scenario with bioweapons as biblical plagues and nuclear weapons as "cleansing fires" etc, leaving the whole world bereft of people except the nutcases who prepared for it. This is not scaremongering but a real and growing possibility. It was a significant element in the Reagan campaign, for instance - there really were those who thought they could bring about the Rapture through Reagan's victory. Building from scratch (or even saving another existing country) in the face of that is wishful thinking. JJM

The gaps left by the producers themselves, yes. I know that is not what the GotG refers to, but it really is about filling in gaps. Information cost money to obtain, and has different costs to different people. Some speculators/investors specialise in getting the information cheaper or sooner than others, and so filling the gaps in the market for what is traded on the basis of that information. Snerd rightly raises the example of the futures markets transferring risks from one party to another. The producer who faces the risk in the first instance could try to get the information required to mitigate the risk, but it is more cost effective for them to sell the risk to another, ie the speculator, who is better placed to get and/or use the information effectively. Another set of gaps is in the interpretation and processing of the information rather than the information itself. Different people use different methodologies, placing different degrees of importance on different things or calculating differently. There are a few different methodologies for valuation, such as capitalisation via EBIT multiples and its variants, PE multiples, and of course DCF. A real professional is supposed to use two, one for main and the other for cross-checking, and while there are guidelines on which to use under which circumstances there are no hard and fast rules. Other gaps are entirely bad-law in origin, even leaving aside insider-trading law. For instance, in many jurisdictions it is illegal to continue to purchase stock in a company that you own more than 20% of without making a formal take-over offer. Those who own less can still purchase stock, and often do in anticipation of the required offer. However they get their information and process it, they will trade stock depending on their various expectations of the timing and the price of the offer. Differing opinions means the price moves slowly over time, rather than jumping straight away to the offer price. Again SNerd is correct. Speculators and speculation are real people and their activities. A speculator is anyone who forms an opinion on the future price of something that is divergent enough from the current price (ie after adjusting for holding costs etc) that a pair of trades now and in the future will be profitable: "I speculate that so and so price is appropriate..." Every day-trader is a speculator, as is every broker working on their own account or on their principal's account, every funds manager for various firms, and so on, to the extent that they are not investors. What distinguishes speculators from investors is that investors do the same thing plus one thing more: they take an active interest in what the company or industry is doing and place a value on the ability to influence it. Investors will place a value on the ability to vote, or will make suggestions to the physical traders in the commodities, and so on. The distinction is real, but it isn't of any particular significance for the smooth functioning of markets. Valuing the ability to vote or otherwise meaningfully influence the physical course of events doesn't alter the fact that the pursuit of gains is the driver. That ability is just another means of altering the risks faced and potential returns to be gained. It has a definite cash value accordingly, known as the premium-for-control in the valuation of take-overs for instance as Snerd raises. But it is not just limited to takeovers, but of any instance of someone valuing the ability to have a say, no matter how small. Besides the above traders, a particular concrete example of this that I know of is that Rupert Murdoch created two outstanding stock classes for the News Corporation: the ones with voting rights and the ones without. Investors trade the one with the voting rights, while speculators trade in both. As you can imagine, the stock with the voting rights trades slightly higher. Entirely true, but it doesn't make speculation any the less real just because it doesn't do what demagogues claim it does. Same as investing generally, minus any desire to influence the industry generating the root value. You gather the numbers, evaluate them and form an opinion, and trade accordingly. That in turn influences the industry anyway by altering the prices the participants pay and receive, filling the information gaps left by those participants whose time is better spent doing other things they're more productive at. As the root cause, no, but it is a major efficient cause. The root causes are whatever is occasioning speculators (and investors) to risk their capital in this fashion. Who or what is making the gaps in the first place? Some are legitimate, some are not. Some speculators might be right, and others wrong, but no matter what they are not the root cause (assuming no fraud like deliberate misinformation etc). I don't mind using it as it does have some meaningful content, but I hold no major candle for retention of the term: "non-voting investor" and similar constructions would do just as well. We could abandon the term completely and not really lose anything important. You're right to dismiss speculators as having any blame, and right to downplay the importance of the term, but despite that you're wrong to say that 'speculator' is only meaningless pejorative. JJM

My guess is that what you have in mind is the reference to the Pyramid of Ability in Galt's Speech (and even if it isn't, this rules out the canonicity of the negative judgements you raise): Not anything of any significance in determination of codes of ethics and standards of judgement of people. The vast majority of us are perfectly capable of producing enough to live our lives with. Without the Atlasses that life would not be particularly fruitful, but it would still be a life. Indeed, even without the Atlasses we could still slowly prosper over time were we to act morally. What the Atlasses of the world do is create far more than the rest of us, particularly in the form of ideas, trade that product of their minds with us, and thereby enabling us to be even more productive with our own efforts through us putting those ideas into practice. In that way the progress of prosperity is sped up enormously while everyone involved is still earning what they get through production. Only small percentage of people can't produce enough on their own to get by, and even then as the modern world gets more advanced the number of such people actually falls. For instance, Dr Stephen Hawking, a guy in a wheelchair who is barely capable of moving a joystick and tapping a keyboard, can still earn his way in this world. The numbers of those who are genuinely just recipients of transfers without producing anything in return - ie all the bona-fide charity-dependents - is miniscule and getting smaller (at least as a proportion of the population.) JJM

Dammit. JJM

So perhaps the car is run on a plutonium-based breeder reactor using sodium-potassium alloy as the coolant? JJM

The fuel cost is actually fairly low as a proportion of the unit cost of the electricity produced, and the vast majority is accounting and financial charges like depreciation and interest. For example, last I heard the uranium itself was only 16% of the cost of producing electricity in a nuclear plant, and that was after the price hikes in recent times. That number is only about 2 years old. I have no doubts that nuclear would be more common than it is at present, but I still say coal will still be a major player. Indeed, precisely because power would be much cheaper without the wackos et al, I can easily foresee that the cost of running a coal-fired station would be more than offset by using the same supply and storage infrastructure for a coal to liquid or gas facility. In an integrated fashion the synthetics facility could begin to fire up in the afternoons as demand elsewhere goes down, thereby maintaining a steady total demand for the coal plant and allowing great economies through consistent supply. There's a lot of perfectly good capital invested in the infrastructure for coal, and for so long as the revenues exceed costs you could be surprised just how long an "obsolete" technology can remain viable even in a laissez-faire economy. Unless I am mistaken, breeders work by turning non-fissionable materials into fissionable materials and then fissioning them as normal, rather than accelerating the decay. I think the burn up of waste by increasing the decay rates via jacking up radioactivity is a separate line of development (being done chiefly in France, as I recall). On a purely geeky technical note, I'm rootin' for thorium But anyway... Possibly, I don't know the details of this offhand, but I do know that you're correct to state coal stations do release lots more radioactivity than nuclear stations. However, IMSM the main culprits are the likes of polonium and radium. It's in the capital costs, not the fuel costs. Fair enough. Off the top of my head I doubt it for the immediate future, but it would still be an idea in the back of the minds of people interested in the energy sector for when the easiest of the easiest sources starts running out and oil prices climb for legitimate supply reasons. When that would be I can't say. On another side note, research in that field may not come from want of new supplies for consumption here on earth, but of the generation of synthetics for use in the space program. For instance, Zubrin's Mars project includes a vehicle that generates its own fuel to power a return flight to Earth by synthesising it from Martian CO2 and either locally sourced hydrogen or supplies brought with it. Entirely earthly spin-offs from space-related technologies abound today, so this is not to be scoffed at, even if the Mars mission itself turns out to be a bust. JJM

Heya Santiago. You might be interested in looking up the October 2005 issue (Vol 19 No. 3) of The Intellectual Activist. Rob Tracinski covers this in quite some detail. JJM

When coal runs out, yes, but that's not happening any time soon. Nuclear does have its place, but coal will remain a major supplier of base load for a long time yet. I don't think much of solar except in niche applications, though saline algae biodiesel might have merit (I can see problems with it). Even on the premise that crude oil is running out, an idea whose import is questionable at the moment, it's highly speculative to muse about things like that without paying due attention to the economics of other legitimate alternatives to standard crude oil as a source of transport fuel. These include tar sands (big in Canada at the moment), LPG (common as dirt in Australia), oil shale (pilot plants in the US), coal-to-liquid and coal-to-gas (both of which are viable technologies under many conditions). Biodiesel from corn and other regular plant sources is nothing but subsidy-whoring AFAICT, but biodiesel from saline algae just might be genuinely viable as a use for otherwise waste land. These technologies are also likely to be present in multiple, with the economics varying from region to region (eg ethanol from sugarcane is supposedly genuinely viable for Brazil?). Similarly, depending on the paths of development, I wouldn't be betting on any single technology being the Big Thing because the economics can alter this way and that over time. In short, I wouldn't assign "probably" to any one in particular at all. The problems we're seeing with oil supplies are politically generated. If it weren't for the wackos, and also myriad other evils, we wouldn't even be having this discussion because we'd have enough oil at decent prices and what oil we do have would last longer because diesel engines would be more prevalent. Without all that evil, talk of alternative sources of transport fuel would be only a specialised topic almost entirely for academic and/or speculative purposes, and wouldn't become generally topical for a long time. There wouldn't be as much research into them, and they certainly wouldn't be getting government grants and subsidies like biodiesel does. If it weren't for those evils then, until the time oil supplies really do become low, stories like the water-powered car would not receive any enthusiasm from the general editors of reputable media outlets. If the stories were plausible enough not to be dismissed outright by those editors they'd get passed on to the science editors. They and their staff would then quickly sort out the cranks from good ideas, and what good ideas there are might get a little space in the science pages, ignored by all except us scientifically-minded and inquisitive persons. JJM

An environmentally-incorrect way of having fun. Firebombing the suckers is a personal favourite JJM

Our contract electrician has a mate who swears by LED lighting. Apparently the savings sums for it leave even fluoros for dead. AND, they're instant full light, AND they (if set up for straight-swap) can be put into standard dimmer circuits. One can even get industrial-grade floodlights using LED's, now. I've still to do some more research on this myself, though the one thing that the sparky told me was to avoid Made-in-China like the plague because for now Chinese LED's are still hideously unreliable. The ones made elsewhere have no such problems, he said. That is just hearsay, but I have no reason to doubt this guy's judgement so be sure to ask the salespeople about reliability if you're investigating LED at the hardware store. JJM

I'll be there, sounds good! I hadn't planned on anything other than being on the tail end of jet lag, so I'm easy. JJM

First up, it is definitely not representative of the arguments for ranges of moral codes as identified by Miss Rand or other prominent Objectivists. West mentions moral agnosticism, identified by Dr Peikoff. Another that Dr Peikoff mentions, in the "Objective Communication" course (lecture 9 or 10) is that Kant's theory is neither egoistic nor altruistic (nor agnostic for that matter), as it instead exhorts people to sacrifice in favour of the "categorical imperative," IE sacrifice for its own sake and explicitly for the benefit of nobody (as a primary source of motivation, anyway). He also mentions the death-worship of Nirvana-seeking Oriental religions. Secondly, Nyronus is correct to note that the self-others continuum is bogus. This is also expressly mentioned by Miss Rand and Dr Peikoff, so again the excerpt is not representative of Objectivist thought. See OPAR Ch7, especially p229-241. A key quote (p239): The final excerpt is blatantly NOT applicable to Objectivism. Maybe it holds of other theories, but if anyone tries to say it holds of Objectivism then just say that this other is asserting that books like AS, OPAR, VOS, CUI, and so on, do not exist. -- How else would I respond? Here's what I'd do (depending on how much space there is to make an argument in): first I'd note that morality exists, and is a vital necessity for man here in this world, because man has the faculty of volition and is constantly faced with choices to make, but as he is born tabula rasa he has no innate knowledge of which option he should follow and so needs to adopt a code to help him decide. Morality is that code. Dr Peikoff noted in ObComms that at this level there is a single simple question whose answer is subject to the Law of the Excluded Middle. Is at any time, anywhere, anyhow, a man required to make sacrifices (as properly understood)? Yes, or no? By reference to the sliding scale, the author of the book you're working from is trying to avoid dealing with the blunt yes or no part of that question. There is no "balance" at that level, no sliding scale. Questions of how much a man should sacrifice are secondaries that presume a yes to the main question. In OPAR (p206), he noted that this question was the third of three, and depended on the answers to the other two. The questions are: What is the ultimate value? How should it be achieved? Who or what (if anyone or anything) should benefit from action? The only way properly to answer that main question, the third of the three, is to answer the first two first, starting with the standard of value. The whole excerpt you quote expressly depends on value through and through, but makes no mention whatever of what the standard of value is. The author speaks of doing a balance - but does not say how! The standard of value is the only method for making any balances. Further, the issue of virtue - the second question - includes answers that identify the fact that in questions of principle there is no such thing as balance. That is why the fundamental question of whether man is or is not ever a sacrificial animal is a simple yes or no question, whose answer just does not refer to a continuum. From there, I'd go into what the standard is, what the foundation of virtue is, and validate oneself as the proper beneficiary of all one's actions. That then provides the three answers to the three fundamental questions of morality. An undergraduate paper wouldn't have room to go much further, but I would include reference to the virtue of justice and show what the proper basis and nature of one's proper interaction with others is. JJM

Regarding your second question, the section of the brain normally used for image interpretation gets rewired for other uses in blind people, usually sound interpretation as I recall - here's the result of a quick google. The general concept or brain rewiring is neuroplasticity. Of course, just because the visual cortex's systems get shanghaied into alternative uses this doesn't mean there's anything the blind actually 'see'. Why not go ask some real neurologists? JJM

Oh great, yeh, another Victorian G'day Clinton! JJM

What Stella said - fashion as being whatever is "the latest," with choices based on what people think others will think and not necessarily including whether the wearer personally likes how it looks. True but irrelevant. I have no problem with people bringing out new looks for goods all the time, and nor is there any problem with people wanting constantly to have new goods because they're bored with the old ones. The summer-dress fiasco in We The Living comes to mind, too. The issue is whether one chooses aesthetics based on one's own personal preferences (directly for oneself or indirectly through having reason to care about particular other people) on the one hand or to gain the approval (or disapproval) of others as a primary on the other. Sometimes what others think is partly the point (such as dressing with consideration for what would please one's lover, eg Kira making a lot of effort to reverse a blue woolen dress), but all that does is take the issue back to why one values the opinions of those particular others (and as a follow-on, it is directly their preferences that are sought, rather than them being cipher-proxies for the opinions of people-at-large). If you value those others for legitimate reasons then including consideration for them in how one dresses is not second-hand. Considering others' opinions becomes second-hand when those opinions are not means to your values but are your values. Looking good is legitimately part of the former, while fashion (particularly the stuff that gets all the attention) is the latter. JJM

Ditto. Fashion for its own sake strikes me as second-handed. As I see it, the utilitarian aspect comes first, with fashion being merely a choice among options. Some events require particular styles of clothes, though even there options can exist. Pick the option that, first, does the actual job you need it to do (I am assuming you value the required job for good reason), and second, pick the option that YOU like the best and not whatever keeps others happy. Like Zip I wear company-issue livery most of the time, change into a tank-top and trakkies for the gym, and usually it's trakkies and a t-shirt on the weekend. Khaki or cream dress slacks, a standard shirt and dress shoes for ball-room dancing. Usually it's good jeans, a non-office but non-loud shirt and my favourite boots when I go out. That sort of thing. You might want to avoid that if you are in the UK. Tenure could probably tell us more, but from what I understand Burberry tends to be the brand indicating the wearer as a "chav". The entry says Burberry are trying to get away from that and blaming the stereotype on counterfeits, but every print advert I have seen here has models that look like a bunch of cashed-up mallrats with a bad attitude. Experiences and views of Burberry in the US could be totally different, of course. With sunglasses far more than other items of clothing the primary consideration MUST be the utilitarian aspect. Sunglasses, unlike say footwear, are not items of clothing that are both useful and normally expected things that we can then decide the particulars of - nor can I see any valid reason as to why they would be expected. The normally-sighted are always free not to wear them at all, and no rational person would gainsay another for not wearing them as an end in itself. Indeed, the common expectation is that the normally-sighted should take theirs off when the technical need passes - who respects someone who wears sunnies indoors or after sundown? Without that utilitarian aspect they are just big signs saying "look at me! I have more dollars than sense!" The point about them is to help you see better by providing shade for the eyes, plus technical things such as having UV barrier material and being polarised to cut glare. There are even other technical needs - for instance, sunglasses form part of PPE for outdoors workmen, so need to have at least some hefty measure of impact resistance and other details. Once you've got your technical needs in place then it's valid to worry about the appearance of what passes muster. For instance, the fashionability aspect to workmen's PPE-grade sunnies is added to it after the technical specifications are met so as to encourage greater use - but if I, as site safety officer, were to purchase a set that didn't meet technical needs as PPE and instead listened primarily to employees' fashion sensibilities then I (and the company) would be in deep doo doo if there were an eye injury that would not have occurred had I purchased the right kind. As I see it, the private purchase of sunglasses must follow the same principle of selection: technical first, fashion second; and if there is no technical advantage then the best option is not to spend money on them at all. JJM

Minor quibble - that's seemingly an urban legend. Here's the Straight Dope. JJM

Unearned guilt - at least insofar as the donors are concerned. It is not the donors and what is done with the funds that the system has as the primary aim - that is conditioning the kids. JJM

Looks like shops can look forward to a roaring trade in soap for a while, methinks. JJM

Internationally, there's this link to various national statistics organisations around the world. Closer to home, you could try the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the Reserve Bank of Australia, Statistics New Zealand, and Reserve Bank of New Zealand. All government, I know, but still fairly valuable. JJM

Uh-oh. JJM

Yeh, I was thinking that myself, once. If spacetime were quantised then motion would have to consist of an object at total rest one moment, then achieving infinite acceleration, moving the quantum of distance in zero time at infinite velocity, then achieving just the right amount of infinite deceleration to bring it to a halt at the next position, then sitting there unmoving for one or more units of time. Asserting quantisation creates more problems than it solves, at least from this layman's perspective. JJM

I don't know much about QM but I wouldn't be so quick as to say that a silly scenario like that adds to it. Hell, it may turn people off! On a technical note, I'd always thought Zeno's paradox was flawed because it uses a certain assumption while wrecking the context that makes that assumption valid. It assumes that one cannot complete an infinite series because it would take infinite time, but if one looks at the sums right one finds that it also shows that the time required is actually finite in this instance. There is not just the one infinite series to complete, there are TWO, and one cancels out the other. The one is the sum of the successively smaller distances - but the other is the successively smaller amounts of time required to traverse those distances. The latter is not summed up in time, it is time, and comes to a finite number that represents the amount of time required to complete the first infinite series. Pure rationalism done for fun, but Zeno's paradox was itself rationalist drivel to begin with. If QM people take that paradox seriously as adding any weight to their thinking then I raise an eyebrow at them in suspicion of lacking objectivity. JJM

No. It is not the government's place to act in loco parentis in any way shape or form for anyone with functioning adult parents or legal guardians. Even if you could provide all the absolutely watertight proof in the world that they work 100% without side-effects, and even assuming nobody had any religious objections etc, it would still be completely wrong for government to force people to do things "for their own good." If you allow that then you are sanctioning the principle of the government doing anything to people against their will "for their own good," and that is the road to the most hateful and intractable types of totalitarianism both by those who really meant it and those who are using it as a cover. I'm not touching the rights-of-children debate. You are saying that people who choose to go about un-vaccinated, and thus vulnerable to these diseases, might somehow be entitled to get the government to force other people to be vaccinated so that the first people are less likely to catch diseases from the second people. Don't you spot some problems with that? It doesn't - or at least not directly enough to warrant discussion in the same thread. JJM