Miljenko's Blog

And the alternative is exactly what? Radical re-distribution of wealth? No thank you, I don't want any of my stuff redistributed. You want it, you'll have to take if from me and I'll go all 2nd Amendment nutcase on you. I do not buy the premise of inequality being what will bring down civilization or even a single country. This is because all the well-meaning egalitarians fail to account for one very simple thing - an issue that seems outrageous on paper is much less so in real life and as Victor Frankl said, it is only our individual circumstances that matter to us, not as much our comparison to the circumstances of others. This is why I can feel pretty crappy and thinking about how much better my situation is than that of those who are dying of hunger or being oppressed will not make me feel any better at all. The point is that when Catherine the Great built the Hermitage or the Winter Palace on the back of serfs in Russia, the inequality between her and those others ...

A 21km stretch of road in Mexico between Punta Mita and Puerto Vallarta airport has a total of 13 very nice, big Pemex gas stations. What is noticeable is not only their sheer number but that they are all Pemex. The state of Mexico is via Pemex managing its unemployment rate and providing employment for a lot of folks who spend most of the day doing nothing at all because none of these stations are very busy. No matter how non-sensical this is, I will bet any amount of money that there is some PowerPoint slide somewhere in Mexico that shows a graph of how with more gas stations you will sell more gasoline. This is a perfect example of why "state capitalism" does not work on that most fundamental of levels - return on capital. The country's collective savings are being spent to build infrastructure that is not needed and therefore produces very low return on investment because motivations of the owner - the State - are quite a bit more complex than the motivations ...

I don't quite understand why people seem to be so into Orcas and how those animals are in some way noble, special and in some way "spiritual". Based on what? If it were one fish one vote, Orcas would have been voted out of existence in the animal kingdom long ago (I know, I know - there is no voting in a "kingdom"...) They terrorize all the other species around them eating massive numbers of them daily from salmon to seals to anything else they can get their killer jaws into. And yet, people worship them almost and are all about his special they are because they whistle in some way we can actually record with our audio equipment. What about the sounds seals make when being devoured by Orcas? Orcas are superpower of animals, Hitlers of the sea so to speak. Please stop talking about them as something great and praiseworthy!

For some time I've had Geothermal as my No. 1 candidate for best long term alternative among renewable energy options. I thought I'd lay out my arguments in simplest form. First, the resource is limitless for all practical purposes and relatively equally distributed around the world. The later is down the road although in the short run, due to technology limitations, some locations are more attractive than others. Second, it offers both a"utility scale" and more granular solutions. One can utilize the same resource on a different scale both on the MW but also on a "subdivision scale" or even on an individual home scale. Third, we are still on the steep part of the technology curve with geothermal and problems to be solved are within visible reach of further development of technology. Advances in drilling techniques "ported over" from fracking type of drilling will solve the problems of occasional seismic activity and also drive down the cost ...

Making a list (and not checking it twice) of things one can do by oneself and those which one can only do with somebody else. Please feel to contribute. Things one can do by oneself - read, run, swim, meditate, eat, hike, chop wood, ski, drink, dance, sleep, play chess, cook, sing, practice any number of sports, feel guilt (as opposed to shame). Things that can be done only with participation of at least one other person - hug, kiss, have a conversation, get or give a massage, shake hands, play any number of sports, entertain somebody else with one's dance, singingor writing, feel shame (as opposed to guilt).

For decades now political scientist and politicians have tried to figure out why the communist experiment in the Soviet Union failed when it did. That it was going to eventually was not as much of a puzzle as was / is why did it happen when it did and what were the proximate causes (as opposed to the ultimate causes if one adopts Jarred Diamond's terminology). My contention has long been that the most destructive weapon against communist ideology was the VCR. With increasing proportion of the population being able to see "how the other side lives", all the propaganda simply could not keep the genie in the bottle. People wanted to have a refrigerator and became unwilling to suffer the trade-off involved in not having a refrigerator so that the country can afford more MIG-17s. What Voice of America or Radio Free Europe could not achieve because they were considered mere counter propaganda and as such inherently not to be trusted any more than home grown propaganda, was ...

Earth is a closed system. Nothing escapes into space that is not launched at escape velocity. Therefore, the water we have is the water we had and the water we will have. Other than the very small amounts of water that get "lost" through chemical reactions converting those molecules of H20 into something else, all of the water that we "use" stays with us. Unlike oil where once we use it up, it is no longer in the same form, water more or less stays the same and thermodynamics gives us a clue to this as there is no energy to be had from water and therefore no conversion of matter into energy no matter what we do with water. We "have" more or less the same amount of water we had a million years ago and we will have the same a million years from now unless we cart it out into space. The issue is what form water comes in and this issue is all a "parts-per-billion" issue meaning that in some cases water is mixed up with salt (in fact 97% of...