Why I really hate the Fed

I've made it no secret that I hold no love in my heart for the Federal Reserve Bank. I really don't like an institution who's mission is to de-value the cash I have in my bank account. I hate them. But here's something few people know, a secret scar inflicted upon me when I was no more than a tad and had no money at all. For nearly forty years I've held this knowledge close, I've told no one. Not my wife, my children or even my mother. Gather 'round for the horrifying tale...

It was 1979 and I was a college student at a prestigious institute of higher learning located in San Francisco California. I won't name names because I would hate for anyone to be overly impressed by my academic credentials, but I will say that it was the only State University located in that city, and the only one that would have me. My high school grades had been less than stellar. No honorariums were offered, no meal tickets. After two painful years living hand to mouth I was forced to find a decent job to pay my tuition. It was that or keep selling blood at the plasma bank down on 6th and Mission. This was a time when five bucks would buy a five pound can of tuna parts at the downtown Second Harvest. My roommates and I discovered Patunas (a tasty blend of cheap cheese and tuna guts stuffed in a twice baked potato, popular among the farming communities of rural Bakersfield) and Tuna Spaghetti.

Armed with only a CS 101 class in FORTRAN (which, if I recall correctly, I got a C- in) I acquired employment with a small company that did off-line microfiche services for the financial industry. My job was to pick up tapes from various client banks, haul them back to a little office on 4th and Howard, mount them on drives and flash images of bank statements onto tiny blue cards that stank of ammonia. It was amazingly high tech in a world before CDs. I was proud, but still relatively poor. All of these services were performed between 11pm and 4 am and (baring the driving part) required little attention, freeing me to do most of my homework while being paid.

Every night I'd make my rounds at midnight visiting some of the great names in US banking; Wells Fargo, Bank of America, First Bank of Sasquatch. You name 'em, I was there. But on top of the list was the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank, an awe inspiring edifice of marble and concrete. Entering the building was the closest thing I could imagine to visiting Mt. Olympus; this was where the Gods dwelled.

And they ate well. After a few short weeks of service I discovered the cafeteria at the SF Fed by accident. On my way back from the computer center one night I punched the wrong button on the elevator and there I was. It was glorious. Huge wedges of blackberry pie for 50 cents. Turkey with gravy, dressing and mashed potatoes for a buck and a half. I was in heaven. I came, I saw, I ate (after which I ate more). Suddenly I was rich and I began to develop a deep and abiding respect for the Federal Reserve Bank. I bought things that would keep well and stuffed them in my pockets to take home to my girlfriend. It was marvelous. I gained weight and became popular with the ladies (until then I'd only been popular with the boys, it was an SF thing).

But, as they say, all good things must pass. One fine winter evening I went through security at the Fed, headed up stairs, loaded my tray, took my favorite window table and tucked into dinner with zest, only to notice a shadow looming over my poised fork. I looked up to see a portly man of some 45 years standing tall over my shoulder with a ferocious look in his eye. He was wearing a badge.

"You have some ID on you?" he said.

"Yes" said I and after slowly reaching into my pocket while keeping my left hand in clear view, I produced it.

"This isn't one of ours and you aren't supposed to be on this floor" he said, "What are you doing here?"

"Eating dinner" I replied.

"Well you aren't cleared for this floor. You have to leave."

"Now?" said I.

"Right now."

With a mournful look at the blackberry pie and a cautious glimpse of the uniform, badge and gun standing behind me wrapped around a fat assed bastard with no real claim to humanity, I rose to my feet, picked up my receipt and proceeded to exit. Our hero felt it necessary to follow while saying "don't come back" and that I was in a "secure area without clearance".

And that is why I really hate the Fed. It has something to do with inflation and market manipulation too, don't get me wrong. But down in the basement of my soul, this is why I hate the Fed.

New Word: incontentious

In • con • ten • tious |inˈkənˈten ch əs|

adjective

1 causing or likely to cause a pissing contest; inflammatory: an incontentious issue.

• A heated argument in which the participants judge the winner based on the distance over which a stream of urine can be projected.

ORIGIN Late 20th century American English: from Old French contentieux, from in- ‘not’ + continent- ‘holding together’ (see continent 2 ).

Technocracies, theocracies, bureaucracies and full contact sports.

Preamble

Nobody who knows me would call me a religious person. I've frequently engaged in conversations concerning the wisdom of incorporating non-secular thought into government and I've done it from a selfish desire to keep people from taking my liberties based on their religious beliefs. In return I've offered to do the same for them, which I consider a fair trade. I've made several friends during the course of my conversations on the topic and very few enemies. Occasionally I'll run into someone who's pretty darned sure they can inflict their belief system on me for my own good whether I like it or not, but generally those relationships don't last.

While I'd like to say I've only encountered authoritarianism in the realm of "traditional" religious discourse, of late I've had to admit that isn't the case. Several of the more animated public debates I've been involved in have concerned environmental policies ranging from the use of pesticides, nuclear power, global cooling, species protection and most recently global warming. While many of those conversations have been grounded in objective thought, increasingly they've taken on a familiar religious aspect that disturbs me. I'd like to explore that in this short monologue.

Background

Science has always been the realm of objective evidence, rational hypothesis and supportable theory. Observation leads to hypothesis, hypothesis leads to testing, testing leads to theory, completeness and provability lead to law. Contrast this with traditional religious law, which typically begins with a declaration by an authority and proceeds to social enforcement, often skipping the hypothesis, theory and objective proof steps. Religious law is based on authority communicated on faith and obeyed under duress. There is no reasoning with a law based solely on authority; it's a law because the believer says it is and it can't be disproved or set aside in favor of a more accurate law through the use of reason, experiment or observation. In contrast, scientific laws may be revised based on new evidence, theories may be overturned by better explanations, and shotguns are discouraged as enforcement tools. In the scientific world a debate is never over and there are no ultimate winners of a scientific argument. Equally important is the fact that the number of scientists holding an opinion does not in any way make the opinion more or less true; thousands of scientists once believed Earth was the center of the universe and they were proven wrong by one man with a telescope. Science isn't about democracy and consensus, though both have a known effect on funding and the direction of inquiry taken by investigators.

Lately I've heard several people declare the debate on Global Warming finished. I've repeatedly been offered "peer review" and "majority consensus" in defense of argument for implementing civil legislation. I've been told again and again that "this debate is over". I'm left wondering if I'm talking with scientists or evangelists and I've concluded on several occasions I'm involved in a discussion with the latter.

I come to the sciences from a background in engineering, which loosely translates into my being someone who looks at science from an applications perspective. I am an empiricist, a person who uses the work of theorists to guide design of experiments that either prove or disprove theory based on direct observation. My training and experience is in the area of measurement theory, statistical methods and design of experiments. I am an internationally published author in those fields and my background qualifies me to critique the work of other scientists engaged in the application of those skills, including climatologists and paleo-climatologists. My work has been subject to peer review and I have served on the editorial board of the Oregon Workshop on Software Metrics, the Journal of Software Quality and IEEE Computer as a peer reviewer and technical editor.

I have reviewed the literature of Global Warming and Climate Change published over the past 25 years and I have what I believe to be justifiable questions. As of yet I have not found answers to those questions and I am seeking education on the topic. I offer these questions in the hope I will find legitimate answers to them and I'll emphasize the word "legitimate". I am not interested in contributions that quote consensus or authority; I would like qualified technical answers with references. I am also not interested in having anyone tell me the debate on global warming is over in ALL CAPS.

Questions

My central question concerns the accuracy and precision of the measurements used to develop climate models. From my reading there are three critical measurements necessary to support the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming and they are Temperature, Atmospheric CO2 Fraction and Date of Observation.

Date of observation is important since it determines the resolution in time and also the precision with which two disjoint measures may be combined. If we use tree ring counts to give us the date of a measurement along with the temperature on that date, those data must then be accurately joined with measures of atmospheric CO2 taken from a different proxy, typically a measure of boron isotope decay found in the fossil shells of foraminifera gathered from sediment core samples.

Question 1:

What is the standard method used to date these measures and its precision?

Tree ring counts are frequently used as proxy date estimates yet I can find no reference that quantifies the standard error of these estimates. To the best of my knowledge carbon 14 dating is accurate +/- 700 years over the 26,000 year period it has been calibrated, with higher precisions of +/- 50 years available for measures taken in the recent past (before 1950 and approximately after 0 AD). TIMS dating, used to determine the age of samples older than 26,000 years apparently has a precision on the order of +/- 10,000 to 100,000 years depending again on the age of the sample.

Concern 1:

With a precision of between +/- 50 to +/- 100,000 years, use of C14 and TIMS dating in the construction of models aimed at determining the effect of atmospheric CO2 on observed direct measures of temperature during the past 120 years is statistically impossible; the resolution of the dating technique is not sufficient, making the paleo-record useless in that application.

Question 2:

What is the standard error in tree ring temperature proxies expressed in degrees centigrade?

The majority of data used in climate research depends on the measured width of tree rings for various species as a proxy measure to estimate annual temperature. Where can I find a reference to the standard error by species? What is the standard error of estimate when data from multiple species are combined?

Concern 2:

While tree ring temperature proxies have been calibrated over the 120 year period that direct instrument measures are available I have seen no discussion of their legitimate use beyond that calibration region.

Use of empirical regression models to determine the relationship between variables is statistically invalid when extrapolating beyond the model's region as defined by observation. From literature, these proxies are being used to establish global temperatures at times well outside the model.

Concern 3:

Research indicates that tree growth and annual tree ring widths are effected by both temperature and atmospheric CO2 fraction, confounding the measure of a dependent variable with an independent one. This violates a principal rule of experiment design.

In experiment design it is vital to either eliminate confounding or to block it. How has this been done?

Question 3:

What is the standard error of CO2 proxy measurement expressed in parts per million?

Literature cites the use of boron isotope decay as measured from the fossil shells of foraminifera recovered from sediment cores as the favored proxy for atmospheric CO2 fraction. Atmospheric CO2 fraction is therefore implied by a relation between it and dissolved oceanic CO2, which is further abstracted by boron isotope concentrations in the shells of fossil plankton. Error is introduced by each level of abstraction. What is the combined error?

Concern 4:

During the time we have possessed the technology to measure the fraction of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere directly using instruments we have observed an increase of approximately 100 parts per million in that gas. If the proxy based estimates of historical CO2 are not accurate +/- half of that value (50 ppm), they are useless in the evaluation of the observed increase during the past century.

Discussion

These questions and concerns are offered for education and debate. They are not presented as an indictment of the theory and it's my hope they will result in a more complete understanding of the science behind the politics.

It's important to remember that the theory of global warming might be valid after these questions are answered yet still be invalid as a method of predicting climate behavior over the course of the next century. Should it prove that the dating techniques used have insufficient resolution to predict events over a 100 year interval, we must discount any predictions made by those models in that timeframe. Similarly, should it be proved that the temperature and CO2 fraction proxies used by climatologists are not accurate to 1.5 degrees centigrade or 100 parts per million, we should discard them in any discussion of the significance of an observed 1.5 degree increase in global temperature that may result from a 100 ppm increase in atmospheric CO2 over the past century.

As I mentioned, I am not a climatologist but I am a citizen and I have enough of an education to ask these questions and understand their answers. Like many others, I am concerned about the risks of ignoring the theory and also the risk of wrong action based on a flawed theory or a theory based on flawed measurement. It wasn't long ago that we were warned the world was on the verge of entering a new ice age and now the science of climatology has done an abrupt about face in a short 30 years. During that time we were also told not to eat chicken eggs, a position that was later reversed with little fanfare. If science was wrong before it can be wrong again.

Rachel Carson wrote a book and science declared a war on DDT, the cheapest and most effective tool the world had in the battle against malaria. After nearly three decades and the death of millions, Rachel was proven wrong. Consider this well when you evaluate the predictions presented to you on the subject of global warming because incorrect legislation might well kill millions if not billions of people. These are legitimate questions and they deserve a better answer than "the debate is over".

Theocracy is the marriage of religious authority and the state. Technocracy is the government or control of society by an elite of technical experts. Neither one is good for liberty or the advancement of knowledge. I'll propose that authoritarianism in all of its forms results directly from a real, or at least perceived, lack of knowledge.

Education is the root of the tree of Liberty. Lets get started.

Should we insure our health the same way we insure cars?

I'd say yes. I carry my car insurance through State Farm and my health insurance through Blue Cross. They're completely different companies and neither one plays in the other's sandbox. But does that really make them different? After some thought I'd venture 'no' as an answer to that question. 

Most of us know that when it comes to insurance coverage for car accidents, the fewer you have the cheaper it is, and the older your car the less you pay. Health insurance puts a slightly different spin on the subject-- while it's true that your rates go up for priors, they also go up the older you are. Some might make a case for the priors based on an unhealthy lifestyle and to some extent I'd agree; if you spend a lot of time hanging your butt over the void attached to an 11mm kernmantle rope wearing nothing but shorts, sneakers a t-shirt and a helmet (maybe some really good sunblock), you're intentionally risking a trip to the emergency room and for that you should pay extra. If you're so bad at it that you've messed yourself up at least once in the past doing it, you should pay a lot extra.

But I've got to admit that getting old is not a personal choice. I could argue that it is a lifestyle, but not one that most would choose to pursue. Getting old just happens.  Old people don't get sick because they want to. They don't die because they want to. Everyone gets old.

The point here is that the punitive model employed by insurance companies to vehicle operations, plant safety and malpractice doesn't apply to basic healthcare because there's no way to modify your behavior in any way that makes you less likely to get old. You're getting old. Period. Over time large amounts of empirical evidence, along with some pretty well documented clinical trials, suggest very very strongly that you will end up having something necessary to keep your tail wagging break on you, and that the likelihood of that event increases directly with age. At some point, everybody's heart stops beating because it just got tired and wore out. 

Are there things you can do to improve your chances? Sure. You can stop smoking, drinking and eating. Don't expose yourself to sunlight. After that you can stop having sex with strangers. Don't jump out of working airplanes. Avoid complete submersion in water for extended periods. I'd talk about driving fast and passing on blind corners but that's already covered under auto insurance. I don't think these problems are unmanageable for the elderly; I personally intend to stop having sex with strangers right after my 60th birthday.

You can't stop getting old, and it's for this reason alone that I've decided to support government management of basic health care. I could be very wrong about this since it wouldn't surprise me to see a government managed program use lifestyle related criteria as a justification for denying service. We are after all, a society of health nazis. But I'm already convinced that the private sector will not voluntarily agree that it is fundamentally immoral to charge unsupportable fees for care of the elderly as if it was somehow their fault that they'd gotten old-- get a clue folks, they're old because THEY'VE BEEN PAYING HEALTH CARE PREMIUMS, MEDICARE, MEDICAID AND SOCIAL SECURITY FOR THE PAST 60 YEARS!

Unless private industry addresses this issue directly, I find myself having no choice but to advocate public sector competition. 

And that leaves a disgusting taste in my mouth.

Man With Brain Cancer Votes to Increase Federal Authority.

In response to today's vote in the US Senate to allow the US Food And Drug administration control over tobacco products, Sen. Edward Kennedy stated "It is a lifesaving act for the millions of children who will be spared a lifetime of addiction and premature death".

Sen. Kennedy is currently being treated for Brain Cancer. It defies all reason that a man suffering from a documented brain disorder might have a relevant opinion on any subject at all, least of all one that affects the lives of hundreds of millions of people. 

Who comes up with this crap anyway?