Category: Main

I mentioned microgeneration (of power) in my previous piece, just as a random Tory policy that I didn’t give a hoot about either way. But the revival of the concept calls to mind one of the first pieces I wrote here, back in 2005, in one of my rare forays into things I actually know about.

If a 500MW power station could only be built by putting fifty thousand small 10kW generators in racks, with expensive complicated machinery to try to keep as many as possible fueled and running at once, then I don’t think the concept of an electricity grid would ever have caught on. But that’s what a “computing” power station looks like.

There are some slight economies of scale to computer hardware, mainly in management overhead, but compared to the cost of putting your own computer at the other end of a wide area network, they’re negligible.

Now we are being told that central power stations are not, or at least will not be, a good idea even for power.

When I read about this in the Metro (yes, yes, I know), the idea was attributed to “a group of environmental and economics experts”, which in fact turn out to be a bunch of lunatic lefties. So it’s safe to assume that their facts are all rubbish. But the logic is sound, and just the same as my point about computers. For centralization to be efficient, the economies of scale have to outweigh the cost of having stuff a long way from where you need it.

The economies of scale are threefold: mechanical (a big turbine is more efficient than a small one), organizational (it’s easier to keep two big machines fed & maintained than 200 small ones), and pooling (If everyone has their own little resource, they each need enough capacity to meet their own peak demand, which is much more capacity than overall peak demand).

For computing, as I argued, the first is non-existent or negative, the second marginal, and the third not enough to outweigh transmission costs.

Power generation that is based on making things very hot (i.e. all current major methods except hydro, but not photovoltaic solar) have large mechanical economies of scale because capacity varies with volume, and heat loss with surface area. But on the other hand, transmission costs are very high – both in building and maintaining the Grid and in transmission losses.

(I also seem to remember reading that the seasteading people looked at OTEC and found that it couldn’t be made effective on a small scale, though it might on a larger scale. It still seems to be turbines and things, so perhaps it’s the same fundamental scale effect.)

The management scale issue is questionable.

The pooling is a big deal for power where the cost of production is large compared to the cost of having capacity – that’s fuel-burning but not most renewables (or nuclear). They talk about offsetting the pooling problem with small-scale grids, or hydrogen storage, but that brings in a whole lot more management overhead. If microgeneration becomes sensible it will be because generation methods which are all capital costs and no fuel costs take over.

And no, my reader who knows who he is, a national torque grid of spinning axles will never be sensible.

One of the bigger stories I didn’t get round to writing about in the last two months was David Davis’s little stunt.

I don’t call it a stunt to disparage it or him – stunts are what it takes to get attention these days. If the government introduced a policy of sacrificing newborn babies to Beelzebub, the media would spend hundreds of hours of screen time on how it affects any possible leadership challenge by David Milliband, whether Boris Johnson and David Cameron are disagreeing about the best response, and what the effect will be on the voting patterns of Beelzebub-worshipers. Actual substantive discussion of the merits of baby-sacrificing would be left to a few vox pops and rentaquotes from the most ludicrous partisans on both sides. (It might be difficult to find a ludicrous anti-baby-sacrificing position, but they would manage it).

“Opposition spokesman objects to new police powers” is about as far away from being news as it is possible to get. To actually get anyone to notice, there must be a conflict, an election, a resignation. So, Davis gave us all three.

What has he achieved? That will become more obvious now that the fuss has died down. First, he has probably doubled the number of people who remember his name – no small thing for an opposition MP. I would assume the only Conservative MPs with any name recognition are Cameron, former leaders Howard, Hague and Duncan-Smith, and a few former ministers such as Redwood. The only other thing that would have got Davis as much publicity would have been a sex scandal.

That’s by the way. The main effect of the escapade has been to nail his colours to the mast. The reason his opposition to 42-day detention was not newsworthy or interesting was that oppositions always object to the government curtailing freedom, and then always go on to do more of it when they get into power. Nobody cares any more – it is just accepted that politicians are forced to go through the motions.

But nobody forced Davis to go through this. By taking this extraordinary step, Davis has actually succeeded in making a credible commitment. Will a Conservative government continue to generously fund public services as they promise? Buggered if I know – I hope not. Will they follow through their policies on micro-generation? Anyone’s guess. Will they push on with expanding the police state and replacing justice with administration? Not if David Davis is in the cabinet, they won’t.

Wow.

That’s really something. And that’s why the irrelevance of resigning as an MP and then being reelected doesn’t matter. The frankly obscure details of the 42-day issue don’t matter. All that matters is that one politician said “No further and I really mean it”, and we can believe him, not because he is unusually honest, but because he has found a way to make a commitment that, however much he might want to go back on in future, he won’t be able to.

Mencius Moldbug has been on good form while I’ve been quiet, but one particularly original and interesting idea he came up with was, as a transition to a new form of government, handing power to a member of a particular profession – he suggested pilots.

Let’s look at the advantages of this … I am not myself a pilot – I am neither wealthy enough, nor responsible enough. But everyone I’ve ever met who was a pilot, whether private, military or commercial, has struck me as not only responsible, but also independent-minded, often even adventurous. This is a particularly rare combination. To be precise, it is an aristocratic combination, and the word aristocracy is after all just Greek for good government. Pilots are a fraternity of intelligent, practical, and careful people who are already trusted on a regular basis with the lives of others. What’s not to like?

The reason I was so struck by this idea is not because it’s a particularly good one. It’s because it rests on one of those claims that is only ever denied, never asserted – the claim that one of the most important things you can say about any person is what they do for a living.

In fact, probably anything we deny as assiduously as we deny that should be assumed to be true.

Of course there is more to every professional than their profession, but few other single things say as much about someone. We all know what we think of Lawyers, Estate Agents, Accountants, Teachers… they are each more homogenous groupings than Lutonians, grandparents or Audi drivers.

Thoughtful people have probably already wondered what it means that Parliament consists overwhelmingly of lawyers, journalists and adminstrators – however they probably nevertheless underestimate the importance of that, by underestimating the significance of profession to a person’s habits and outlook.

I’m back! Actually I’ve been here all along, I just haven’t posted for a couple of months. It would be nice to come back with some huge thesis, but I don’t have one, just a few things that have been nagging at me that I never seem to have the time, the inclination, and the opportunity to put down all at once.

So let’s warm up gently…

The front page today was about the abuse of children by aid workers. I was going to follow up my 2004 piece, pointing out it was still going on, but the real story is much more interesting – and more positive.

The newspaper stories are based on a report by Save the Children UK, who sent researchers into Sudan, Côte d’Ivoire and Haiti to investigate the problem of sexual abuse of children by aid workers and peacekeepers. That is the real story here – the UN (at the top level) and some aid organizations like Save the Children are taking the realistic approach of assuming it’s going on and working out how to get rid of it, rather than waiting for proof that they can’t deny.

It’s an excellent piece of work – I’m surprised and very impressed. The report concentrates on the underreporting of abuse by the victims. It recommends creating a global watchdog within the UN, which makes sense if they believe that not every charity and UN agency shares their determination to deal with the issue openly. They also recommend setting up local contact points to which victims can report abuse.

If I were to quibble, I’d say they needed to pay more attention to how these complaints will be investigated. The victims will see no benefit in reporting if there is no possibility of their allegations being proved. They cannot be compensated on the basis of unproved allegations, because that will encourage floods of false allegations, and obviously nobody can be punished on the basis of unproved allegations. So there needs to be some mechanism for investigating complaints. From the survey, it appears it is not uncommon for individuals to persistently abuse their positions, in which case it should be possible to catch them in the act after a complaint, provided the complaint goes through a secure alternative channel and the offender is not tipped off.

But that’s a minor point; what’s most significant is the seriousness and realism being brought to the question, which if it is followed through should be enough, not to eliminate abuse – the huge power asymmetry is bound to create it – but to limit it.

Doc Searls talks about the familiar obsession of technology companies (in this case social-networking providers) for business models with lock-in, and strategies that “kill other companies”

Why do they do this? It’s not because it’s the only way to make money. Plenty of companies make money by supplying open, competitive markets in which consumers can easily choose one supplier over another.

But those companies don’t make vast amounts of money – at least, not unless they are in vast markets. To make huge amounts of money without being the size of Mittal Steel or something, you have to have some degree of immunity from competition. This can come from network effects, patents, state regulation, or some combination.

I can’t back this up right now, but I think that most of the private-sector business in the world – most of the salaries, most of the profits – come from socially useful work. But most of the biggest profits come from businesses which have found some way of locking out competition.

The kind of logic here is that behind every great fortune there is a great crime – if you define crime loosely enough to include practices that limit the choices of consumers. (And if you allow one or two exceptions, which are worth looking at in another post). It does not follow that behind every modest fortune there is a modest crime.

This has a huge effect on perception. When you look at the market from outside, the most visible practitioners are the most successful, who are largely those who have managed to extract some form of monopoly rent. And the size of those rents are so large that they do represent significant costs to society. But theyare the exception rather than the rule – the bulk of economic activity takes place in competitive markets by businesses without market power.

It was also one of the factors behind the original internet bubble. Investors were valuing business that used the internet, but were in fact normal businesses, by comparing them with the companies that made internet infrastructure, and therefore had lock-in because of network effects. Amazon is a large and profitable business, but it has little or no lock-in. Cisco, Sun, Intel collect monopoly rents resulting from the network effects of their installed bases. Therefore Amazon’s operating profit is 5% of revenue, while Microsoft’s is 35%

For the UK, statistics show 60% of business (by no. of employees or by turnover) is carried out by businesses with less than 500 employees – just some vague background to show that it’s plausible that I’m talking about the real world.