Here's a good article today from Thomas Sowell.

It got me thinking about something I've been wondering for a while: could our species ever have a meaningful trade relationship with wolves?

Here's how I got there. The reason that Capitalism works for the human species is that we consume even when we don't need to. Something like that is alluded to in the Glenn & Helen Show's Fat Kids and Beer episode. We are becoming a more obese nation because we simply are capable of consuming more. In fact, it is only the rich that are capable of eating specially prepared food that is so unhealthy that they are able to stay thin. If we weren't motivated to consume whatever we could, then lower prices would not increase demand; demand would only increase until a certain point and then we would say, "Enough!" on our own.

Wolves are like that. Wolves in captivity will never get fat because they will only eat until they are full and voluntarily stop. Dogs, as any dog owner knows, won't. Dogs are happy to eat and get fat until they fall over dead from a heart attack. Whether dogs learned this from us or we kindred spirits found each other because of this or living in a human's envrionment put the same pressures on dogs causing us both to evolve in the same way is irrelevant. At least today. What I wonder is this: can a pattern of consumption like a wolf's lead to a higher species? It's tempting to think, No, if it could we'd be like that, but that's not very satisfying. It could simply be chance that, on our planet, the selective pressures and gene lines were such that we evolved exactly the way we did. But can a wolf's style of "selfless" consumption lead to the degree of sharing found in a human society? Consider: if there's a food shortage, a human will have to pay twice as much for a meal, and so each human will consume half as much. This may be below subsistance, but we're all in it together because we all have to pay; if one goes we all go. We are all motivated to produce more food because no one wants to starve. But is the amount a wolf will eat and no more mere subsistance or is there some grace amount? I suspect it's a bit more. What would happen in a food shortage? Does the pack leader eat his full, then the next one, then the next one until the lowest standing member starves? I actually don't know.

So, here's where the aliens come in (from the title). Suppose such a (socialist) consumption pattern could lead to higher life forms. What would it look like with intelligence behind it? More importantly, could humans interact with it significantly? I suspect not. Ideally, yes, but if they had something we wanted or needed and they simply decided they would produce just so much and no more, simply because they didn't want any more of what we had to offer, certainly someone would get upset? Wouldn't there be an assumption that they were "hoarding" or "stockpiling" just to spite us? I suspect it would be couched in terms of "an act of war" and there could very well be war, with Bill O'Reilly and Lou Dobbs and the other Populists leading the charge. After all, how many people does it take to start a war? Only one, if he's charasmatic enough.

Well, I'm going to give my two cents on Global Warming. First of all, I haven't read the recent reports from the UN and the US "government scientists" (quoted because it's a farce that the government can be objective enough to promote "science"). My opinion is more like this. I've commented a few times on Maynard's posts, but I'm not sure I'd hold him as a big scientific authority, except that the Economist's Free Exchange blog has about the same opinion. The evidence may not be complete, but given the size of the problem, it may be enough. There's an old saying, "if you wait until you have all of the information, it's too late."

Business decision making comes down to this question: what is the cost if you're wrong, and what is the pay-off if you're right, weight those with their probability, and follow the money. The probability of Global Warming may not be 100%, or even 60%, but the cost is enormous if we do nothing and we're wrong, and the cost is enormous if we do something and we're wrong, and the pay-off of being right either way is commonly believed to be practically nothing, certainly nothing better than the current status quo, and usually it's a pretty healthy cost anyway to either "fix" the problem or to prevent other people from "fixing" the problem. It's all about a little cost to avoid the huge cost (estimated by a recent British government study at 5% global GDP; that's a lot).

The best discussion I've heard lately is from a podcast my brother recently told me about, TEDTalks. The economist Bjorn Lomborg discusses the costs and possible benefits from Global Warming and concludes that it's probably true, there's not much we can do about it, and so it needs to be made a lower priority than other uses of our charitible monies like potable water and AIDS prevention in the Third World. This is probably a pretty good point, actually, not only because it's taking an economical view of the problem (my own biases like this approach), but the more we can bolster population anywhere, the more likely it is that the super-mega-genius that could come up with a solution to this problem will be born, won't die at 2 months from dyssentary, and do so. It's an investment in the long-term good that could pay off fixing the "bigger" problems. This strikes me as a much more, well, rational approach than this from Salon, which, contrary to basic capitalism, attempts to make judgements about the "proper" judgement beforehand and then condemns the market for not choosing thier choice. It is true that there is an economic phenomenon called "externalities" meaning costs to society that are not paid by any individual, and this seems to be one of them, but at the same time it's also possible that the market is deciding that the alternatives to pollution are unacceptable, like starvation and disease. The difficulty with this too-simple analysis is that capitalism often results in lower pollution than government controlled economies; see the radical drop in the Eastern Bloc during the '90s as they upgraded their infrastructure.

That being said, I'm not convinced that the solutions need to be so expensive nor so anti-thetical to economic conservatives. I think I like Guiliani here. Has anyone studied the emissions impact of banning rent-control and open-space laws in San Francisco, NYC and other big cities? Rent-control drives up the price of housing in cities and forces people out into suburbs, who then have to commute in, clogging the highways. If more people lived in the cities, we could have more walk-friendly cities, like NYC already is, and we'd have more open land instead of suburban-sprawl, increasing our land-cover ratio (which is probably bunk, but judging by the Kyoto Protocol fuss, it may be a selling point to the left that needs to be convinced).

How about a recent post linked to by Instanpundit (I don't remember the site) that talked about reducing the protectionist laws around shipping; lifting these will likely shift the shipping industry along the coasts from trucks up I95 and I5 to freighters, which have lower emissions per ton. Sell it to the left as a Global Warming action and not just for the economy and we may be able to move foward.

I'm also not convinced of the arguments that ethanol will pollute as much as gasoline, just during production instead of consumption; I don't know much about the production of ethanol, but I'll bet a lot of that can be done with electricity from the grid and it's being computed with the assumption of coal-burning power plants. Shift those to nuclear and we're getting double-benefits. And, to top that off, if we lift the protectionist policies against importing corn and ethanol from places like Kenya, we will alleviate the tortilla shortage in Mexico (honestly, I know that sounds like a bad SNL joke, but people are going hungry in Mexico because so much American corn is going to ethanol production instead of exports. There are investigations into Big Tortilla regarding price-fixing, just like we had against the oil companies a few years ago).

I've also had thoughts about the ability to privatize the atmosphere. Seriously, we make breathing public domain and maybe car emissions, but factory and power plant emissions bring down fees from the owner of the airspace, they pay each other according to the trade winds, and then they pay out for athsma treatments and destruction due to acid rain and stuff according to the rises from a baseline in the form of tort laws or something (I wouldn't want to put all of this into the hands of government regulators; as unattractive as our tort laws currently are, they'd have to play into this idea somehow). They'd then have some incentive to invent air purifiers and stuff to scrub the emissions out. I wonder if there'd be a profit in that; it would definitely have the benefit of costing the emitters in direct proportion to the damage they cause. It's the same sort of system that gives me hope we could turn atmosphere cleaning over to private utilities on space stations and not have to ban cigarettes or something; smokers would be charged based on the cost of purifying the air and not according to nosy busy-bodies' assumption of the role of Protecting Angel. It removes the "externality" inefficiency from the system; Salon's "market failure" is solved. I'm sure this is just the solution they're looking for.

Anyway, these aren't the sorts of conversations I hear about regarding Global Warming, mostly because the only people interested in looking into this problem are the ones that passed all the things getting in the way. But, maybe some of these are good ideas, if people who know how to research and judge them ever hear about them.

Also, see a recent article by Larry Elder here at Town Hall; it's funny in a quick laugh sort of way, but I want to read those books. And, to be fair, I do want to see Al Gore's movie, too.

I was watching C-SPAN today and Tony Snow was having a little "sit-down" with the Washington press corps. It got me thinking: first, "I'm a big dork; I'm watching C-SPAN" and second, they made a big point about how they're not really so adversarial in real life.

I guess it even makes sense to me. I understand that my best path to success with a customer is to be their ally, but that didn't stop me tonight taking a younger colleague out to dinner tonight to find out the political situation, who controls the money, who's having problems, who doesn't like us, and that sort of thing at my new client. That's my job. And the Washington press corps doesn't even have the incentive to serve the White House.