Gravity

I can't stop thinking about gravity.

General relativity says that gravity is the same thing as acceleration. If so, then acceleration bends spacetime and inertia seems to be the resistance of spacetime to being bent.

But gravity and inertia are equal. We know this because a pendulum's period depends only on its length and not even one whisker on its mass.

How is it that two different things, bending spacetime and resistance to bending spacetime, are precisely the same? They can't be. They must be the same thing. Gravity must also be resistance to bending spacetime. But what does that even mean?

Photons do not bend spacetime because they have no inertia/gravity. A photon approaching a mass doesn't bend towards the mass like a particle would, it follows bent spacetime around it. Why?

Please clarify in the comments below.

Why You Can't Just Bomb the Hell Out of ISIS

What is the difference between terrorists and the U.S. Armed Forces?

To most Americans, this sounds like a ridiculous question. Anyone who can't tell the difference between terrorists and military forces must be, to use the modern term, challenged. But the terrorists and the military both kill people, and both kill innocent civilians. The principal difference is that the American military tries not to, while terrorists specifically target civilians. If America engages in military operations without regard to civilian casualties, though, the line becomes blurred. Our enemies always try to portray us as the real terrorists, or at least, as no better than they are. Up to now, the U.S. has managed to maintain a broad global consensus among nations cooperating to fight terrorism by acting responsibly. If our commitment to protecting innocents waivers, we risk losing that consensus.

Our military maintains a detailed procedure for deciding when, where and how to use military force, protecting civilians as much as is practical while still achieving important and necessary military objectives. The procedure is complex, but it comes down to some basic principles. When innocents are at risk, which is almost always the case these days, the importance of the objective and likelihood of success must be weighed against the risk to noncombatants. We would not create a high risk of harm to an elementary school full of children to kill a small number of low-level terrorists.  The fact is, we would not recklessly risk the destruction of a school full of children no matter how important the target. The document is very dense, but you can read the procedure yourself if you want to plow through it at this link. Or, if you haven't got the patience for that, you can rent the superb 2015 British thriller Eye in the Sky, which portrays the procedure being applied in a hypothetical attack against terrorists in Kenya.

When our new President tweeted that he was going to "Bomb the hell out of ISIS", he was speaking out of ignorance. He had no idea what he meant by this and I'm sure he doesn't care what it means. Now, after removing the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Director of National Intelligence from the National Security Council, which advises the President on military operations, Trump has put his hot-headed know-nothing attack dog Steve Bannon on the NSC instead.

President Trump's impulses are clear. Those who are waiting for a kinder, gentler Trump to emerge will be disappointed. Those who care about nurturing and preserving the politically fragile global effort to combat terrorism, painstakingly crafted by all U.S. Presidents over the last forty years, must resist Trump fiercely and tenaciously, and do it now, before the American-led anti-terror consensus collapses in a hail of civilian body parts.

Trump is Never Wrong

Donald Trump is never wrong about anything.

"Not so", you say. "No one really believes they are always right about everything, not really." 

So let me tell you a story.

When I was a young lawyer in Cleveland, Ohio, desperately trying to start a solo law practice in the middle of a nasty recession, I forked over what seemed at the time like a small fortune for a ticket to attend a charity fundraiser in hopes of meeting some rich people I might get as clients. I had plenty of poor clients, but the problem with poor clients is, they don't have money to pay the rent let alone pay lawyers' fees.

I was seated next to a prosperous-looking young man in his thirties. I didn't think of it at the time, but I now realize that he was probably also a lawyer who had come looking to find rich clients. Maybe everyone there was, or at least everyone at our table. They probably seated all the upstarts together. Well, the money went to some presumably worthwhile good purpose, at least, or maybe not.

Though it was a very elegant affair in all outward aspects--expensive silverware and table linens, floral arrangements, even candelabra--the meal itself was quite plain, pot roast, if I remember correctly. I do remember that my first taste of it was a little startling, because it was heavily salted. The probably-a-lawyer-on-the-make-like-me, without tasting it, reached for the large crystal salt shaker. I discretely warned him, "it's already salted." 

He glared angrily at me. He didn't say a word, but made a great show of shaking a huge amount of salt over everything on his plate, an amount that would have made it all but inedible even if it hadn't already had too much salt. Then, to spite me further, he proceeded to eat it, professing great enjoyment.

I puzzled about this for a while, then realized that, rather than taking my remark as a well-intentioned caution, he took it as a criticism--a personal attack on his dining competence. 

It's one thing to tell someone that they have made a mistake in the past. I almost never do that, because it's useless information, unless you think it will help them avoid the same mistake in the future. (It won't.) But to warn someone who is about to make a mistake, and have them take extreme offense, and proceed with the mistake with exaggerated gusto, persisting out of spite even after it has become painfully obvious that they have in fact made the very mistake you warned of--what is that? It's immaturity. It's what teenagers do.

This is Donald Trump. An overgrown teenager. If he becomes President, it's not just his own dinner he will spoil every time he acts up in defense of his infallibility. He'll be Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States, and it won't be long before he sends them off on some wild goose chase to spite whoever has deigned to contradict him. 

And when that happens, we'll all get indigestion.

Trump is a Megalomaniac

Megalomania is described in Wikipedia as a psychopathalogical condition characterized by fantasies of power, relevance, omnipotence and inflated self esteem. It is normal in two year old children but is suppressed in adults through socialization--the traumatic and agonizing process of learning to accommodate the needs and desires of others. But Trump's father encouraged him to resist socialization, so the two year old mentality reigns supreme in the 70 year old billionaire. The modern term for this is narcissistic personality disorder.

This would be hardly worth noting except that Trump has a very real chance of becoming President, and the President is Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, with the Constitutional power to order a military attack against anyone at any time, including the use of nuclear weapons. Imagine a two year old with a pistol in hand and you have some idea what that would be like. 

Trump's popularity is a mystery to some, but it shouldn't be. It's appealing to imagine giving vent to our inner two year old, to lash out at those who challenge our self-importance and to allow ourselves any self-indulgence with no regard for those we consider "lesser" human beings. Somehow those who flock to Trumpism fail to see that in Trump's eyes, everyone is a lesser human being, fit only to be recruited to his campaign for a greater Trump. His insults are celebrated, his excesses are explained, his frauds are ignored and his lies forgiven because they are our own long-suppressed childIsh urges reborn in iconic form.

If he manages to become President, the morning after we will regret it, just as we regret that weekend in Vegas, the affair with that person we met in a bar, the money we invested with Uncle Harry and every other thing we've done that we knew perfectly well we shouldn't. Of all the happiness-destroying things you can imagine, Trump as President tops them all.

We must put aside childish things. Everything depends on it. Don't allow Donald Trump to be elected to the most powerful office on earth.

Why Being a Billionaire Should Be Illegal

Should being Donald Trump be illegal? A lot of people would say so.

This is a facetious question, of course. Whether anyone should ever be allowed to be a billionaire is a more serious question, though. The question was seriously debated in the past, but the world since 1989 has come to the conclusion that everyone should be allowed to accumulate as much wealth as they possibly can. Is it time to reconsider this question? What are the benefits of allowing uncontrolled wealth? What are the harms?

The arguments for allowing unrestricted wealth can be divided into "romantic ideals", practical considerations and economic theory:

• Much of the western world believes that people should be "free", which means that they should be allowed to do as they please so long as it doesn't cause serious harm to others. From that point of view, the argument comes down to the question of whether allowing individuals to accumulate a billion dollars or more causes serious harm. 
• Practical considerations are probably the strongest arguments in favor of allowing great wealth, and are based on the fact that some schemes for controlling the accumulation of wealth, communist systems for example, are difficult or impossible to carry out without enslaving everyone. 
• The economic arguments come down to the question of whether the benefits outweigh the harms.

I want to focus on the economic arguments, because economics is the sphere that is most often invoked by those in favor of allowing unrestricted wealth accumulation. The economic justification for allowing extreme wealth to exist is that investment by the super rich leads to growth. I think that argument is highly questionable, though, because it implies that the absurdly rich make more efficient investment decisions than the rest of us, but exactly the opposite seems to me to be the case.

I'm not an economist, though I did study economics in business school. Mostly this article contains conjecture based on my experience and common sense. I've tried to research the issue but I haven't found much on the topic. That in itself seems surprising. Why is there so much published on the economic benefits of allowing people to become filthy rich, and nothing on any economic downside? I assume it's because publication of economic theories is heavily influenced by wealthy people.

A certain amount of angst has been spilled in the news recently about "secular stagnation", meaning low economic growth that is long term rather than cyclical. I believe that concentration of wealth is an important contributor, if not the main reason for, persistent low growth. What's more, I believe that the effect on investment is as much of a problem, if not more so, than the effect on demand.

In my experience, wealthy people are much more risk averse than less wealthy people. Maybe that has something to do with why they're wealthy. I knew a wealthy person once who spent several days mourning the loss of $25 he sent to a company to buy a pair of leather gloves, only to find out the company went bankrupt shortly after. The extent of this person's grief astonished me. Ordinary people lose money on lots of calamities (my family and I certainly have), and often quite a bit more than $25. It stings, of course, but it's part of life. I've never engaged in the level of grief over lost money that this person experienced, nothing close to it, and the person could very easily live without the $25. It made absolutely no difference to his quality of life or that of anyone he cared about. He could have lost $25 every day of his life, from the time I knew him anyway, and it would have made little difference to him in any practical sense.

People are different, of course, but I believe that a good majority of very, very wealthy people have an unhealthy addiction to wealth for its own sake, quite apart from any good it can do them or anyone they care about. How else can you explain the accumulation of so much wealth? Once you have a billion dollars, what could rationally make you take any time, effort or stress to acquire another billion dollars?

There might be rational answers to that question, of course. One thing that motivates people to acquire wealth is so that they can do whatever they want, whenever they want, however, they want, to whomever they want, with no adverse consequences to themselves. In today's world, the amount of wealth you need to buy your way into or out of absolutely any self-indulgence imaginable is quite high. Maybe a trillion dollars. A person who has a billion dollars may find that it's not enough to allow them to indulge in child rape, for example, if that's their proclivity. It's certainly enough though that you can ignore or insult most anyone you like. Donald Trump certainly can and does.

These things are interesting, but not what I want to talk about. I suspect that what I call the "inversion of risk tolerance", by which I mean the increasing tendency to avoid financial risk as wealth increases, is a major reason that we're seeing secular stagnation at the same time as we're seeing increasing concentration of wealth.

Wealthier people should be able to tolerate higher investment risk with at least some of their wealth, compared to people who are less well off. What I see, though, is the reverse of this. People who are less well off make riskier investments than people who are more secure.

One possible reason for this is that wealthier people don't need to take the higher risks, whereas less well off people feel more compelled to do so. If you have very little, getting more makes a big difference to your well-being, so it's worth more risk. If you have a lot, you don't need more, so you do not feel so compelled to take the risk. It does seem that the first thing that a billionaire thinks of when he gets his first billion dollars is how to get the next billion, but he wants to get that second billion with no risk.

How is that possible? We learn in business school that you get higher returns for taking more risk. That doesn't apply to billionaires, though. They will only invest in "slam dunks" but they are able to get large returns anyway. Probably this is due to their ability to engage in one or another kind of "corruption", which I define to include any device that allows you to get returns that are larger than what free-market economics would predict--returns based on monopoly, secret information, extortion, etc. Corruption, broadly defined, is not necessarily illegal. It's anything that involves "overreaching", a legal term that means "getting the better of someone by cunning".

If economics is going to be used to argue for the supposed benefits of allowing people to become absurdly rich, then economics should also be used to decide whether there are harms. 

There are other reasons for allowing people to become rich that do not involve economics. There is, for example, the romantic idea of "freedom", that individuals should be able to do as they please, basically whatever they can get away with, which is the "libertarian" ideal. There are also non-economic reasons to prohibit great wealth--that it allows the wealthy to engage in unethical or immoral conduct towards others while avoiding consequences. These days, the arguments in favor are mostly based on economics, but the arguments against are mostly non-economic. I believe that those opposed to extreme wealth concentration should not concede the economic arguments.

So what are the "economic" arguments against allowing extreme concentration of wealth? First and foremost, great wealth distorts the fundamental assumptions of market economics. These assumptions are:

• A large number of buyers and sellers - A large number of consumers with the willingness and ability to buy the product at a certain price, and a large number of producers with the willingness and ability to supply the product at a certain price.
• Perfect information - All consumers and producers know all prices of products and utilities each person would get from owning each product.
• Homogeneous products - The products are perfect substitutes for each other, (i.e., the qualities and characteristics of a market good or service do not vary between different suppliers).
• Well defined Property rights - These determine what may be sold, as well as what rights are conferred on the buyer.
• No barriers to entry or exit
• Every participant is a price taker - No participant with market power to set prices
• Perfect factor mobility - In the long run factors of production are perfectly mobile, allowing free long term adjustments to changing market conditions.
• Profit maximization of sellers - Firms sell where the most profit is generated, where marginal costs meet marginal revenue.
• Rational buyers: Buyers make all trades that increase their economic utility and make no trades that do not increase their utility.
• No externalities - Costs or benefits of an activity do not affect third parties. This criteria also excludes any government intervention.
• Zero transaction costs - Buyers and sellers do not incur costs in making an exchange of goods in a perfectly competitive market.
• Non-increasing returns to scale and no network effects - The lack of economies of scale or network effects ensures that there will always be a sufficient number of firms in the industry.

Obviously, all of these assumptions are violated to some extent in any real-world economy. Extreme accumulations of wealth, however, result in more extreme violations of these assumptions and a corresponding loss of the efficiencies of free markets. With concentration of wealth, you end up with:

• Fewer buyers and sellers.

• More power in the hands of the super rich to control information, warp the enforcement of property rights in their favor, create artificial barriers to entry into particular businesses and influence government regulation in their favor.

One particularly insidious effect of concentrating wealth in the hands of the very few, however, is the previously noted tendency of wealthier individuals to invest more conservatively.

An efficient market economy, and the very real benefits it brings to humanity, depend greatly on the efficiency of investment. The right amount of wealth needs to be invested in the right things at the right time. Because of the tendency for investors to invest more conservatively as they become wealthier, the increasing concentration of wealth we've experienced over the last 30 years ends up "starving" the economy of high risk capital, resulting in persistent stagnation.

I can't prove this, but it could be researched. A profile can probably be developed somehow that compares investment risk, investment returns, and individual wealth. I think what you'll find is that wealthier individuals persistently get much higher net returns on investments, averaged over time and over the class of individuals. That shouldn't be, of course. If you take more risk, you get higher returns, but you also suffer higher losses. It should average out over time and over a large number of investment decisions. But it doesn't, not for the wealthy. What it means is that the wealthier you are, the more you are able to "game" the system to get high returns with low risk. The "high yield" investments are not really high risk. But the economy needs true high risk investment to achieve maximum efficiency. Starving the economy of this "real" high risk investment results in stagnation.

How to Stop Russian State Sports Cheating

The Russian FSB, Russia's version of the CIA, helped fool Olympic drug testing protocols by defeating tamper-resistant packaging containing urine samples. It's not explained how they did this, but one way to defeat tamper-resistant packaging is to create a duplicate of the packaging. Tamper-resistant packaging is designed to be difficult to counterfeit, but a state intelligence agency, given essentially unlimited resources, can probably counterfeit anything.

Tamper-resistant or tamper-evident packaging is designed so that it can't easily be opened without it being obvious that it has been compromised, using plastics that can't be opened without tearing or cutting and tapes with holograms and the like that can't be removed without damage. When designing tamper-resistant packaging, it's best if every package is unique in some way that's difficult to counterfeit and this unique aspect is recorded in some way, such as by photographing. Such techniques are effective against most anyone, but not against a well-funded state agency.

One approach that may work even against a state agency is to incorporate printed currency, a U.S. five-dollar bill for example, that is difficult to duplicate exactly. A state agency could presumably create a perfect counterfeit of U.S. currency, but the bills have tiny red and blue fibers randomly distributed throughout the paper that are essentially impossible recreate in exactly the same configuration. They are easy to distinguish from printed imitations, even with the naked eye. A photograph of a five-dollar bill with sufficient resolution to show the red and blue fibers is effectively unique against attack by any worldly agency. If the bill is incorporated in the packaging in a way that it can't be removed without damaging the bill or the packaging, it seems that such a protocol would be effective.

You still need to photograph the bill together with the packaging and guarantee the integrity of the photograph. Digital photographs can be processed with SHA hashing but then the hash value needs to be protected in some way. Probably the best way to ensure the integrity of the hash values is via a block chain, which associates the existence of the photograph with a precise point in time, relatively speaking. The temporal integrity of a block chain is a whole separate topic, but you can establish absolutely that a certain point in the block chain came after a certain point in time by, for example, incorporating a photograph of a newspaper front page. So if the photograph to be verified is added to the block chain on the day it's taken, and then you incorporate a photograph of the next day's newspaper front page into the block chain, anything that hits the block chain after that is obviously counterfeit. Adding a group of photographs to the block chain all at once adds to the security because of the difficulty of counterfeiting multiple photographs.

It's a lot to go through, but it seems that the audacity of the "evil empire", what's left of it, has evolved to the point that it's necessary to go full out with securing Olympic drug tests.

How the Elon Musk Hyperloop Can Work

I've had my doubts about whether the Elon Musk Hyperloop approach could overcome inherent problems with stabilization. The problem with the approach, as it seemed to me, was that it committed to a tube pressure of 1 millibar, which seems to preclude aerodynamic stabilization.

The problem is that stabilization requires some kind of feedback loop. The capsule will tend to vibrate or oscillate, and there needs to be some mechanism that detects the vibration and counteracts it. My conjecture was that mechanical "damping" of vibrations could not react quickly enough at or near supersonic speeds.

I've realized, though, that the reaction speed required of the damping mechanism is reduced if the mass and rigidity of the capsule is increased. If, for example, the capsule is constructed with a 10 cm. thick steel shell, giving it a weight of some 20 tons, it seems that it would have sufficient mass and rigidity to reduce the damping reaction speed required. The damping force required would increase, but I'm guessing that's not as much of a problem as the reaction speed.

Constructing the capsule of heavy, hardened steel would also increase the protection of the occupants. Besides protecting against breach of the capsule, the increased mass also reduces the inertial forces inside the capsule in the event of unplanned deceleration or buffeting.

A heavy capsule requires more energy to accelerate, but the energy can be recaptured during deceleration.

People may be reluctant to travel inside what is essentially a bank vault, even though it would be much safer. Engineering psychology can be used to make people feel comfortable with the whole experience, though, which is already used to make people feel safe and comfortable in aircraft.