Jdremillard

I was happy to be interviewed for this Damon Poeter piece at Venture Beat on activism pressuring Google and other tech companies. Specifically, I talked about the nascent unionization attempt there, which is very small, but could become significant.

The Alphabet Workers Union comprises more than 800 full-time employees, temporary employees, vendors, and contractors working for Google, YouTube, and other Alphabet subsidiaries. It was formed in January as a minority union that lacks the power to force collective bargaining for compensation. AWU members are members of the 700,000-member strong Communications Workers of America’s CWA Local 1600 chapter.

While it is a new union with limited power, Muthukumar said the AWU had already secured some victories in the Alphabet workplace.

“We’ve provided legal services to employees who have faced retaliation [for speaking out] so they don’t have to take on a billion-dollar corporation on their own,” she said. “Some of our recent campaigns include getting Google to post around our datacenter offices what employee rights are, so employees are better informed and able to organize and exercise freedom of speech in discussing pay and other issues.”

…

Union activity in the tech sector shows promising signs, but without major reforms to labor law, organizers will continue to face difficult, uphill battles to form strong unions, said Erik Loomis, an associate professor of history at the University of Rhode Island and author of A History of America in Ten Strikes.

“It’s an objective fact that union membership in the U.S. has been declining for decades. But at the same time, we see high support in polling for unions and a whole bunch of grassroots organizing that’s taking place with things like journalist unions, graduate student unions, and even the move towards more labor-friendly policy by the Democratic Party,” he told VentureBeat.

“But the biggest problem is that, while there is reason for hope, there’s also this giant barrier that is our non-functioning labor law. As it stands, companies can engage in enormous levels of worker intimidation when workers try to organize. They can pretty easily cause unions to lose elections, and even when the unions win, companies can delay [union certification] so as to force another election, with different workers voting.”

…

It turns out that a lack of manufacturing jobs is not America's only problem. There's also a lack of columnists willing to defend Donald Trump:

As they discovered during the long campaign season, the nation’s newspapers and major digital news sites — the dreaded mainstream media — are facing a shortage of people able, or more likely willing, to write opinion columns supportive of the president-elect. Major newspapers, from The Washington Post to the New York Times, have struggled to find and publish pro-Trump columns for months. So have regional ones, such as the Des Moines Register and Arizona Republic, which have a long history of supporting Republican candidates.

Here's the problem: these folks are not looking for writers who will defend particular Trump policies from time to time. They want columnists who will regularly defend all Trump policies. And here's the catch: they want people who are non-insane.

That's hard. But perhaps it's a business opportunity for me. I could do this, I think, if I put my mind to it, but for obvious reasons of self-respect and the loss of all friends and family, the pay would have to be very high. So the question is, just how desperate is the media for a seemingly rational pro-Trump voice? Are they willing to pool their efforts to make me a highly-paid syndicated columnist who defends Trump no matter what he does?

Let's see how serious they are. Show me the money, people.

Points of light.

The election of Donald Trump and a GOP Congress will very likely be devastating for federal environmental policy. But that’s not the only environmental news from the election. Further down the ballot, a range of citizen initiatives focused on conservation, clean energy, and transit. How’d they do?

Turns out, pretty well. There were dozens and dozens, so I won’t run through them all, but here’s a roundup of some of the more significant ones, both wins and losses.

Climate and energy

• The big one: I-732, which would have implemented a revenue-neutral carbon tax in Washington state, was defeated decisively, 59-41. That’s a pretty brutal margin. I wrote a long feature story on the tortured history behind this initiative, but the TL;DR version is: In attempting to lure the right (by making the tax revenue-neutral), it lost the left. And then none of the support from the right showed up! So the initiative was on its own, underfunded and outgunned. Climate groups in the state say they’re going to have another go at a ballot initiative in 2018.

(Javier Zarracina)

• Florida’s Amendment 1, the grossly deceptive, utility-sponsored measure that used pro-solar language to conceal a pro-utility agenda, failed. The Yes side got 51 percent, but in Florida, 60 percent is required to pass a ballot initiative. (The more solar-friendly Amendment 4, exempting solar equipment from some taxes, did pass.)
• In Nevada, where battles over rooftop solar power are long-running and intense, voters overwhelmingly approved Question 3, which would open up the state’s retail electricity markets to competition. This means utilities no longer have a monopoly on retail sales — customers can buy power from third-party sellers, which can often provide them electricity that’s both cheaper and cleaner.
• Colorado voters approved a measure (Amendment 71) that would make it much more difficult to gather signatures for future ballot initiatives. The initiative was heavily funded by oil and gas companies, who fear citizen initiatives to ban fracking. Its success is considered a big blow to grassroots anti-fracking groups.
• Monterey, California, voters approved Measure Z, which would ban oil and gas fracking in the county. It became the seventh California county to do so.

Environment

• In Alabama, voters overwhelmingly (80-20) approved Statewide Amendment 2, a measure restricting the use of funds raised at state parks for the maintenance and improvement of state parks.
• By passing Amendment 1, Missouri voters overwhelmingly (80-20) elected to continue spending one-tenth of one percent of their sales tax revenue (about $90 million a year) on conservation and state parks.
• In Oregon, voters firmly approved Measure 100, a ban on the sale of products and parts from certain endangered species.
• Residents of the San Francisco Bay area voted to impose a property tax on themselves to fund wetland restoration, through Measure AA.

Transit

There were dozens of transit initiatives across the country, which you can browse in this giant list from the Center for Transportation Excellence (CTE). Here’s CTE’s interactive map:

Transportation for America highlights a few of the more significant ones.

They include what is, in my biased opinion as a Seattleite, the best news of an otherwise wretched cycle: King, Pierce, and Snohomish counties, which contain Seattle and its surrounding satellite cities, passed Proposition 1, otherwise known as Sound Transit 3. It is a massive, 25-year, $54 billion expansion of the Seattle area’s rail and bus capacity. By the time it is done in 2040, the system will be five times bigger than it is now. That will put the Seattle metro area in league with big, transit-served cities like Chicago and Washington, DC. (At last!)

Here’s a good video intro:

Also notable:

• Los Angeles County voted Yes on Measure M, which will hike the county sales tax by a half cent (raising an estimated $860 million a year) to pay for a major package of light rail and bus rapid transit (BRT) projects. Behind ST3, this is probably the biggest transit win of the year.
• In Atlanta and the surrounding county, voters approved two ballot measures. One boosted sales taxes by a half cent to pay for $2.5 billion in MARTA repairs and expansions over 40 years. The other boosted sales taxes four-tenths of a cent for five years to, among other things, finish the 22-mile BeltLine Loop, a multi-use trail and green space that will extend around the city’s central business district. Despite its reputation as Sprawl Central, the Atlanta area is actually taking strong steps to become more transit-friendly.
• San Diego County voters declined to raise their sales taxes a half cent to fund transit. Measure A, which would have raised $18 billion over 40 years to fund transit and freeway projects, failed to get the two-thirds vote it needed (painfully close, at 57 percent).
• Most disappointingly of all, voters in the metro Detroit area rejected the Regional Transit Authority millage, which would boosted property taxes to expand and rationalize the four-county area’s bus system and put in several new BRT spines.

The measure lost by an achingly close 18,000 votes, which means the beleaguered residents of Detroit will, amid all their other troubles, continue to wrestle with an inadequate and ineffective transit system.

Yep, Qualified Health Plans in the individual market are seeing roughly a 25% price hike year over year. For people who are buying on Exchange, the vast majority of that price hike will be hidden if they are being subsidized and if they are willing to switch plans. For people who are buying off-Exchange or don’t qualify for subsidies, they are screwed.

But let’s get some context here.

#ACASignups Without downplaying the very real rate hike problem these people face, here’s some important context. #ACA #Obamacare #OE4 pic.twitter.com/C4YlTAZDTp

— Charles GHOULba (@charles_gaba) October 26, 2016

Most people get their insurance through either a government program (Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, VA, IHS etc) or through work. Employer based coverage looks like it is increasing by 5% to 6% this year.

The rest of the market is fairly stable and predictable with few major policy shocks to it. The QHP market is still not stable and still not predictable as the ramifications of major policy shocks are still reverberating.

Is it a problem. Hell yes. Is it a widespread problem. Hell no.

Google's 'Allo' is "surveillance", apparently.

Ladies and Gentlemen, step right up and into our Wayback Machine as I transport you back to a post I wrote on June 4th, 2013. Herein, I will discuss the Republicans’ epic battle to prevent the Democrats from gaining partisan control of the District of Columbia’s Circuit Court of Appeals.

And so it begins. President Obama has made three simultaneous nominations for vacancies on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. One of the seats has been vacant since September 2005, when John Roberts was elevated to the Supreme Court. The Republicans claim that the DC Circuit is already adequately staffed and doesn’t need any new judges. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has even introduced a bill to remove one of its seats and move two others to different circuits. This is a naked attempt to maintain Republican parity on the court which just recently got to a 4-4 split of Republican and Democratic nominees when Sri Srinivasan was confirmed. Mr. Srinivasan is the first Obama nominee that the Republicans have allowed to join the DC Circuit in his entire presidency.

I wrote earlier about Harry Reid’s strategy for breaking the opposition to the president’s nominees. It begins with these three judges, who were all carefully chosen to be non-controversial and well-qualified. If the Republicans block a vote on them, Reid is going to use it as an excuse to change the filibuster rule as it applies to the advise and consent role that the Constitution gives the Senate. This will not only allow these three judges to be confirmed, but many more. And it will allow the swift confirmation of the rest of Obama’s cabinet and subcabinet.

The Republicans are in a tough spot. They may be able to forestall such a drastic move by making some kind of deal, but that will never happen if they simply continue to insist that the DC District doesn’t need any more judges so the president doesn’t have any right to have a vote on his nominees. There are still enough Democratic senators who don’t want to change the filibuster rule to make a deal possible, but they are waiting to see how these judges are treated. If they are blocked, Reid will have all the evidence he needs to persuade the few remaining doubters.

Reid doesn’t have any credibility on this issue, having made so many previous threats without following through. But he’s never had enough support in his caucus to change the rules before now. At this point it is clear. If these judges don’t get a vote, they will change the rules so that they can get a vote.

Things came to a head in November, and I wrote about it extensively at that time. But I had already sussed out the details and what was going to happen back in June.

The Republicans considered it their duty to do everything in their power to prevent losing the DC Circuit Court of Appeals as a strategic base for undermining the Obama administration and having it serve as a lethal weapon in their inexorable movement to forestall and roll back progressive change.

They did not care one iota that the law determined the size of the court or that the president had the right and the responsibility to make nominations to fill it.

They just argued that the court didn’t need any extra judges and so they wouldn’t be allowing any votes on new members.

The DC Circuit is correctly seen as the second most powerful court in the country. If they were this hellbent on preserving their influence over the second most powerful court, how much more strongly do they feel about the Supreme Court?

It was the most predictable thing in the world that they would make the same kind of arguments. In this case, they can’t plausibly say that the Court doesn’t need nine members, so they just say that they’re not obligated to consider the president’s nominee. This is exactly what they argued about the DC Circuit.

There were four vacancies on the DC Circuit by the time they confirmed Sri Srinivasan in May 2013, and (as noted above) John Roberts’s seat had sat vacant at that point for eight years, including Obama’s entire first term.

No amount of shame could budge them in their obstruction. And, I suspect, they’d be willing to block a replacement to Scalia’s post for longer than a year. The approximate time when they’ll be reconciled to replacing their Lord & Savior with an Obama or Clinton or Sanders nominee is never.

This is particularly true for the anti-choice crusaders, because their mission to overturn Roe has come so close to fruition that they could anticipate the taste of victory in their mouths. They were foiled by Souter and Kennedy, but they have Alito there now. All they needed was to elect a Republican president and replace Kennedy and their life’s work would have been complete.

Then Scalia went and died on them.

But they’re not about to give up the dream. Not for shame. Not to protect a small handful of vulnerable incumbents.

Not for anything.

Over the weekend, I tried to come up with at least a theory of how their obstruction might be defeated. I pretty much came up empty.

My first sad effort included President Obama picking someone of such advanced old age that they’d be actuarily unlikely to serve on the Court for very long. My second desperate stab involved picking a sitting U.S. Senator. Maybe he could do both at the same time.

But, truthfully, the Republicans don’t want the president’s Kenyan paws on Scalia’s high seat and they’re not going to give in just because the nominee is 75 years old already. The only hope is that Obama picks a senator and a sufficient number of the club members don’t have the stomach to create a precedent that punishes only them and their job prospects.

I came up with Patrick Leahy as someone with the age and credentials and clubbiness to meet the compromise criteria, but he’s on the record mocking conservative legal ideas, including on subjects that are sitting before the Court as we speak.

No, I can’t find a way.

They will never vote to end their dream.

Even defeat in November may not sway them.

Richard is right – 6 million more Americans on insurance is great news. Here’s what isn’t:

Ed Kilgore has been calling this the “wingnut hole,” and many have been speculating about its size. How many Americans will go without health insurance simply because the GOP dislikes the president? Well, happy 2014, dear readers: initial estimates are in, and we have 5 million lucky winners!

These are mainly hard working poor people who would be getting Medicaid at no cost to the state (through 2016) but who won’t simply because the Republicans in their state threw a tantrum.

A few states (like Iowa) will probably find some way to take the free money the feds are handing out, as long as the program is called something like the “Non Obamacare Medical Workhouse Plan for Undeserving Moochers Who Should be Shamed”.  The rest of them are just going to let people suffer. 

While everyone is busy commemorating the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination at the hands of Lee Harvey Oswald, you morons the Mob, the CIA, Castro, the Freemasons, the Rothschilds, Marilyn Manson, and the Reverse Vampires, let’s pause briefly to remember William Henry Harrison, our first presidential stiff, felled by an alliance of germy-handed office-seekers, pre-scientific medicine, and being old as fuck. Harrison’s death was an odd national affair altogether. Though certainly known well enough to Whig voters and electors around the nation (especially for his over-hyped 1811 victory over Tecumseh and the Shawnee) he was primarily a creature of the emerging Midwest—a believer in internal improvements, a stable banking system, a solid protective tariff, and Indian removal executed with slightly more tasteful methods than the party of Jacksonian Democracy. Harrison enjoyed his new job only long enough to deliver a gaseous, 8000-word inaugural address, meet with hordes of groveling patrons looking for federal employment, and summon Congress into early session to deal with “sundry important and weighty matters.” (The national economy had shat its knickers four years earlier, and Harrison was among those who believed a restoration of the National Bank would help relieve the ongoing depression.) After contracting some sort of pneumonia-inducing virus or bacterial infection in late March 1841, Harrison submitted himself to the good work of his doctors, who—between sessions of jabbing him with a lancet—barraged him with leeches, snakeweed, castor oil and opium.

When “Granny” Harrison at last went toes-up on April 4, the nation had to figure out how to properly mourn a president who had died in office and who’d achieved literally nothing other than verifying (with his election) the emergence of a competitive two-party system and demonstrating (with his inauguration) the successful transfer of power to a new administration—the latter, having taken place seven times already, being something of an underwhelming accomplishment by this point. Nevertheless, Harrison’s death was by most accounts a shock to the country (here’s a description of his funeral), and it provoked an outpouring of non-specific grief. Eulogies focused on the inopportune passing of a good man from a good family with a long record of public service and a dying wish—left to the living to fulfill—that government remain useful and effective. This one happens to be my favorite, with its odd “one dies, get another” message:

The operation of our system never seemed happier than at this very moment. In the season of a wide exultation, the Chief Magistrate of a great and confiding people was suddenly struck down. What then? No confusion follows—no trepidation—no revolutionary outcry—no rush to arms. The government moves right onward. Not a wheel stops. Not a jar is felt. One name indeed is blotted out—to thousands, a dear and honored name. Another is written in its place, and all is quiet as before. Meantime, the nation puts on her weeds awhile and silently deplores her loss. Again, she puts them off, and goes joyously forth like a strong man armed or a giant panting for the race.

Harrison’s poor wife, Anna—who had been ill herself prior to the inauguration and never left Indiana Ohio (thus making her the only First Lady never to set foot in the White House)—was eased in her grief by a $20,000 pension and Congressional franking privileges, which she enjoyed for the rest of her life.

Meantime, the nation did sally forth “like a strong man armed.” Harrison’s Vice President, John Tyler, was among other things not much of a Whig. A slaveholder, erstwhile Democrat and future Confederate, Tyler was affiliated with the Whigs only because he loathed Andrew Jackson, not because he shared a political vision that aligned well with party leaders like Henry Clay or Daniel Webster. As a Whig apostate, he was much less concerned about the perils of national expansion than his predecessor, and he looked to the annexation of Texas—the dickthrob du jour of the Slave Power—to enlarge the national domain and secure for himself a political future. His fellow Whigs had stricken him from their ranks, and Tyler—now cast adrift in a highly partisan political culture—imagined that perhaps his old party might reward him with the Democratic presidential nomination in 1844 if he were able to deliver on the Texas question. Long story short, the Democrats joined the Whigs in thwarting Tyler’s ambition, but Tyler nevertheless secured the passage of an annexation resolution during the final, lame-duck weeks of his accidental presidency. And with the ruthlessly expansionist Democrats restored to power with the election of “Young Hickory” Polk, war with Mexico was all but assured a year before it actually began in the Spring of 1846. The Whigs would have one last go at the presidency—botching that effort as well, electing the soon-to-be-dead Zachary Taylor in 1848—before slavery and nativism ripped the party to shreds.

We are fond of asking “what if” questions about presidents who croak in office. What kind of reconstruction policy might Lincoln have pursued? Would FDR have used atomic weapons over Japan? Would JFK have deepened our involvement in Vietnam? Would Nixon have been evicted from office if the famously carnivorous White House raccoons hadn’t gotten to him first? And so on. But it’s perhaps also worth asking how a non-dead William Henry Harrison reshapes American history. If Harrison doesn’t succumb to pneumonia, it’s entirely possible that the Whigs keep their shit together long enough to elect Henry Clay in 1844; certainly, the Democrats would have ridden the Texas issue with whip and spur, and maybe the Liberty Party still siphons away enough Clay voters in the North to keep him out of the White House. But if the Whigs had spent four years actually governing as a coherent party and not struggling against the fake Whig Tyler, their chances of winning in 1844 would have been vastly improved. If Clay—or another Whig—had won that year, there would likely have been no Texas annexation (at least not then, and possibly not ever); with a Whig in office, there would also certainly have been no war of conquest with Mexico. And with no war against Mexico, there would have been no room to renew the debate over slavery’s expansion, no precedent of “popular sovereignty” in New Mexico to guide Stephen Douglas toward the Kansas-Nebraska Act, no party disintegration in the 1850s, and quite probably no civil war two decades after Harrison’s inauguration.

Or maybe everything goes to hell anyway. Americans were some ghastly violent motherfuckers in the 19th century, and it’s hard to imagine they wouldn’t have found some way to devour one another eventually. But at least William Henry Harrison didn’t have to live to see it.

Remember all those liberal thinkers who clustered around Senator Aqua Buddha because he was the only person standing between them and being droned off to glory at Starbucks next Tuesday?

Mad Men (and I'm not talking about Don Draper)

by digby

In case you're busy with important things, like watching The Real Housewives, and haven't been following the detailed ins and outs of the latest Congressional brouhaha, Ed Kilgore gives you the upshot:

Originally John Boehner wanted to give his charges the chance for an extended temper tantrum about Obamacare timed to conclude when the moment arrived to keep the federal government functioning, perhaps with a bit less money. Nope, that wasn’t sufficient. So the GOP headed directly towards a government shutdown, until Boehner and company looked about two inches beyond their own noses and saw that the public was (tragically) more tolerant towards a debt limit default threat than a shutdown. So the House GOP leaders moved in that direction. But they soon discovered getting the entire House GOP to vote for a debt limit increase would require a measure that incarnated every conservative policy fantasy in sight, and they are still struggling to get the votes. So now they may throw some sand in the gears of the continuing appropriations resolution and perhaps generate a mini-shutdown as a tonic to the troops, and hope that between the appropriations and debt limit measures they can slake the destructive furies of the Republican Party and its often-caustic right-wing chorus, and maybe even mark up a victory or two if Democrats conclude concessions are better than economy-wreaking chaos.

Golly, I wonder what those concessions might be? It's worked out so well before. It is chaos, but chaos can often accrue to the benefit of the crazies, can't it?

Being completely out of control does create some leverage, particularly if the firebug is willing to set fire to himself (“When you are on fire,” Richard Pryor famously observed after nearly incinerating himself in a freebase cocaine accident, “people get out of your way.”). So people start thinking about making concessions they wouldn’t otherwise consider, or contemplating scenarios they wouldn’t otherwise entertain.

Indeed they do. And that's from a starting point where this offer remains on the table.

This whole thing brings to mind this article about the Madman Theory from a few years back:

One of the starting points for Cold War game theory was President Eisenhower's proposed doctrine of "massive retaliation": Washington would respond viciously to any attack on the US or its allies. This, the thinking went, would create enough fear to deter enemy aggression. But Kissinger believed this policy could actually encourage our enemies and limit our power. Would the US really nuke Moscow if the Soviets funded some communist insurgents in Angola or took over a corner of Iran? Of course not. As a result, enemies would engage in "salami tactics," slicing away at American interests, confident that the US would not respond.

Cluster bombs, designed with "submunition" ordnance to set off a chain-reaction of explosions, became an important part of the US conventional military arsenal in the 1960s. In Southeast Asia, cluster bombs allowed the US military to inflict widespread damage on the enemy from the air, without resorting to nuclear weapons.
Video: The National Archives

The White House needed a wider range of military options. More choices, the thinking went, would allow us to prevent some conflicts from starting, gain bargaining leverage in others, and stop still others from escalating. This game-theory logic was the foundation for what became in the '60s and '70s the doctrine of "flexible response": Washington would respond to small threats in small ways and big threats in big ways.

The madman theory was an extension of that doctrine. If you're going to rely on the leverage you gain from being able to respond in flexible ways — from quiet nighttime assassinations to nuclear reprisals — you need to convince your opponents that even the most extreme option is really on the table. And one way to do that is to make them think you are crazy.

Consider a game that theorist Thomas Schelling described to his students at Harvard in the '60s: You're standing at the edge of a cliff, chained by the ankle to another person. As soon as one of you cries uncle, you'll both be released, and whoever remained silent will get a large prize. What do you do? You can't push the other person off the cliff, because then you'll die, too. But you can dance and walk closer and closer to the edge. If you're willing to show that you'll brave a certain amount of risk, your partner may concede — and you might win the prize. But if you convince your adversary that you're crazy and liable to hop off in any direction at any moment, he'll probably cry uncle immediately. If the US appeared reckless, impatient, even insane, rivals might accept bargains they would have rejected under normal conditions. In terms of game theory, a new equilibrium would emerge as leaders in Moscow, Hanoi, and Havana contemplated how terrible things could become if they provoked an out-of-control president to experiment with the awful weapons at his disposal.

The nuclear-armed B-52 flights near Soviet territory appeared to be a direct application of this kind of game theory. H. R. Haldeman, Nixon's chief of staff, wrote in his diary that Kissinger believed evidence of US irrationality would "jar the Soviets and North Vietnam." Nixon encouraged Kissinger to expand this approach. "If the Vietnam thing is raised" in conversations with Moscow, Nixon advised, Kissinger should "shake his head and say, 'I am sorry, Mr. Ambassador, but [the president] is out of control." Nixon told Haldeman: "I want the North Vietnamese to believe that I've reached the point that I might do anything to stop the war. We'll just slip the word to them that for God's sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communism. We can't restrain him when he is angry — and he has his hand on the nuclear button' — and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.

The problem is that the Tea Partiers really are mad.


.

We have to fight wage theft in all of its various manifestations.

Contrary to Niall Ferguson's glib assertions, John Maynard Keynes in fact cared a great deal about the future, and in fact was one of the deepest thinkers on the implications of modern economics who has ever lived. His essay "The Economic Possibilities of our Grandchildren" is still a sparkling read. In it, Keynes speculates that with the economic growth accumulated over future generations, humanity could at last be free of work and "the economic problem" of scarcity would be solved. At one point, he takes a swipe at greed:

the love of money as a possession — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life — will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease

Will Wilkinson is not impressed with such sentiments:

First, Keynes is too myopic about the definition of "the long run". That the living ever dwell at the frontier of time seems to encourage a fallacious sense that the hour is getting late... Friedrich Hegel and Francis Fukuyama spotted the end of history just ahead of them... Environmentalists tout a sort-of pagan eschatology... Yet, for all we know, this is the morning of humanity... Suppose that in 50 years a great breakthrough extends the average lifespan by hundreds of years. Our grandchildren will look upon the present age of so-called abundance as the end of the original human era, during which a terrible and absolute scarcity of time prevailed.

My second complaint is that Keynes's assumption about the superiority of leisured pursuits is dogmatic rather than reasoned...it's hard not to see his bias against commerce and consumption as a vestige of aristocratic ideology about the inherent degradation of market activity. The idealisation of bohemian artistic and intellectual life... [which] prevails still among artists and intellectuals, is a remarkably sturdy remnant of our feudal legacy... It seems simpler and less question-begging to say that we keep on working long hours and buying lots of stuff because, whatever the ultimate cause, we take less satisfaction in the occupations of non-commercial leisure.

Two points. First, while the apocalyptic defeatism of Paul Kingsnorth is indeed obnoxious, it is a terrible mistake to draw a straight line from religious millennialism to "environmentalist eschatology" and thereby imply that the grimmest predictions of climate hawks and the beliefs of UFO cults are similarly plausible. Take for example this paper looking at uncontrolled climate change on our current path extrapolated to 2300. It predicts that half the Earth's currently inhabited surface will be uninhabitable—so hot during the day that people sitting in a windy shade wrapped in a wet towel would still die of heatstroke. (Needless to say, that would about wrap it up for human society in its current form.) That is highly speculative, yes, and no one can predict with any certainty the likelihood of that scenario coming to pass. But it is grounded in scientific measurements and science-based models. And furthermore, over 99 percent of all species in Earth's history are estimated to have gone extinct. One cannot handwave past this kind of reasoning.

Second, Wilkinson supposes that even should we create some lifespan enhancer such that we all live to 300, we'll probably all still want to work, though the reasons might remain mysterious. But so long as we're talking speculative fiction, why not a development that allows people to control their desires directly?

First, let's imagine the ultimate form of desire modification (or "d-mod" as I will sometimes refer to it). In this ultimate form, each person would have a computer in his or her brain that could change his or her desires, habits, beliefs, personality, and emotions in any conceivable way. Here are some thoughts about what that would imply for the human species:

1. Obviously, the technology would be incalculably dangerous. If the brain computers were hacked, people could be made into slaves, zombies, or worse. So the technology would only be adopted after extreme precautions had been taken and shown to be effective.

2. Such a technology would mean the instant end of economics as we know it. Utility theory assumes something called "local nonsatiation", which means that people always want more of something. With d-mod, local nonsatiation goes right out the window, since you can instantly dial yourself to a "bliss point" where you are just perfectly satisfied and don't want anything else. That's the end of scarcity.

3. Just as personality upload makes FTL travel look a bit silly, d-mod makes personality upload look a little silly. Why bother creating new worlds when you can just like the world you're in? Why "hack the world" when you can just "hack the human"?

4. When we can decide what we want, desire becomes less important than meta-desire. What do we want to want? And what do we want to want to want? Etc. D-mod is like putting the parameters of the utility function in the utility function itself. The result could be very chaotic if people keep changing and changing (because each new change induces a desire for another change). But most people are likely to end up in fixed-points or "cul-de-sacs", where they want to want exactly what they currently want.

(Read on for more fascinating stuff, and a reading list should this pique your fancy.)

The point is that thinking about the future is hard, and getting more so with the increasingly complex connections between technology and humanity. Will we, like yeast, drown in our own excrement, or will we construct a socialist pleasure utopia? Or something else? Only one thing is certain—science fiction is where to find the most important questions of our time.

I had occasion to call customer support for my Web host recently. When the young man began his patter, his “script” if you will, I would have sworn I was talking with someone in the midwest. However, as we got down to the specifics of my call, away from the script, it became apparent I was not talking to someone from the midwest after all. Not the midwestern United States, anyway. Like most people, I equate such calls just above a trip to the dentist on the “list of things I enjoy.” I have an extroverted friend, however, who loves to get on the phone with a live support person. He yocks it up with them and asks them all kinds of personal questions and probably plays havoc with their time-per-call stats, but he gets good service. They seem to appreciate being treated like human beings. I’m trying to learn from his example. It’s hard.