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The Most Expensive Material in the World
May 13, 2008
The most expensive stuff, pound for pound, is not the gasoline you put into your car. It’s not gold, or platinum, or diamonds, or even some exotic medicine. If you bought some, you wouldn’t even be able to hold it without destroying it. Of course, you probably wouldn’t be able to buy much of it. To manufacture a milligram of it, it would cost about $300 billion, and would take decades or even centuries. Even after you manufactured it, it would be difficult to store for more than a few hours at a time. The most expensive stuff in the world, by far, is antihydrogen - the only form of antimatter that humans can reliably create.
What is antimatter?
Antimatter is simply the opposite of normal matter. Every particle (except some with no charge) has an antiparticle. Antielectrons (called positrons) have the same mass and act similarly to electrons, but have a positive charge. Antiprotons have the same mass as protons but have a negative charge. If you can get a positron to start spinning around an antiproton, you have an antihydrogen atom. Antihydrogen acts, in many ways, exactly like hydrogen - it will have the same mass, the same spectroscopy, and should have the same gravitational interaction as regular hydrogen. If you looked at something made of antimatter in a vacuum, it would look just like its regular counterpart - anticopper would look just like copper; antigold would look just like gold.
Of course, as any reader of science fiction knows, the one big difference is that if an antimatter atom touches a normal atom, the result is the theoretically most powerful explosion possible as both atoms transform into pure energy at approximately 100% efficiency. Ounce for ounce, this is more than 100 times as powerful as a hydrogen bomb.
What could I possibly do with antimatter?
Aside from helping mankind understand the basic makeup of the universe, antimatter could provide us with an incredibly efficient engine. Antimatter fuel would take up an incredibly tiny amount of space compared to normal rocket fuel. Antiparticles are already used in medicine; antimatter might help precisely destroy cancerous tumors or help with imaging technologies. Antimatter weapons could be incredibly tiny, making the “suitcase nuke” a reality, or incredibly powerful, dwarfing even the largest nuclear explosion ever.
How can I make some?
If you want to get in on the antimatter gold rush that is sure to be coming soon, you’re going to need access to a lot of electricity, a particle accelerator, and a long stretch of time. The first step is creating some antiprotons. At CERN, this is done by speeding regular positrons up to near the speed of light, then smashing them into iridium blocks. This creates enough energy for new particles to be formed, and some of these particles will be antiprotons. You will need to save these for later, as they will form the nuclei for your antihydrogen atoms. Of course, you can’t touch them with regular matter, so you’ll need to use an array of magnets to catch them in a Penning trap or something similar.
Now you’ll need to have a source of positrons. This is actually quite easy to find; several different radioactive isotopes emit positrons as they decay. In fact, positrons are used in PET (positron-emission topography) machines in many hospitals for medical imaging. One way is to get positrons for this purpose now is to use xenon clusters. Start firing the antiprotons at the xenon atoms. When the antiprotons get close to the nuclei of the xenon atoms, electron-positron pairs will suddenly appear. About one antiproton in 10,00,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10e19) will grab one of these positrons and create one antihydrogen atom. You could also try storing antiprotons in a Penning trap and bombarding them with positrons, like these guys did. Using the latter method, you should be able to create up to 100 antihydrogen atoms per second! If you’re lazy, you can just take a look at U.S. patent number 6163587, “Process for the production of antihydrogen” and copy from them.
Before you start putting together your business plan, remember that at this point, having created a few hundred atoms, you will have used more electricity than a medium-sized city would use in a day. You also will have spent billions of dollars on creating a particle accelerator capable of producing the antiprotons. You also will have had to avoid any mistakes in supporting all of these incredibly complex procedures. Then, of course, you would have to store enough of it to sell without any of it touching any normal matter. Current estimates are that, under perfect conditions, you would get back around 0.00000001% of the energy used to produce antimatter when annihilating it for energy.
Of course, the production costs become a moot point if we can find it lying around in space. Some people think this is possible; the AMS spectrometer is currently orbiting the Earth, searching for interstellar antimatter. We’re in the Wright Brothers phase of antimatter exploitation and exploration now. Antimatter may be a blessing, taking us to a world of abundant, non-polluting energy, or to destruction, if the wrong people get their hands on sufficient supplies of antimatter. It’s too early to tell. One thing is for sure, though… it’s really expensive to make it.
“Our Customers are the Enemy”: Five Lesser-Known Cartels
May 8, 2008
“Our competitors are our friends. Our customers are the enemy.” -James Randall, former president of ADM
Everybody’s heard of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), which is an international cartel dedicated to maximizing profits on oil for its members, and the news is filled with tales of “drug cartels” around the world. Price-fixing via collusion of supposedly competitive industries is often suspected in high-cost, abstract industries such as insurance. But did you know that there have been cartels artificially inflating the price of goods as diverse as light bulbs, vitamins, and groceries?
1. The Phoebus Cartel
If you think that it is difficult to convince people to convert from incandescent light bulbs to CFLs, try getting people to convert when virtually every manufacturer of light bulbs is colluding with each other to raise prices of all bulbs and reduce their average life expectancy (causing more bulbs to be bought). Named after the Latin form of the Greek sun-god, the cartel included every major manufacturer of light bulbs in the world, including General Electric, Philips, and Osram. For almost twenty years, from 1924 until the beginning of World War II, the cartel kept prices fixed for light bulbs in the rest of the world, including Europe, at around four times the cost of light bulbs in the United States. The cartel has also been accused of retarding research into more cost- and energy-efficient light bulbs for all of those years. Eventually, effects of both the war and the entry of lower-cost Scandinavian manufacturers into the market led to the demise of the Phoebus Cartel.
2. The 1990s Vitamin Cartel
Although some people think that cartels are just a memory of a gilded age past, they are alive and well even today. There was a lull in most cartel activity for fifty years after World War II, but they are popping up more and more in the last few decades. One of the largest and most sophisticated cartels operated in the mid-1990s to fix the price of various vitamins and amino acids, such as lysine, citric acid, and vitamin A. Consisting of several massive, blue-chip companies, including Roche, BASF, and ADM, this cartel made hundreds of millions of dollars in excess profit in a few short years. The cartel came to end after an FBI raid in 1995, with several ADM executives going to prison, one for 36 months (the first time this maximum sentence was ever handed down).
3. The Uranium Club
Between 1972 and 1976, a group of non-US governments and various uranium suppliers, both in the United States and elsewhere, caused the price of uranium to rocket upwards. This group - “The Uranium Club” - created a cartel with price floors and production quotas to ensure that certain countries would provide a certain amount of uranium to buyers. Major members included companies from Australia, Canada, South Africa, and France, and these governments, monitoring the export of uranium for “security reasons,” provided a way for the cartel to check if any individual companies were cheating the system by underselling or selling more uranium than allowed. Prices of uranium more than sextupled within four years. This apparently had little direct effect on the US uranium, as foreign uranium was mostly barred from trading on the market at the time, but it is alleged that it caused an indirect rise.
4. The Horse Racing Cartel
The Asian Racing Federation is a collection of various racing horse racing organizations, many of them government monopolies, that have conspired to ensure that only their affiliates can legally gamble on racing outcomes. Representatives have stated the goal of their “Good Neighbour Policy” is to restrict illegal, off-shore gambling, and thus provide more tax revenue to their respective governments. However, since they minimize the number of competitors, they have artificially kept profits higher for their preferred bookmakers, and thus act exactly like a cartel.
5. The Supposed British “Supermarket Cartel”
Last month, the United Kingdom’s Office of Fair Trading (OFT) started an investigation into the four largest supermarket chains in the UK, on suspicion of conspiring to fix prices. Theoretically, this makes no sense. Virtually all cartels tend to be in commodity businesses with little room for branding (for example, graphite, industrial dyes, freight shipping and bulk chemicals). This makes it easier for companies to detect cartel “cheaters,” since they are selling basically the same product. In addition, most companies involved in cartels have little direct interaction with the end consumer but rather with other businesses. Finally, cartels prefer to operate in markets with a relatively small number of buyers. Supermarkets seem like the epitome of companies that would not be involved in cartel formation and operation. However, the OFT has been asking very specific questions. If they find out that the supermarkets have been colluding in a cartel, it will bring up several difficult questions on how prevalent cartels are in this day and age.
Nauru: The Decline and Fall of the Phosphate Empire
May 5, 2008
Its people had the highest income, per capita, of any nation in the world. Families who had never before left their hometown would charter planes for shopping expeditions to Hawaii and Singapore. Citizens bought sports cars with their royalty checks. Less than thirty years later, eighty percent of their nation is a barren, strip-mined wasteland. Per-capita GDP is less than Namibia’s, Nicaragua’s or Sudan’s. Phosphates made Nauru rich, but also contained the seeds of its destruction.
Discovery… of the Island, and of Phosphates
Nauru (pronounced NAH-oo-roo) was discovered (by the Europeans at least) in 1798 by John Fearn, who named it Pleasant Island. For almost a century, its people mingled with European whalers, traders, and the occasional deserter. In 1878, as more firearms were introduced into Nauruan culture, tensions between the twelve clans of Nauru reached a boiling point. A fierce civil war erupted, and lasted for ten years, until the Germans annexed the island and helped unify the tribes.
Nauru may have endured as so many other Pacific islands have, by not being worth too much to anybody and having colonial rulers adopt a laissez-faire attitude towards them. Unfortunately, they had a different destiny. In 1900, a British prospector discovered that almost the entire island of Nauru consisted of high quality phosphate rock, created mostly from years of bird droppings. Although many people have never heard of them, phosphates are essential to a modern standard of living. They are a key ingredient in fertilizers, even today, and several wars have been fought solely over phosphate supplies, especially in the 19th century.
Within a decade, phosphate mining commenced, and continued as nations battled for control of the all-important phosphate rock (more information about the current phosphate shortage). Between discovery of the phosphate in 1900 and the independence of Nauru in 1968, five nations had control of Nauru at one time or another: Germany, Australia, the UK, New Zealand, and Japan. Nauru was invaded during both World Wars (in WWI by the Australians, in WWII by the Japanese) to ensure that the phosphate would flow. During all of this time, although their island was a cornerstone in the global economy, ordinary Nauruans did not benefit much from the phosphate mining in their country. The various companies extracting the phosphate rock tended to keep the profits for themselves.
The Golden Age
In 1968, the Australian government, then-trustee of Nauru, declared that the island was “uninhabitable” and offered to resettle the Nauruans. The people of Nauru decided instead to declare independence from Australia, and shortly afterwards, bought the rights to phosphate mining away from all foreign owners. They were going to go it alone, and they were going to do it on the back of phosphate rock. They started bringing in companies to mine the phosphate for them, and set up the Nauru Phosphate Royalties Trust to invest and manage the money from the mining (an early example of a sovereign wealth fund). The NPRT was founded to ensure that there would continue to be money to run Nauru even after phosphate reserves were depleted, and to provide royalties from the phosphate mining to the people of Nauru.
The money was shot out from the NPRT onto the citizens of Nauru like a fire hose. Within a few years, Nauru had the highest per-capita GDP in the world. Forget about oil wealth; in the 1970s, in Nauru, all the talk was of phosphate wealth. Nauru acquired a collection of foreign real estate, invested in musical productions, and showered its citizens in free money. There was no real need to work; government checks bought everything a person could desire. The streets were lined with new German, Italian, and American sports cars. People moved away from the traditional diet of their ancestors and gorged on chocolates, red meat, and other processed, high-fat and high-sugar foods.
Phosphate mining continued unabated, and people thought the party would go on forever. Below the surface, though, were several forces forcing an end to the festivities.
The Decline and Fall
As phosphate reserves started to decline in the 1990s, Nauruans began asking questions about how much money was being managed by the Nauru Phosphate Royalties Trust. Although the managers had always been secretive, it was assumed that there would still be plenty of money to maintain a decent standard of living, if not living up to the heyday of phosphate mining a few years earlier. However, it was soon found out that through mismanagement, corruption, and some old-fashioned busted investment, the NPRT had lost a great deal of money. More than a billion dollars - almost the entirety of the NPRT’s assets. Nauru was broke, and their one reliable export was almost extinguished.
Unemployment now reaches about 90%… and 95% of the jobs that do exist are government jobs. Private enterprise is almost obliterated. A facility to house refugees denied admission to Australia provided 20% of the GDP of Nauru last year, and is shutting down this year.
The life expectancy of the islanders has plummeted to 58 for males (65 for females), as bad dietary habits have taken a toll. With 90% of its population obese, renal failure and heart problems are epidemic. Anywhere from 40% to 50% of the population has type 2 diabetes.
Over eighty percent of the country is a desolate moonscape, as all of the phosphate-containing topsoil was stripped down to the bare rock. Droughts have become an epidemic - the bare rock in the interior of the island reflects the heat, driving away virtually all clouds. The only remaining human habitations are in a small strip around the edge of the island.
Finally, in 2007, the country’s phosphate reserves ran out. There have been some plans floated to start mining “secondary phosphate” - phosphate that is stored underneath the worthless limestone of the interior. Extracting it entails crushing and removing the limestone, then strip mining more phosphate from below the ground. Let us hope that the Nauruans have learned some lessons in sustainability from their first brush with mineral wealth.
Let the Engineers Rule!: The Alternate Economic System of Technocracy
April 28, 2008
Ever wonder what society would be like if it wasn’t run by politicians and economists, but by engineers and scientists? If every part of society could be developed from the ground up, including borders and locations of cities, by technicians who could optimally plan the most efficient use of resources? If fiat money were abolished and replaced with something more advanced? In the 1920s and 1930s, a man named Howard Scott and a group called Technocracy decided to plan out a system devoted to reaching economic efficiency via empirical studies and evidence. Technocracy Incorporated is not remembered much today, but at its peak had over half a million members in California alone. Some of the most notable Technocracy advocates include M. King Hubbert (originator of Hubbert Peak Theory, or “peak oil”), Thorstein Veblen, (economist and author of Theory of the Leisure Class) and Upton Sinclair (author of The Jungle).
What is Technocracy?
Technocracy is the system of thought that holds that as society progresses, the old Price System of using tokens of debt (”money”) is no longer a reasonable way to sustain a society. Technocracy seeks a zero growth economy based on efficient use of resources, especially energy, and the abolition of relics of the traditional past, such as the democratic political system and the borders of nation-states. They believe that these constitute an inefficient allocation of resources, which leads to the illusion of scarcity. Therefore, if societies could be re-organized into Technates (energy-independent regions with a sufficiently qualified engineering population), that humans would move to a post-scarcity society. That is, goods and services would be practically free, due to the fact that society would be able to easily produce anything required for minimal cost.
How Would Everyday Life Be Different from Today?
Private ownership of most things, aside from personal belongings, would come to an end. However, most anything you need will be available for your use, including communications devices, transportation, etc. Large metropolises such as New York will dwindle as their reasons for existence - trade and commerce - are eliminated. People will live in smaller, more self-efficient and spread-out pre-planned communities called Urbanates. It would be easier to get around in these population centers, as they would be planned to be easily navigable and walkable instead of the hodge-podge of inefficient development that cities have seen in the past. Traditional social life would not change, and any social legislation (problems not related to the conversion of energy to produce for the populace, such as divorce, gay marriage, etc.) would be passed by Technate-wide referendum.
One of the main results of the move to Technocracy would be a vast increase in the amount of leisure time. As people would receive the current equivalent of $500/day in energy credits, more than could possibly be spent, the only reason for working would be the approval of one’s peers. Retirement would be possible (but not mandatory) at age 45. People could work on anything they wanted, resulting in a flourishing of culture as never before. Citizens of the Technate could spend time learning anything that they wanted to at school throughout the course of their lives. Education would become a lifelong drive, not something to do at the beginning of life in order to learn a skill to survive.
Traveling in the Technate, both within an Urbanate and to other areas, would be incredibly easy due to a Technate-wide system of canals (”Continental Hydrology”), high-speed rail and air transport, and widely available individual vehicles. All of these vehicles would be designed to be as energy efficient as possible.
What About Money?
The monetary system as we know it would no longer be used. Instead, people would get “energy credits;” each unit would equal a unit of energy used to run the society. They could not be saved or earned, but only distributed equally among the citizens of a Technate by the planners. They would be distributed according to the needs of the populace, as determined by the Technate planners. The first advantage of this system is that ecological costs are automatically included in the “cost” of items, since energy is the main resource used by citizens. The second advantage is that socioeconomic problems will be eliminated, or at least greatly reduced, by the broad socioeconomic equality produced by the equal distribution of energy credits. Finally, energy credits would be like the “gold standard” - they could not appreciate or depreciate in value since they are directly mapped to a unit of energy. Thus, a Technate would have no issues with inflation or debt.
How is the Technocratic Economic System Different from Communism?
Technocracy advocates argue that both communism and capitalism are outgrowths of a scarcity mentality, and exist to live with scarcities instead of working to eliminate them. Also, traditional communist thought holds that the State will “wither away” once society is ready for it to happen. However, Technocracy thinks that their version of a “state” (actually, the Technate) is permanent. People may be equal on an economic basis, by everybody receiving the same amount of energy credits, but there is a meritocratic system of advancement through the Technate. They believe that people will want to advance up the ladder due to both intrinsic motivation and to get more respect from their peers. It is possible to cite examples such as Wikipedia, the free software movement, and other actions that people contribute to without monetary reward. They argue that personal initiative will flourish like never before, as people will no longer have to rely on the archaic scarcity mentality that limits their choices in life.
How Would Relations With Other Regions Work?
There would be a”Sequence,” or profession, that would work similarly to an expanded version of our present day Foreign Service. They would work to offer assistance to any regions of the world that had an emergency, no strings attached.
For foreign trade, any items that were needed from a foreign country would be obtained via a barter-like system. However, since the Technate would be able to produce basically everything that its citizens need, this would most likely be a rare occurrence.
For individual citizens traveling abroad, people would receive the equivalent of their energy credit usage in foreign currency when they leave the Technate. All extra foreign currency would be relinquished upon returning to the Technate.
Citizens who wished to leave the Technocracy would be free to do so, either permanently or on vacation. In addition, tourists and students would be invited to see the Technate in action and learn more about introducing Technocracy in their own homelands. Although the minimizing of trade between the Technate and other areas makes it seem as if this is an “isolationist” theory of economics, this is due to the lack of a Price System and thus, lack of need to trade. Technocracy would maintain and enhance the two-way flow of information between the Technate and other areas of the world.
How Would the Leaders be Chosen?
The antiquated concept of letting the masses decide who is the best person to lead them will be replaced by a process similar to the way corporations promote technical personnel today. Those who are the best at their current positions and are found, via objective methods, to be the best candidates for the next higher position will be promoted. Recommendations from both above and below will play a major part in the promotion process. This way, a system in which those who are at best at doing what they do for society will play a larger and larger role in that society.
Criticisms of Technocracy
The first and most major criticism of Technocracy is that the Earth does not support their concept of a post-scarcity society. There will always be more things that people can consume and want to own than the Earth can conceivably produce. Technocracy advocates retort that their studies show that there is sufficient energy to convert to a post-scarcity society, and that energy is the limiting factor in most production equations.
Another criticism of Technocracy is that it provides no incentives to better oneself or progress in society based on hard work, consequently de-legitimizing work and going against human nature. Technocracy advocates assert that the incentives under Technocracy would merely be different, not nonexistent. In a post-scarcity society, people would work to earn praise and self-respect, instead of monetary rewards. An example is the world of science, where scientists work hard to make great discoveries for personal fame.
Critics also note that due to the low unemployment rate in developed countries, there is an obvious need for many people to be working. This means that one of Technocracy’s basis premises - that machines can take over for most production, and that work in general will be greatly reduced - is flawed. However, many professions in today’s capitalist society are irrelevant under Technocracy, such as finance, marketing, and advertising, and most industries are wasteful due to competition. By streamlining these sources of production and eliminating needless jobs, people will have more leisure time to enjoy life.
For More Information
Please see the website of Technocracy, Inc.
Want to Learn More About Communism?
April 27, 2008
These days, most of the nations of the world have decided on a capitalist economic system, if not always enthusiastically (see dirigisme). It wasn’t that long ago, though, that many different alternative economic systems were competing for the attention of nations. If you’re interested in alternative economic theories, you can’t do much better than communism. Whether you’re interested in Eurocommunism, Juche, or Pro-Albanian Marxist-Leninism, most serious studies of communism begin with the works of Karl Marx. Now, the first ten volumes of The Complete Works of Marx are available online.
