I’ve been a big Brandon Sanderson fan ever since I read Mistborn.
Perhaps because of that, there’s something about his writing which
makes it very, very easy to read; when I was doing my borderline
insane read-all-of-the-wheel-of-time thing earlier this fall, it was
snoticeable when I got to Sanderson’s books, because I could read them
in less than half the time the equivalent length Jordan books had been
taking me.

So, of course I ordered the Alloy of Law as soon as I heard about it.

The book was written as a joke-relaxation project between when
Sanderson finished The Way of Kings and when he started on (what he
promises is) the final book of A Memory of Light. (as an aside,
there’s something about that title which bothers me – it suggests,
perhaps, failure, looking back from the future at the memory of light,
which is all that is left of the light in this time of darkness. I’m
pretty sure that’s not what Jordan meant by it, but …)

Perhaps as a result, it feels very light and airy. It’s a simple story
and a quick read, and it was entertaining, but it was lacking …
something. It’s not just that the novel ended in the middle of the
story, leaving more things unanswered than answered and hinting at a
world that won’t be explored; it’s more that … for all that the
characters were interesting, there was no real growth or change in
them. Moreover, Sanderson’s other works all have some deep mystery
about the nature of the world, and this didn’t; and that made the
reveal seem … insignificant and paltry.

None of this is to say that the book was disappointing; it was fun.
But it was, in the end, a tasty trifle, rather than a meal.
November 16, 2011 at 09:43AM

I went to see the Foo Fighters primarily because of one song, which I
am convinced is the best rock song of the last decade (for me, at
least). So I was pleasanlty surprised by the fact that the concert was
a November 16, 2011 at 09:42AM

The most interesting parts of history aren’t in the schoolboy history
books. This particular part of history is poorly served even by adult
academic histories; it’s a mostly forgotten episode with only a small
handful of books covering it. But it’s fascinating: for a period of
time in 1840-41, there were two competing governments in the state of
Rhode Island, there were fears of a civil war in the state, and the
federal government carefully avoided doing anything.

By way of background: during and immediately after the revolution,
most of the states ditched their colonial charters and replaced them
with new constitutions, drafted in alignment with the spirit of the
age. Rhode Island didn’t, leaving it in the (theoretically) anomalous
position that it’s founding document was a grant of authority from the
King of England, whose authority was otherwise no longer recognized.

Rhode Island’s 17th-century charter remained in effect in 1840. Among
other things, that meant that seats in the legislature were
apportioned as declared in the 1660s, despite wild population shifts
in the intervening century and three quarters. It also meant that,
alone among the states, Rhode Island still required voters to own a
certain amount of property, with the result that on the order of 3/4
of the adult white male population of the state were disenfranchised.
(In addition, the legislature held some of the state’s judicial power
in a way which was considered wildly inappropriate everywhere in the
country by this point).

Both of these – the disenfranchisement and the malapportionment -
would be considered unconstitutional today, the malapportionment
explicitly so, the property qualification implicitly so.

Liberal agitators had been trying for years to get the state
government to reform itself, but the legislature had no incentive to
do so; any such move would inevitably reduce the political power of
those who controlled the legislature, so why would they do it? This
resistance crossed party lines; neither the Whigs nor the Democrats in
the legislature were willing to risk the personal lack of power that
would result.

So the activists gave up on the legislature, and tried something else.
Under American political theory after the revolution, sovereign power
inhered in the people, who had vested a portion of their sovereign
power in the governments of the states; surely the people could
withdraw the vesting of power and vest it elsewhere, right? So the
appropriate solution would be to simply vote on a new constitution,
elect a new legislature and executive under that constitution, and
have them take over the government of the state. Such a government
would be legitimate because it would be an expression of the popular
will; in the Rhode Island context, because it would be elected by
universal white male suffrage, it owuld be more legitimate than the
government whose mandate had been withdrawn.

So they did it. They organized an election with universal white male
suffrage, to select electors to a constitutional convention. They
drafted a constitution. They submitted it back to the voters, who
overwlehmingly adopted it (the numbers showed that it was supported
even by a majority of those who could have voted under the charter).

What happened next was an instructive lesson in liberal politics.

What the activists expected would happen is that the charter
government would simply accede in its destruction. After all, at the
level of theory, they were correct: american political theory held
that the sovereign power inhered in the people acting together, and
the revolution itself implied that the people could withdraw their
sanction from the extant government and vest it in a new one. And the
results of the election showed that the new constitution and the
soon-to-be-elected government had the backing of, and represented the
will of, the people of the state. It would be illegitimate for the
charter government to resist, right?

The charter government resisted. It argued that, while the people
might have a theoretical right to divest the government of power, they
could only exercise that right in accordance with whatever rules were
set down in the government’s founding documents. The people were bound
by the procedures they had previously set up; and, since the charter
provided no mechanism for constitutional revision other than pursuant
to a convention called by the legislature, the new constitution was
illegitimate.

This is probably the dominant view of the matter in american politics
today. But it was, and remains, rank nonsense; under that theory of
politics, both the American Revolution and the adoption of the
Constitution were fundamentally illegitimate and illegal. You can try
to argue that they were exceptional events, but it’s hard to find a
reasoning for the exceptionality of those events which doesn’t also
encompass the situation in Rhode Island in 1840. (And that’s before
you even get into the point that the charter, having been granted by
the King of England, was itself fundamentally illegitimate, and in no
way a representation of popular sovereignty).

The charter government’s theory was backed up by the fact that it
controlled the armory, the state treasury, and the police. It adopted
measures which made it illegal to run for, or accept, office in the
constitutional government; while the election proceeded anyway, this
scared away many of the middle class supporters of the constitution.
The prospect of fighting scared away more, and a nasty vicious circle
developed: as more moderates were scared away, the legislature became
more and more radical, scaring away even more moderates. The elected
governor (Dorr, after whom the rebellion is named, and a man who was
in the strange position of being governor of the constitutional
government while a legislator in the charter government) tried to
seize the armory; he failed, and fled the state.

Unable to convince the charter government to step aside, and at first
unwilling to fight for control of the state and then later unable to
amass the military force to do so, the constitutional government
collapsed after only a few months. Dorr was arrested when he foolishly
returned to the state, tried and convicted of treason, and sentenced
to life in prison. The legislature disbanded. The constitution was
forgotten.

At the same time, though, the rebellion caused the charter government
to concede the point: it called its own constitutional convention,
which revised the constitution to ameliorate (but not equalize) the
malapportionment, and which established (a) native male suffrage
(including black men) for all who could pay a poll tax, and (b)
immigrant male suffrage for all immigrant men who could meet the old
property standard. This wasn’t as liberal as the Dorr constitution,
but it was an improvement.

Dorr’s treatment in prison became a political issue half a decade
later, and he was eventually released, but he died not long
thereafter; nineteenth century prisons were seriously dangerous to a
man’s health.

The issue eventually reached the Supreme Court. Someone whose house
had been searched by the charter government – while he was in
Massachussets – sued in federal court, alleging tortious trespass;
since the charter government was illegal, the search was not under
color of law and therefore was trespass. The Supreme Court refused
consider the issue of the legitimacy of the charter government,
arguing that it was a political question not subject to judicial
review; the opinion is still cited today as the basis for political
question jurisdiction.
November 16, 2011 at 09:42AM

there’s an election tomorrow.

in nyc, it’s not a very interesting election.

in my part of nyc, i can vote for three different kinds of judges -
justices of the supreme court (eg, the trial court), judge of the
county civil court, judge of the civil court.

for justices of the supreme court, i can vote for five candidates out
of the five who are running.

for judges of the county civil court, i can vote for two candidates
out of the two who are running.

for judge of the civil court, i can vote for the one candidate who is running.

i’m not sure this qualifies as an election.

i’m wondering whether it says more to go vote a blank ballot or to
simply not show up.
November 07, 2011 at 10:06AM

There was a report in some paper – probably the Post, but I can’t be
bothered to search for it – over the weekend about concerns that the
electric company responsible for the cleanup at Fukushima might be
cutting corners on worker safety. Evidently the company is just barely
not insolvent, and so it makes financial sense for them to do the
minimum they can get away with in terms of providing low-level workers
with safety equipment and training.

I find the notion that a major nuclear disaster would render the
owner/operator of the plant potentially insolvent to be an interesting
one.

I should note at the outset that I am broadly pro-nuclear-power. I
take the lesson of eastern europe’s environmental problems to be that
coal is the worst possible form of energy generation; I take the
lesson of global warming as being that we desperately need to reduce
our dependence on fossil fuels for energy generation, and while
alternative energy is broadly good, they also carry an environmental
cost, and are not feasible currently on the scale needed to provide
all of our energy. Nuclear power, despite the potential for a
substantial increase in the cost of raw material, is the least bad
alternative. Most of the public opposition comes from the fact that
nuclear accidents, while low likelihood, are extremely high cost when
they happen – and it’s a natural human bias to value low-probability
high-impact events more highly than high-probability low-impact
events; we can focus on the cost of the single high impact event much
more easily than we can conceptualize the aggregate costs of all the
low impact events.

And yet, Fukushima presents ani nteresting question for pro-nuclear
people, because of the fact that the power company is borderline
insolvent.

Imagine, if you will, a comparable meltdown at Indian Point. The costs
of cleanup would be enormous; it seems highly unlikely that ConEdison
would remain solvent after those costs were incurred.

At that point, one of two things will happen. Either the government
(maybe NY state, maybe the Feds) will front a bunch of money to
ConEdison under the theory that it is too big to fail, OR ConEdison
will go bankrupt, its assets will be sold off, and the major liability
- the cleanup of the disaster – will devolve on the government
because, once ConEdison goes under, there’s nobody else to assume the
cost.

This is a low probability event, but it’s a low probability event
whose cost will very likely be covered by the state, because *not*
covering it will be unacceptable to almost everyone, and because the
cost will likely exceed ConEdison’s available resources. (And by
‘state’ here, I mean the federal government; New York State will
shoulder some of the cost but is unlikely to be able to pay for all of
it – Indian Point’s location is such that, if it melts down in
Fukushima-style fashion, the state’s economy will be severely
disrupted, too).

So, the question is – and I really don’t have an answer to this – what
kind of demands can the state legitimately place on ConEdison and
other nuclear operators to help counteract this potential problem?
Would it be reasonable, say, to create an FDIC analog where the
nuclear operators are all required to put up a certain amount of money
into a fund which then becomes the primary source of funding for
cleanup if a nuclear operator goes under after a meltdown? Do the
numbers on that work? (Even if they don’t work perfectly, it’s
probably better than the alternative).

Fundamentally, from an economic perspective, the question is how to
ensure those investing in nuclear energy internalize the cost of a
meltdown rather than simply assuming that they can slough it off on
the state. Because the costs are so large and the probability is so
low, the economically rational thing to do is to simply accept that if
it happens, you’ll go under and lose everything, and not plan to have
enough cash around to deal with it; so we have to have a structure
which keeps such operators from externalizing the cost.

Any ideas?
November 07, 2011 at 10:05AM

Wow.

From a report in the Wapo (http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/antiabortion-movement-hoping-for-electoral-victory-in-miss/2011/10/25/gIQAHEVGmM_story_1.html)
about Tuesday’s vote to change the Mississippi constitution to define
a fertilized egg and label its destruction an act of murder, two
paragraphs:

“If upheld, it could open a host of sticky questions, including
whether a woman with cancer would be prevented from receiving
chemotherapy if it could kill her fetus.”

“Personhood supporters say that such concerns have been drummed up by
opponents and that common sense will prevail in situations like the
example of the woman with cancer. The Mississippi measure does not
deal with the question of enforcement, and if the amendment is
adopted, the courts might decide that the states homicide laws cannot
apply, Kiessling said.”
November 06, 2011 at 09:41AM

It’s very rare for the voters of the world science fiction convention
to be so conflicted that they are forced to award the Hugo Award in a
given category to two winners, because voting has ended in a tie. The
only time it’s happened recently was 1992, when the award fr best
novel went to two very different books: The Doomsday Book by
Connie Willis (an incredible, devastating tale of a time when the job
of historians is to time-travel into the past to study the periods
they are interested in, and how this can go very, very wrong) and
A Fire Upon the Deep, a byzantine space opera with a first
contact subplot involving a species of dog-like creatures who, when
they are in close proximity to one another, form group minds via
telepathy. I can understand the outcome of that year’s balloting; I
don’t think I could choose between the two, myself, because both are
utterly phenomenal books in such different ways that comparing them is
a bit like comparing the relative pleasures of red curry and sour
cherry.

So I was excited last spring when I discovered that Vernor Vinge was
publishing a sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep. That book,
Children of the Sky, was released last month, and I bought it
for my Kindle shortly after I remembered its release date.
(Warning: I can’t review Children of the Sky without
providing spoilers for A Fire Upon the Deep, so if you
haven’t read AFUtD, stop now, as it’s worth reading unaware).

Children of the Sky was both good and a disappointment.

The book takes place roughly a score years after the end of aFUtD, and
the primary plot element involves attempts to resolve a real problem:
many of the other children, woken from hypersleep, simply don’t
believe Ravna’s account of the blight, and (in effect) blame her for
the fact that they’re marooned on this world without the technology
they had taken for granted before being placed in hypersleep. This
leads to strange political factions and manuevering, an unstable
society, and a fracturing of relations between the Tines and the
Humans.

That’s the less interesting part of the book, even though it
occupies the majority of the pages.

The more interesting subplot, the part I wish that Vinge had explored
more, is what goes on in the tropics: the population is too large for
proper packs to form (because of the interference by the mind thought
of other singletons), but there is instead a strange sort of emergent
hive mind, which plays a surprisingly important role in the story.

A book which focused on that and which put less emphasis on the
political manuevering would have been substantially more satisfying.
But that’s not the book we have.

And then … the ending felt incomplete. I read a review by someone
else which said that the book read like the second book in a trilogy,
and that seems to me to have nailed it; while the plots in the book
were all resolved, it felt like a tentaitve resolution, the kind of
resolution which comes at the end of act three of a five-act play
before everything changes in the fourth act. Without a commitment to a
third book, it feels incomplete.

(By way of speculation regarding a third book: does anyone else think
that the leader of the dissidents is infected by the blight in some
fashion? And doesn’t it seem likely that there is some intersection
between the choir and pilgrim which will shake the world?)
November 01, 2011 at 11:17AM

In a word: meh.

In a phrase: it’s been years since I’ve seen a movie where I’ve so
thoroughly disliked every character.

In a further phrase: what I wouldn’t have given for a faster pace, say
maybe something written by Aaron Sorkin?

Fundamentally, though, I had the same problem with this movie that I
had with Event Horizon: the ads and trailers led me to expect
something so different, structurally, from what I got, that I couldn’t
possibly have not been disappointed.

What I expected was a drama where Ryan Gosling’s character had found
out something that *his character* thought was so terrible that it
made George Clooney ineligible to be president, and he had a terrible
personal moral dilemma over what to do with it.

That’s *not* what I got: what I got instead was a sordid and
unpleasant tale of political backstabbing in which every character -
except, possibly (and then only possibly) the one who died – showed
themselves to be loathsome.
October 25, 2011 at 10:55PM

A fascinating historical oddity gleaned on the train this morning
while reading Lords
of Finance: much of the extensive power wielded by the Fed
(including open market operations) developed in the 1920s as part of
an attempt to prevent runaway inflation.
The problem was that (during the Great War) a combination of borrowing
by European governments, capital flight, and the need to buy more
goods than the English and French economies could produce, a
significant percentage of the world’s gold moved from Europe to the
US. For reasons having to do with repayment of the war debt and the
collapse of the major European economies during the war, this trend
continued during the early 1920s.
Since the US was officially on a gold standard, this meant inflation -
the money supply was theoretically dependant on the country’s gold
reserve. The NY Fed’s estimate was that, even after the immediate
post-war period, the increase in the gold reserve would require a
*doubling* of prices in order for the economy to absorb the increase
in the money supply.
Since the Fed at the time viewed its goal as being maintaining a
*stable* currency and preventing inflation, this was a bad thing, even
though the orthodoxy of the time required a gold standard. So it
developed techniques, above and beyond raising interest rates, to
suppress money supply growth in order to prevent the inflation caused
by the influx of gold.
October 25, 2011 at 09:43AM

to stop doing this sort of thing:

http://politicalwire.com/archives/2011/10/21/website_alleges_new_jersey_mayor_paid_for_sex.html
October 21, 2011 at 04:09PM