I met lots of terrific people. When I mentioned my involvement with the LDP I got an unfortuantely too typically libertarian response which is that people would like to join the LDP and vote for a candidate of the LDP if only the LDP was properly libertarian on policy X, policy Y or policy Z. Ironically many of these same people if in America would vote for Ron Paul who belongs to a political party far less libertarian than the LDP. Strange but unfortunately typical.

I would definitely hang out at one of these seminars again and I support the effort entirely. However if I was to complain about the lack of libertarian purity regarding the event it would be the obsession of most of the economic speakers with the very unlibertarian idea that fractional reserve banking should be illegal. It is the same idea that turned me off the Austrian school of economics when I first encountered it more than a decade ago. Thankfully they had one speaker, Steve Kates, who did not share this obsession. He kind of saved the day for me.

To be clear I do agree with Austrian economists when they say we should abolish central banks. This is a very libertarian proposal.

In summary libertarians can disagree on the details but should still work together where they have common cause and find agreement. So vote LDP and also support the Mises Institute of Australia.

The prospect of global warming induced by carbon emissions scares a lot of people. There are two reasons why I’m not scared. One is that I think the more alarmist predictions are overblown. The other reason is that I am very much a technology optimist. I think that technological advancement has an enormous capacity to solve most of the problems predicted by the likes of the IPCC.

Before trying to pick some winners I offered two caviets:-

• “Firstly my track record at picking winning technologies is not great.”
• “Secondly very few attempts at futurology prove successful (thats why venture capitalists have broad portfolios).”

In that article I looked at two interesting technologies. One was the thermal Solar Tower technology being promoted by Enviromission and the other was a battery by a company called Eestor. Four years on I’m less optimistic about these technologies succeeding in the market place and even if they do I’m quite sceptical about them offering any form of meaningful solution toward the global warming issue. However always the optimist I have some new tips to offer.

However first I should outline briefly why I continue to discount the hot favourites of wind power and solar power. A lot of subsidies have been poured into wind and solar on the assumption that with scale the cost of production would fall and these technologies would get cheaper. These technologies have in fact got cheaper so the proponents of subsidies can make a respectable case that they have been right. However the problem with this argument is that even as the efficiency of these technologies has improved and the costs of these technologies has reduced there are still scale issues that are in my view insurmountable. Cheaper and more efficient due to the scale of production is arguably a case of global economies of scale. Scale delivers what is known as a learning effect not to mention other cost reduction benefits. However from the vantage point of a single grid there are still massive dis-economies of scale. Converting our grid to 90% wind power will cost a lot more than nine times converting 10% of our grid to wind power. In short dis-economies of scale in grid operation will trump any economies of scale in the production of these machines.

In the last few years I have become quite interested and impressed with nuclear technology. It is a solid proven base load power source that can scale. France get’s over 80% of it’s electricity from nuclear power plants. Despite the bad publicity it has an incredibly good safety record as I discussed in my article here called “Safety and Electricity Production“. The recent events in Japan have done little to dent that view. However in spite of being safe and viable nuclear power contributes less than 15% of the worlds electricity. The issue is cost. Nuclear power remains expensive for a host of reasons.

Part of what makes nuclear power expensive is sovereign risk and excessive regulation. That is the risk that the government will under pressure change the rules half way through the construction of a nuclear power plant or during it’s operating life or that regulators will make it hard to achieve construction deadlines or to operate profitably. The argument is that governments driven by sections of the community with a hyper unrealistic view of safety drive regulators to extreme levels of interference and the costs mount up until nuclear plants are not cost effective. Those that argue for this explanation point to the fact that nuclear construction in the US halted after the melt down at Three Mile Island in 1979. However whilst I think there is some truth in this argument the construction of nuclear plants was halting before the Three Mile Island accident because of higher than expected construction costs.

For nuclear power to be a solution to the global warming issue it really needs to remain safe but it needs to be cheaper than coal. Given that a lot of the costs are tied up with safety systems these two goals seem to be in some contradiction. What is required is a radical rethink of the design of nuclear power plants. Which is where we get to my latest attempt at picking a winner.

The Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) has never operated commercially but it has an impressive set of design characteristics that suggest that it should. However to understand them we need to understand some of the features of conventional reactors. The list of advantages is long so I’ll only touch on some of the major ones.

Conventional reactors heat water to high temperatures (hundreds of degrees). The hot water is used in a heat exchange to drive a turbine system. The problem with this approach becomes apparent when you think about how it is that water can be heated above 100 degrees Celsius and remain in liquid form. The answer to that puzzle is pressure. The water in a typical reactor is compressed to around 100 times atmospheric pressure. That means very think reactor walls. It also means if there is a leak the water will flash to steam and rapidly exit the reactor. In doing so it will carry out radioactive elements. These will be captured by a containment building but that building needs to be very large because when high pressure water converts to steam the volume increases massively.

What if the water in such a reactor could be handled at normal atmospheric pressure and still remain liquid? And what if when there was a leak the water oozed out slowly and then froze solid? And what if we could still have it at very high temperatures in the reactor? This highlights the first big advantage of the LFTR. Of course water does not have these properties and the coolant used is not actually water. It is molten salt. The reactor runs at atmospheric pressure which means the construction does not need to handle high pressure, the molten salt is a very good thermal conductor so it works well as a coolant,  and if the salt leaks out it freezes to a solid and tends to block the leak.

The second big advantage with the LFTR is that the nuclear fuel is not solid like in a normal reactor. The nuclear fuel is actually dissolved in the coolant.  There is a clever way to add fuel at any time without shutting down the reactor. So rather than stop the reactor and add 18 months worth of fuel in one top up, the reactor can be fueled continuously as required. The stock of fuel in the reactor is in general vastly smaller than the stock of fuel in a normal reactor. Likewise the reactor does not need to be stopped to extract the waste products. This approach also removes nearly all the costly fuel fabrication processes that current reactors require. In fact the business model today for nuclear companies is to basically give the reactor away at cost and make all the profit on fuel fabrication.

Even just in terms of the raw conversion ratio between fuel and electricity the LFTR requires about 200 to 300 times less fuel than a conventional reactor. And it can be fueled using existing stockpiles of nuclear waste. At the end of the process the longest lived waste products are incredibly tiny in volume and are radioactive for only 2 to 3 hundred years. Many substances such as glass are chemically stable for much longer than 300 years and chemical encasement becomes extremely viable.

The raw fuel for these reactors is Thorium. Thorium is much more abundant than uranium.

There is a lot more to these reactors than I have outlined here. I have not gone into the construction and operating costs but they are anticipated to be very favourable. I’ll leave you with this TED talk by Kirk Sorensen.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/commentary/private-prisons-are-best/story-e6frgd0x-1226059946691

Here is a little bit from the recent debate.

http://www.news.com.au/national/gays-christians-clash-at-protest-rally/story-e6frfkvr-1226055977537

Guys – live and let live. Peace and love. If you want to have a bashing session do it in the ring not on the streets.

The Fort Macquarie Tram Depot was built in 1901. In spite of being an important part of the heritage of Sydney it was torn down in 1958 to make way for a theatrical venue.

Fort Macquarie Tram Depot

In 1959 construction of the Sydney Opera House began on the site of an old tram depot. It opened in 1973. In 2003 it was listed in the  State Heritage Register of New South Wales. It made the National Heritage List in 2005.

I think the Sydney Opera House is fantastic. I would never suggest that we demolish it. However I do find it ironic that if todays standards of heritage protection had existed in the past then this iconic building that is recognised around the world as a symbol of Australia and of Sydney would never have been built. Todays heritage required the destruction of the pasts heritage.

I wonder what other world class constructions we are missing out on because we have become fascinated with preserving the past. If it were possible to wind back time would we give up the Sydney Opera House to preserve Fort Macquarie?

Much of religion has often struck me as a somewhat closed system of thought.  Judaism, Christianity and Islam and are each centered on a set of scriptures (the Torah, the Gospel and the Koran) that is closed to amendment and revision. They are not intended to be amended or updated. Although clearly the Gospel and the Koran are presented as extensions of the Torah.  Not being terribly religious I wouldn’t much care about any of this except for the fact that a large quantity of people on this planet are religious, some of them deeply so. It concerns me that people should wed themselves to a system of thought that is closed. In some regards it actually offends me. We should be open to new ideas and if the new ideas are superior we should abandon old ideas.

Over the last decade, whilst remaining an atheist, I have acquired a more nuanced understanding of the Christian faith. One thing that has become apparent is that whilst the written Bible is a closed text, the Christian faith relies on more than this written doctrine. It has a substantial oral tradition that evolves and supplements the closed text. The text of the Bible has an openness called “open to interpretation”. In fact a great amount of effort is expended trying to sell one form of interpretation over another. For instance whilst the Bible says that woman should not speak in Church (1 Corinthians 14:33,34) alternate interpretations based on the context of this passage allow contemporary churches to rationalize their way around the decree. Stories that if taken literally would represent quite a dire conflict with contemporary values are taken as allegoric or limited to a specific context and any such crisis is averted. To me it seems a strange system but who can question the enduring nature of something that has stood for over 2000 years. In one sense it creates a necessary illusion of consensus amongst people who in fact have quite a lot of disagreement.

One book about Christian history that impressed and influenced me greatly was “In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture“. It is primarily about the translation of the Bible into English and the challenges, technical, political and otherwise. One aspect that struck me was the difficulty in shifting meaning successfully between languages and the problems of literalism. Specifically the problem relates to idioms. For example in English we may refer to somebody as “hot under the collar”, however a literal translation of this idiom into another language would be hopelessly devoid of the correct meaning. Our language, and most languages, are sprinkled full of tens of thousands of such idioms. Some more examples of idioms are “sprinkled full of”, “the wrong end of the stick”, “it makes your blood run cold”, “step up to the plate”, “at the drop of a hat”, “burst out laughing”. Whilst the Bible is open to interpretation it is also open to translation. Both in good ways and in bad ways. A faithful translation maintains the literal meaning without translating the literal words and idioms or omitting things that are assumed in one language but which need to be made explicit in another.  The word “spring” for example has multiple meanings and a lot depends on context. A “spring” might be a hole in the ground from which water may flow. A “spring” might be a compressed metal coil. “Spring” may be a season of the year. And the idiom “a spring in his step” means something slightly different again.

My exposure to Islam and the Koran is vastly more limited. Obviously the media has been a primary source of my understanding. Given the medias performance on other topics this gives me some pause. Also I have had a few personal encountered with adherents of Islam, unfortunately most of them left bad impressions. One of them I actually sued.  Obviously the events of 911 nearly a decade ago have sharpened and contextualized my interest in this religion and the Koran.

The original language of the Koran is Arabic. Arabic is not the native language of most Muslims.  So it stands to reason that there is room for many problems in translating the Koran, let alone the subsequent interpretation. Both translation and interpretation seem like important considerations in how this religion will play out over time. So it was with some fascination that I listened to a podcast in which Muhammad Abdel-Haleem, a moderate Islamic scholar based in London, outlines why and how he wrote a new English translation of the Koran. If you are interested in such matters I commend it to you. You can find the podcast by clicking here.

None of this has enlightened me as to why we should take religion seriously. However I do take it serious in so far as it influences the life of a large number of people. It remains interesting because people, their beliefs and their behaviour is interesting.

http://www.goldmoney.com/gold-research/vietnam-to-ban-gold-as-legal-tender.html

Governments will always be able to shut down any serious alternate money schemes. Or at least that’s what I thought until I recently discovered BitCoin.

BitCoin is a cryptocurrency. It entails using encryption techniques to trade and verify electronic tokens between computer users. It is essentially anonyomous like cash. I had looked at such systems in the past but all seemed to rely on the need for a central clearing house during any exchange of the tokens to avoid fraud such as double spending of the same electronic token. And any private currency based on a central clearing house is vulnerable to shutdown by hostile government authorities. BitCoin has a clearing house but BitCoin get’s around the clearing house problem in a really neat way. The clearing house is a distributed peer to peer system. There is a clearing house but it does not live anywhere and is not controlled by anybody. It is a community based system tied into a set of open source algorithms that can’t be changed unless the majority of the community agrees to change them by replacing their individual implementation. And the larger the community the harder it becomes to change the core algorithm. A hostile government authority can’t kill the system by going after a person, a company or a particular datacentre. In a way the BitCoin clearing house is like the BitTorant network that people use for sharing pirated movies and music. Even if they make it illegal nobody can police it. In essence BitTorant looks on the face of it like a private online currency that is unstoppable. The future of online commerce will be a BitCoin cash economy.

There is a lot more to say about BitCoin. About how the unique BitCoin creation process will soon lead to BitCoin deflation (BitCoins are currently exchanging at about US$0.90). However none of this really matters because the technique is now available to create BitCoin competitors if it turns out that there are economic limitations that impact the practicallity of the original. The code is open source. Anybody with the right programing skills can create BitCoin2, expound it’s superior benefits, create an anonymous peer to peer community based clearing house and compete with the original.

One other cool thing about BitCoin. Nobody knows the real name of the BitCoin inventor. It is just “out there”.

http://www.e-gold.com

http://www.bitcoinme.com/

My view on the Libyan no fly zone is layered. In the first instance it is nothing to do with Australia so we should in essence ignore it. From a US constitutional perspective it seems clear that the UN is seen by many as having more moral and practical authority than congress. From a military perspective it seems mad to enforce a stalemate and if your going to make yourself an enemy of the Libyan government you should make the destruction of the Libyan government a core military objective. I don’t see any shining lights in this fiasco.