Monster, in a long comment constituting a fairly spectacular demonstration of the concept “missing the point”, takes issue:
Now, let us move on to your statement of the Laws of Thermodynamics in economic terms.
2. You always get less than you pay for.
That’s not just zero-sum; it’s explicitly negative-sum. If everyone gets less than they pay for, then every transaction leaves all parties worse off than before.
*sigh* The “Laws of Econodynamics” were meant to be jocular, but —
Grade in Physics 202 (Introduction to Thermodynamics): FAIL, in big red letters with a circle around it. Oh, and a friend of mine has plans for a perpetual motion machine. Would you care to invest?
The “real” Laws of Thermodynamics are:
- Energy can be neither created nor destroyed.
- Energy can be changed from one form to another, but always with losses.
- Entropy — the sum total of all the losses — always increases.
Therefore, the Universe is a negative-sum game for everything within it, and zero-sum for the thing as a whole.
[Note two things: First, “energy” is not a perceptible “thing”, it is an existential concept — we can only perceive the effects of energy (heat, a lightning bolt, a heavy object held up by something). Second, there’s no reason for the Laws, no more-fundamental principle that can explain why the Laws are what they are — but nobody, at any time or place, and despite some truly energetic(!) attempts, has ever found the slightest exception to them.]
Energy can be neither created nor destroyed. But, if you find a concentration of energy, it will flow to an area of lower energy; and, if you’re clever, you can make that flow do something useful to you — that is, do work. But you can never get all of the energy to do useful work. Some is always lost, in spillage, friction, or some other non-useful function. That lost energy turns up in the general energy-pool of the Universe. It is no longer concentrated; there’s nowhere it can go where there is less energy, so you can’t make it do useful work any more. Entropy has increased.
One thing you can do with a concentration of energy is use it to concentrate some more useful form of energy. A lump of coal contains a concentration of chemical energy. That chemical energy isn’t very useful to you, so you burn the coal to produce heat, which boils water and pushes your railroad engine down the track. But you didn’t fool Mother Nature; the waste heat from the process spills over and warms the surrounding air, and eventually disappears into the general low-level pool of unusable energy of the Universe.
Life in general (which includes economics) appears to be anti-entropic. It is not. Life builds greater and greater complexity — bigger concentrations of energy — by tapping small energy flows from existing concentrations, mostly (here on Earth) from the Sun. In doing so life appears to make water flow uphill, to build concentrations of energy from nothing, but in fact it does no such thing. It only appears to because we don’t perceive the continuous minute flows of energy that make it work.
Machines do the same thing. We build a machine, reducing the local entropy by using energy flows to create a concentration of energy that will be useful later. We run the machine, perhaps to build something, again reducing the entropy of the machine and its work. But Ma Nature is not confused; handwaving is futile; the losses in the process of building and running the machine disappear into the useless pool, and overall or general entropy increases.
Economics can appear to be anti-entropic in exactly the same way. There’s no particular reason why one or both participants in a transaction can’t make a profit. You want to go somewhere, so you pay the airline to take you. You profit by changing your spacetime coordinates to something more desirable; the airline tallies up receipts, ka-ching! The local system entropy goes down, but the Universe gets its cut, as always, and the general entropy rises.
Ric's Rulez 
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13 September 2009 at 11:31 pm
The Monster
That just doesn’t follow. Individual things within the Universe can gain energy from external sources, and use it. You go on to discuss that very fact. You seem to be contradicting yourself quite a bit here.
Maybe you’re saying that the Universe is a negative-sum game for me because somewhere out there entropy is increasing. Meanwhile, I’m able to ride the gradient between that giant yellow concentration of energy and the cold of interstellar space, and eat pasta and sauce made from wheat and tomatoes that grew from that energy, and chicken and pigs that grew from eating plants that grew from that energy…. If you’re saying that in the Great Accounting of the Universe, there’s a bill marked “Monster’s Contribution to Entropy”, it really doesn’t mean much. I’m never going to pay that bill (so I guess I violate your first Law too), because entropy was going to happen with or without me. No one’s even going to try to collect that bill.
On second thought, if Crap and Tax ever becomes law, that might be exactly what they’ll be doing, since most of the energy storage of which we manage to make use is carbon-based. It would make a great setup selling Indulgences. (“For all have contributed to entropy, and fallen short of the Glory of Gore.”?)
And that’s why I argue “semantics” and “definitions” like this. There are people out there who will take your “jocular” wording seriously, and use it to justify enslaving us. For our own good, mind you.
I was not responding to the physics, but to the economics. Did you just stop reading what I was saying before you replied to it? Most of your post is a longer version of what I said about Thermo in the last paragraph of the comment you’ve described as “FAIL”:The actual LoT specify certain facts that only apply to closed systems, in which no energy is being added or removed. Because the Earth receives a great deal of energy from the Sun, which plants can convert into a form that animals can eat, we can obey the LoT while superficially seeming to flout them. What we can’t do is create energy from nowhere. That only happens in fiction (like the zifthkakik in TDY, which I’m sure you’ll explain in the sequel actually gets it from somewhere). We can only find more efficient ways to use the energy to our benefit.
Since you seem to work well with Lists of Three:
1. You’re the one who writes science fiction in which a major plot point is the existence of mysterious machines that seem to provide energy from nowhere.
2. I’m the one who ends my comment with a paragraph noting that fact to demonstrate an apparent violation of the 1LoT, inviting you to write the sequel(s) that explain exactly whence your perpetual motion machine gets its energy. (Without that source of energy, the apparent violation is an actual violation. And “Unicorn Farts” don’t count as an energy source.)
3. You have the temerity to respond to that comment by accusing me of being naïve enough to buy a perpetual motion machine. And you do it on a new post that doesn’t actually include my comment, just a cherry-picked quote. That makes twice now
With such testicular fortitude, and your formidable writing talent to boot, you’d be a first-string Leftist if the Dark Side ever tempted you.
Frankly, I’m not sure what you’re saying at this point, but you did open the post with the assertion that I’m “missing the point”, so I suppose that’s to be expected. But communication is a two way street. You’ve done nothing to clarify whatever your point was, and a lot to muddy your own waters:
That would seem a direct contradiction the very statement to which I objected:
Do bear in mind that it was the economic language to which I objected.
Hey, any chance you can install a Preview button on this thing?
14 September 2009 at 8:38 am
warlocketx
Monster,
The “missing the point” bit comes because I actually agree with you about the economics. The thrust of the post was intended to be that the Leftoids don’t — they don’t believe the basic assumptions that we take for granted — and to provide a basic starting point from which you could, if you would, derive their “thinking” on the subject and learn to counter it.
You insist upon adding in other considerations, notably ethical ones. The people you’re trying to talk to have a different set of ethical considerations, which they, too, add in, and the result is that both sides consider the other not only wrong but villainous. That isn’t a recipe for discussion, let alone debate, and in case you haven’t noticed, the Leftoids are fucking winning.
What you’re doing doesn’t work. It’s time to scrap it and try something else. I was trying to propose a “something else” — and you insist, demand, that we go back to the failed version. I call that “missing the point”.
As for the SF story — thanks for the kind words. Impossible things like perpetual motion machines and FTL are staples of science fiction; I did work out a justification for zifthkakik, including some basic equations which I have forgotten and lost the notepaper. The story itself is long and turgid enough that it would not be improved by long “as you know, Bob” explanations of how the gadgets work; I was more interested in presenting the peoples’ reactions to the gadgets.
Preview? *shrug* Talk to WordPress. The template doesn’t have that feature, and I’m not nearly knowledgeable enough to add it myself.
Regards,
Ric
14 September 2009 at 10:25 am
The Monster
Describing economics in zero-sum terms is what they do. How can going them one better, and describing it as negative-sum, help any?
Unless you are trying here to describe the Leftist thought process, and derive Econodynamics as their application of the Laws of Thermodynamics to the economics by way of analogy. If you are enunciating their premises, then I won’t argue with a word of it.
But it sounded like you were saying that Econodynamics is some kind of common ground we could use for discussion of economics with the Lefties. I disagree with agreeing to debate on their terms, because their premises are flawed, and lead to spectacularly bad conclusions.
14 September 2009 at 10:36 am
The Monster
And I was quite serious about how finding out how zifthkakik work, including how they can be disabled (at least from High Phase) by the pirates, what defense could be devised against that, etc., and who the Makers are (which probably are intertwined anyway), would be logical fodder for a sequel.
I accept happily that explaining the details of how zifthkakik work would not just have failed to improve, but would have actually detracted from, the story. Precisely because no one but the Makers knows how they actually work, no one else knows how to make (heh) them. The little tidbits like needing to place them near the centerline of a ship indicate that those who use them have a cargo-cultish knowledge about how they work.
And that brings us back to how leftists think, doesn’t it?
14 September 2009 at 10:51 am
warlocketx
Yup.
That’s right. I’m giving you a basic principle, along the lines of “things fall down”, that’s stripped of the ethical considerations and can serve as a starting point for determining how to think about — and counter — Leftoid preconceptions.
Send me an email (my address in “About” works) and I’ll explain the principles of zifthkakik. Implementation details are left as an exercise for the student.