The most retarded 'argument' I've ever seen

I came across this article earlier today, h/t to Longrider at Orphans of Liberty, and so it's about time I made another blog post. I'm amused and shocked that this sort of tripe still passes muster from anyone old enough not need help from the teacher to tie their shoelaces.

The article starts off with a bold claim:

Secondhand smoking is more dangerous than main smoking. It creates more serious health hazards. It is the cause of many modern diseases.

Wow! It should have been banned first, then, right? Since it's more dangerous?

There's a discussion of how "voluntary organizations and governments" have checked the "evil effects of smoking", leaving one in no doubt as to the hand-wringing credentials of the author, and then we get to the meat of the argument:

This secondhand smoke is more dangerous than the main smoking because ...

Yes? Yes?! Because? We're quivering with antici...pation here!

This secondhand smoke is more dangerous than the main smoking because it contains more than 50 substances that can cause cancer and other hazards through passive smoking.

Wait, what?

Those "50 substances" aren't being sucked into the smoker's lungs? Being breathed by the smoker, with their nose mere inches from the cigarette? Perhaps the "50 substances" are scared of fire and therefore only affect people more than six feet away from a lit cigarette...

Secondhand smoke is "more dangerous" than smoking purely because it is "dangerous". And it's only "dangerous" by tautology. This is not an argument. Saying that something is, I quote, "more dangerous" requires an actual comparison of the danger.

Well, the article does have a second try:

Since the secondhand smoke has higher concentrations of cancer-causing agents called carcinogens than the main smoke from the smoker, [...]

That's right. Secondhand smoke, from the combustion of a cigarette, contains more carcinogens than, um, the other smoke from the same combustion of the same cigarette. And at a higher concentration, because spreading that smoke through a 32m³ volume of air in a room makes it more concentrated than containing it in the 0.004m³ volume of the smoker's lungs. It's not diluted eight thousand times or anything. There's no attempt to cite a reference for this claptrap, it's simply thrown out there as a 'fact': smoke coming out of a cigarette is 'more dangerous' to non-smokers. Perhaps smokers build up an immunity to the effects? Science demands answers!

There's a bit of a correlation/causation conflation to 'prove' that secondhand smoke is dangerous, but that's it. Apparently secondhand smoke is dangerous because some non-smokers living with smokers die. Guess what? Everybody dies. It's not even that they died of something potentially smoking-related. Heart disease. Y'know, the #1 killer in the Western World, caused by a lifetime of fatty foods and just generally getting old.

This is like someone has heard about arguments, but hasn't quite understood how they work. Yes, arguments usually contain the word "because"; that doesn't mean that everything containing the word "because" is an argument. There's the whole 'logic' thing to consider, too. Let's have some fun with examples...

This secondhand smoke is more dangerous than the main smoking because it contains more than 50 substances that can cause cancer

How about:

This secondhand smoke is more dangerous than the main smoking because the sky is blue

Or:

This secondhand smoke is more dangerous than the main smoking because my garden wall isn't three feet high

Maybe:

This secondhand smoke is more dangerous than the main smoking because the giraffe is made of brightly-coloured kites

All of which make about as much logical sense

- KoW

The Classless Society

Labour MP, and former minister, Tom Watson has been talking out of his arse as seems to be the fashion amongst his comrades. Apparently the government has a million-pound wine cellar for official functions, which he seems to think can be replaced with £10 boxes from Asda. Because nothing says "classy" dinner to foreign dignitaries than a splitting hangover the next morning.

The scale of the wine cellar is actually rather reasonable. In 2009, the famous Parisian restaurant La Tour d'Argent (try the Pressed Duck) auctioned off 18,000 bottles in the hopes of raising $1m. Its collection at the time was 450,000 bottles - compared to a mere 39,500 with a value of £864k for the UK government. Note that that's about £20/bottle on average - not cheap but hardly excessive, since you'll pay that in most pubs (and even more if you buy it by the glass). The article notes that Government Hospitality, under the FCO buys vintage wine (and port and spirits) relatively cheaply by the case and lays them down to mature. I've no doubt that some of the Premier Cru Clarets bought cheaply last year will be truly amazing in 10-20 years - perhaps when Labour are back in power - and will do the job nicely. The job, of course, is buttering up the French (and anyone else who knows fine wine) at summits. It's hard to put a price on that, but it's a damn sight more than the cost of maintaining the cellar or however much might be raised by selling off the contents.

This is, of course, token politics at its worst. Labour have increased the national debt by close to a trillion pounds and are coming up with toy policies like this which would 'save', at best, one millionth of the debt they incurred. It's appalling. It's the economics of the crack-whore: sell anything and everything to get the next fix of state spending.

It's particularly insulting in that it's a pseudo-populist line - "ordinary people drink Asda wine, therefore it's good enough for the Prime Minister to give to other world leaders" - as if ordinary people, whatever those might be, think that all wine is the same. The working classes don't tend to drink wine, except maybe a bottle of Liebfraumilch with the turkey at Christmas, but that doesn't mean they don't understand that there are differences in quality. Everyone knows that there are cheap wines which will strip the limescale off your sink, and there are really good expensive wines that rich people drink, and there are some in between (but it's a bit fuzzy which is which). My hopelessly untrained palate can easily tell the difference between a bad Merlot, a good Claret, and a 1971 Lafite-Rothschild. I certainly can't afford to drink the latter, but even from the tiniest sip it's clearly superior. Either Tom Watson can't tell the difference, which I doubt unless he smokes a couple of packs a day, or he feels that - while he is cultured - the little people won't understand and therefore the government can be berated for 'lavish' spending. Patronising.

So, just remember, folks: if Tom Watson ever invites you to dinner, either the wine will be poor, or he's a hypocrite.

- KoW

Why regulation CANNOT work

There is an interesting paper discussed here on derivatives and computational complexity - the paper makes the case that, while it may theoretically be possible to value a CDO, in practice it is likely to require intractable amounts of computation. They reduce the pricing problem to the Densest Subgraph problem, which is believed to be NP Complete (read that as "impossibly slow" if you're not interested in the details), and also show that some deliberate fraud in the CDO construction would be undetectable. Essentially it would be the same difficulty as factoring a large number - which is so hard it's used as the basis for cryptosystems.

The paper is an interesting read, and suggests that neither counterparties nor regulators nor ratings agencies could hope to know the true situation, even after the fact. That obviously implies a lot more risk than people were expecting. Hindsight is 20/20, eh? Future regulations will hit the same problem, though - there are some theoretically calculable things that you just can't work out fast enough, and we're not talking "a few days" here, we're talking "billions of years". The FSA can't do the risk calculations here, and nor can anyone else.

Ken's comment down at the bottom of that blog post makes a much more important point: it's possible to construct undecidable derivatives. I'd have gone one step further, had a paper C which pays out if B doesn't - making it superficially similar to A - and have the holdings consist only of C. With that chain, the solution isn't just unknown, it's unknowable: C will pay out if - and only if - C doesn't pay out.

This is fundamental computation theory, closely related to the Halting Problem and some mathematical results (Russell's Paradox, Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem). If the FSA had infinite computing resources, they still couldn't solve it. No matter how smart the people involved are, or how fancy the techniques, or how shiny the machine room, it's impossible. Truly, mathematically, impossible.

It follows from this that Mervyn King is completely right: the solution is to firewall the retail banks from the risks in the market. You can't tax, or risk-weight things which cannot be calculated. If two "casino" banks want to tie themselves in knots over undecidable derivatives, fine - their lawyers can make money negotiating a solution, and if one or both collapses, so be it. But the banks we rely on have to be insulated - and this can be done.

Undecidability only exists in "sufficiently powerful" computation models. Arbitrary derivatives are clearly sufficiently powerful. Long positions are not, even when the companies and funds own shares in each other. The solution, and it's a nice simple one, is to work out what instruments a retail bank can safely trade in, and limit it to only those things. You could even let the bank invest some small amount of its assets in a dodgy-as-you-like hedge fund - with the proviso that it can expect to lose 100% (but no more) of its investment and plan the risk accordingly.

Northern Rock may still have collapsed, of course - it made very poor lending decisions - but its assets would have been snapped up as a going concern. All people would have noticed is a change in the letterhead on their statements. Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers couldn't have affected the high-street banks, as they wouldn't have been allowed to gamble on them - and the other investment banks (Goldman Sachs, et al) and their shareholders would simply have had to eat their losses. Rather than the taxpayer.

- KoW

Something for the CWU to think about

While dismissal of an employee during an official strike is automatically Unfair, that carries a minimum penalty of £2700 and a maximum of £66,200 (only typically reached for extremely high earners).

Sacking 30,000 workers and keeping the temps on would therefore cost between £81m (a quarter of Royal Mail's 2008-2009 profits) and £1.99bn (less than a third of the Royal Mail pension deficit, and about a fifth of its gross revenue) in fines. An award of 12 weeks' pay at £30k per annum, for 30,000 workers, would cost £207m.

A swing of 21,208 votes would have given a majority voting not to strike in the recent ballot, and mass sackings would certainly affect the willingness of people to strike.

In a recession, with 3m officially unemployed (and about the same on incapacity benefit or the like), you do not have the public's sympathy, the costs of unlawfully firing you can be met, and there are many people willing to do your jobs without union "protection". Just a thought. Not a pretty one, admittedly, but there's nothing inherently special about people who deliver letters.

- KoW

Climate Maths

Right, I'm getting fed up with this. This morning's metro has a quarter-page ad for the government's ACT ON CO2 campaign, explaining that I should use less water in the shower. Yes, water, that well-known carbon emitter.

According to this campaign's FAQ, "Over 40 per cent of CO₂ emissions in the UK come directly from what individuals do – for example, using electricity in the home and driving cars. That means we can all make a difference. If every home can install 270mm loft insulation, it would save 3.8 million tonnes of CO₂ – the same as the annual emissions of around 650,000 homes."

OK. Maths time!

A typical person breathes about 7-8 litres of air per minute, 11000 litres per day.^[source]. Sanity checking, this means that a person would breathe all of the air in a lift once in a few hours, which seems plausible.

Using the ideal gas law, pV = nRT, we can calculate how much air this is in molecular terms. Pressure (p) is around 1 atm (by definition) or 100000 Nm^-2. Volume (V) is 11m³. R is the gas constant, 8.31 Jmol^-1K^-1. T is the temperature, let's say 293K (20 degrees Celsius / 68 degrees Fahrenheit). Solving for n, we get 452 mol of gas.

The air we breathe out contains approximately 4% more CO₂ than the air we breathe in.^[source] This means that 18 mol of the gas is CO₂. The reason for using the mole (~6.03x10²³ molecules) as a unit is to simplify calculations: CO₂ has a molecular weight of ~44 g/mol (12 for the carbon atom, 16 each for the oxygens) and so 18 mol of CO₂ weighs 795g (1.75 lbs). Let's round that to 800g / 0.8kg as these calculations aren't accurate enough. That's on the same order of magnitude as the food and water intakes, so it seems plausible.

A typical person produces 800g (0.8kg, 1.75lbs) of CO₂ per day.

Now, the fun begins. There were approximately 6,790,062,216 people in the world in July 2009. ^[source] A bit too much precision, there - let's call it 6.8 billion now. Multiplying 6.8bn people by 0.8kg/person/day and 365 days/year gives us 1986 million tonnes of CO₂ per year. Can't really support four significant figures, so let's round it to 2000 million tonnes.

The human population of Earth produces 2000 million tonnes of CO₂ per year simply by breathing.

Hang on, though. That rounding was 14 million tonnes! Let's go back to our ACT ON CO2 quote. A mere 3.8 million tonnes is the annual emissions of 650,000 homes, so that rounding error would be the emissions of 2.4 million homes - about a tenth of the UK. Wow!

Talking of those 650,000 homes, though... their 2.2 inhabitants will each produce 0.292 tonnes of CO₂ per year, so 0.42 million tonnes of CO₂ - 10% of their total emissions - is produced by respiration. Is that supposed to be scary? That we breathe as much CO₂ as we waste through not having 9" thick loft insulation?

The government wants us only to emit 159 million tonnes of CO₂ per year by 2050. Bit of a shame that the UK population exhales over 18 million tonnes of CO₂ per year - more than 11% of the total.

Even more telling: the UK's entire current "carbon budget" - for power, transport, and everything else - is the same as the amount produced by the Chinese population simply breathing.

More than a tenth of the "damage" we do to the environment is through respiration; I'm inclined to think that such small multiples are irrelevant. Exercise and sex greatly increase respiration volumes - by more than a factor of 10.

Your breathing during heavy exertion, 150 litres/minute, accounts for more than twice as much CO₂ production as everything else in your life put together - driving, flying, importing non-seasonal vegetables, technology, heat and light, etc.

How about we stop worrying about trivial amounts of CO₂ and just get on with living?

- KoW