I’m fond of saying that economists are the the priestly class of the modern West. The Congressional Budget Office is the Oracle at Delphi for Washington. The factions jostle with one another to please the gods and get the correct prophesy from the Oracle. Monks and scribes across the nation toil away at their spreadsheets, looking for ways to make every bit of human existence more “efficient.” Alternatively, they look to divine from statistics the truth about the unobserved from the observed. If X correlates to Y then the we must pretend that Y exists, even it doesn’t and fashion policy accordingly. That’s why I have a forty dollar light bulb that will be part of my estate.
That’s the problem with this religion. It is inhuman. Because enough people in Washington think it is more efficient to use LED bulbs, I have to sit in a weird blueish light typing this. I was perfectly happy with the old incandescent, I mean Edison, but what I want does not count. In fact, what anyone wants is entirely irrelevant. You can see what I mean in this post over at MR. Our scribes and monks are completely baffled by Russia. For some bizarre reason, the Russians keep doing things that are not efficient. Instead, they appear to be clinging to those old crazy ideas about language, history and culture. The best comment is from Jan.
Russia is in a population death spiral. For all the apparent xenophobia, they really need immigrants. Thing is, they already have ton of Central Asians working there illegally or temporarily. Something like half of Tajikistan’s income is from laborers who spend most of their year in Russia. Lots of this thing happening with Kyrgyz and Uzbeks as well.
Hall of Fame third baseman Mike Schmidt wants baseball to implement his science fiction idea that would replace umpires calling baseball games with a force field. Following up yesterday’s idea to shorten MLB games to seven innings, Schmidt thinks that using a force field would speed up games.
The idea from the retired Philadelphia Phillie is that a Star Trek like force field over the plate would shorten the game by taking the human element out of the game. Replacing an umpire with this force field would make every strike zone the same and force batters to swing.
Schmidt idea is that if a ball crosses the force field a little bell could sound indicating a strike. The idea of a force field, while interesting, is just a continuation of the silliness that seems to be coming out from people who feel that baseball needs to be fixed. The suggestions so far have been enough to make many baseball fans roll their eyes.
Umpires replaced in baseball with science fiction force fields as Mike Schmidt wants could open up the game for a lot more issues and complaints. The first thing baseball would need to figure out is how to get the force field to actually work with the strike zone rule. The strike zone differs from batter to batter based on a point near the middle of the batters chest and their knees. So a six-foot six-inch tall player normally would have a different strike zone than a five-foot seven-inch tall player.
This sounds like a capital idea. Why not take it to the logical conclusion? Instead of pitchers, why not use a pitching machine? All of that time rubbing the ball and walking off the mound is wasteful. In fact, why perpetuate the charade of pitcher and hitter. If we can have robot call balls and strikes, just have a robot randomly launch balls into the field of play. The fielders will still have to catch the ball and throw guys out. That way a “no-hitter” could be over in twenty minutes. A three-up-three-down inning would last a few minutes.
Of course, as soon as technology permits, we can replace the fielders with robots too. Since we’re now having microprocessors compete with one another, why have it outside at all? The whole thing can be done as a simulation on a super computer and the results can be displayed on a cool three dimensional matrix.
This is ridiculous and intended to be. The whole point of human civilization is not to please the Coasian gods. The point of living is to live. Part of that is knowing your decedents will stand where you stood and think of you. That’s as much a part of our biology as left-handedness. It is why we live. The whole of out lives is to cast as long a shadow as possible. Collectively, we strive and sacrifice so the people who look like us, sound like us and share out history will live on like us long after we are dust. Those crazy Ivans, who look around at the barren wombs and empty cradles, are not willing to let their people, their language and their culture be swept away in the name of efficiency.
This is why the West is so terrified and confused by Putin. Our leaders have swallowed whole the nostrums from the cult of economics. The dimwits surrounding Obama really think the Russians would prefer to be Americans. They are baffled as to why Putin is unwilling to throw his nation and his people into the great blender of Western liberalism and disappear into the gray slurry of “diversity.”