Protecting Steel from Foreigners

Last week I made an argument that there were some circumstances where protectionism might be logical and needed. Apparently the president agrees, because it's part of his economic stimulus package, particularly in regards to steel.

Almost immediately, representatives from the EU began calling for the removal of any protectionist elements from the bill, particularly with regards to steel. European steel isn't the problem. European steelmakers operate on a fairly level playing field with US steelmakers because Europe requires their factories to meet standards similar to those in the US with regards to pollution, product and worker safety. The problem is Asian countries who don't have these safeguards and can produce steel much cheaper because they don't.

There's a diplomatic problem though, with singling out Asia or particular Asian countries from the stimulus bill, which is probably why they chose to word it so that it covers all foreign-produced steel. The other possible problem is that I suspect this aspect of the bill comes from the United Steelworkers Union and invoking protectionism for the sake of unions can be problematic.

It may also be that we have WTO, EU and other treaties that prevent this element of Obama's stimulus package. If that happens, then we have the choice of either passing them as is and trying to change the treaties after the fact, or we can remove the provision until such time that we can secure changes in these treaties, or we can just pass it as is and let the chips fall where they may with regards to any trade treaties.

I can't recommend the third option, but I can't rule it out either. The answer here has to be a policy of not entering into international trade agreements with countries who use a lax legal environment with regards to pollution, worker and product safety to cut costs and make their products cheaper than ours. If we can get the EU to agree with us on this, then the move would have even more clout. Moves like this might even make agreements like the Kyoto document redundant and unnecessary.

The Science of Thought

Scientists think a lot about thought, but what they've come up with so far seems to ask more questions than it answers.

Emerging is a body of theory suggesting that the brain has four distinct functions. I'll list them in order of how much we seem to understand about each.

Perception is the flow of information as raw data from our sense organs to the brain. We know that data flows from our organs to the brain through nerves allowing us to "tap into" those transmissions, giving us a pretty clear picture of what's going on. Scientists can even trace data flowing through the optic nerve to re-create the image our eyes send to our brain, (although not very well). Scientists understand enough about this function to create working artificial eyes.

Thought itself seems to be the interaction between different parts of the brain. We may know more about thought than other brain functions because technology allows us to make images of thought as it happens.

While nobody has legitimately been able to use science to "read" thoughts yet, we can see pretty clear patterns of activity within the brain based on what the subject is doing or thinking about. We're also pretty good about tracking the effect of damaging or disabling particular parts of the brain on the activity of thought.

Memory we know a lot less about. Some say memory is entirely electrical, some say it's electro-chemical, almost nobody believes it's entirely chemical anymore. Some believe memory is the interaction between clusters of brain cells, but there is study showing that individual brain cells might be capable of holding memory by themselves.

Invariably, when scientists write about or think about memory in the brain, they tend to relate it to memory as we know it in computers. I often wonder if that paradigm isn't holding us back. It's entirely possible that memory in the brain is nothing at all like memory in computers, which might explain why we've made far fewer advances in artificial intelligence than we thought we would by now.

Consciousness we know the least about. We think that consciousness is the merger of perception, thought and memory, but it might be something completely different. Although you'll never get scientists to admit it, at this point along the way, religion tells us about as much about consciousness as science does.

There's a growing number of scientists who draw a relationship between consciousness and quantum physics. If this is true, then the intelligence in "intelligent design" might be our own. If it's true that consciousness creates reality on some quantum level then that changes everything we ever thought about everything.

Image: Leonardo Da Vinci sketch-study of the brain