Unless you can convert dark energy into a useful form of energy, then isn't it only making us use up our useful energy faster?

There are many externalities where I can come up with plausible sounding assumptions that give it whatever value I want.

I'm not sure you can get as far out ahead in resource planning as you might hope. Making decisions on this basis often requires making decisions that can't be made objectively and if you fail to anticipate a shift in which resource constraints are binding, the objective decisions you did make may not provide a useful advantage.

That said, I tend to think that most functions can either be performed by the private or public sectors, but depending on the structure of the issues, one or the other may have an edge in efficiency. There are trade offs between improved efficiency through microspecialization (favors decentralization) and improved efficiency through fluidity of capacity (favors centralization). Efficiency isn't the only element, though. Individual determination, community determination, and national determination issues can also come into play.

Even for the nonclueless users it would be kind of obnoxious. I'm not a settings minimalist, but I happen to think that if its hard to tell what flipping a setting has actually done, maybe it shouldn't be there.

Imagine... All of that just to render a napkin.

Scalar theories of value all break down in the end. I identify four fundamental quantities that aren't generally interchangeable: energy, mass, information, and computation power.

You may think that, for example, computation power is a function of energy, but instead it's a function of energy, resources arranged so as to do computation with that energy, and time to do the computation. If tomorrow you gave me enough energy to power all of the world's computers for a year, I still wouldn't be able to do two day's worth of computation in one day, but if instead you gave me two days I could do two days worth of computation.

Gathering information requires energy. If you spend one joule gathering information, are you sure you're one joule wiser, or might there be some information that might save less energy than the cost of collecting it? The existence of r-strategist species in nature seems to indicate there are times when that is the case.

Computer programs are resources. Institutional policies are resources. Networks of relationships are resources. All of these things take energy to build and maintain, but there is never a guarantee that they can be built for a fixed quantity of energy. How do you plan to account for happy accidents where a good solution was happened upon quickly with little energy investment, or for situations where a great deal of energy was wasted pursuing an unworkable idea? I don't think you can analyze away the underlying stochastic nature of information when analyzing the value of these kinds of resources.

You're missing some finer nuances here. There are some definitions of free will that are clearly impossible to implement. If you throw out those, and look at where we are out of the remaining options, I'd say that our universe's structure is the most "free willish" of those remaining options.

If the universe had processes that were non-deterministic and intractable to stochastic analysis, which I gather would meet your criteria for free will, they would actually render efforts to predict future outcomes impossible. Generally I understand free will to mean the concept that we have a notion of decisions, these decisions are based on anticipation of future events, and those future events can to an imperfect extent be predicted by analysis of past events.

The universe we live in is the middle ground between a deterministic screenplay and a universe without any kind of organizing principles that you can inscribe a story on. I'd say that a pure idealized notion of free will with both unconstrained action and meaningful decisions is impossible to achieve, but we live in a universe that actually achieves an approximation of the ideal with actions that are constrained, but with occasional surprises, and decisions that are meaningful, but always have a chance to fall short of our aims.

Just because my choices conform to probability distributions doesn't mean they aren't my choices.

Take a look at this video: http://fora.tv/2007/01/26/Why_Foxes_Are_Better_Forecasters_Than_Hedgehogs

I know it's long but it's got some thought provoking material. The short summary is that hedgehogs (people who view the world in terms of one big idea) are more likely to make incorrect predictions but occasionally they pick up on a major development early, while foxes (people who keep a sort of bag of tricks of different ideas) tend to make better predictions, in part by gathering up ideas from hedgehogs.

I think that you are a classic hedgehog. You primarily view the world through a lens colored by your concern for issues of economic liberty. I will further add that I believe you are correct in your identification of the trade offs involved in social welfare functions in government and you are a faithful advocate of the importance of one end of the trade off.

I don't think you're right about the collapsing scenario, at least not yet. There are definite concerns about some functions being unnecessary or inefficient at the federal level, although in other cases, the deficits the federal government is experiencing are a symptom of macroeconomic deficits which I'm not sure that we currently have any options for addressing. We suffered a drop in our income but the cost of our needs continues to rise.

As it happens, I work as an actuarial analyst in pension consulting. Everyone has a fundamental actuarial liability for the income they will need to live should they survive to be too old or too disabled to work. You can fund this liability yourself by saving for this eventuality, although going this route you will bear all of the longevity, inflation, and investment risks and there is a significant chance that even if you practice diligent saving and safe investing that this money will not be sufficient. If you have a pension, your exposure to these risks is reduced. Pension related shortfalls reflect the adverse impact of these risks on the backer of a pension.

The unfunded pension liabilities we are seeing right now are due to recent investment losses combined with an increasing difference between average lifetime and average working lifetime. However, these factors affect every single person who does not have a pension as well. A person who does not have a pension is effectively the sole backer of their own personal pension. Or maybe you can regard their friends and family who may be called upon to support them backers of their pension as well. The underfunding of retirement is much more severe than you realize and this is one of many problems we face competing for resources.

(For the record I personally advocate for a policy that pursues funding retirement through a combination of social security, pension plans and personal saving in a manner such that someone who completely forgoes personal saving or loses their savings would need to cut back on their standard of living significantly, but not unachievably so. There are pension plans which exceed this standard which may consider cuts, although the impact of plan design on the employer's staffing requirements also needs to be considered.)

Returning to the original topic, my expectation is that both the federal problems you highlight and the broader structural problems will play out more slowly than you, hedgehog, expect and given the current lack of policy options to address the broader issues it may be necessary to concede a current priority of simply surviving in the short term while some other matters develop. There are some prospects for a revival of the growth of American GDP and if that comes to pass there will be substantially more breathing room on the broader structural problems.

There are also some problems brewing in other countries and I'm not sure if they will harm the US or if they might create opportunities for us. China's demographic crisis due to it's one-child policy has yet to play out. Japanese and Chinese nationalism is on the rise and could lead to some form of indirect conflict between the two of them. India has its corruption problem and has been passing laws to limit foreign investment. Europe still hasn't come to terms with the fact that the Euro was a bad idea. There's always the possibility of countries in Africa of reaching a turning point where economic development speeds up in the same manner as it died for China and India.

I was just giving a flippant reply since it looked like I hit a nerve with the math. I can defend my assertion though. It's something I've given a significant amount of thought to.

In the early 20th century, there was this belief that the scientific and philosophical advances which had made so much progress in the 19th century could be extended to all problems, including social problems. So you have the nazis thinking that you could get rid of crime by studying criminals and then killing off all of the people with criminal traits. You had the communists believing that they could implement a perfect society by wiping out the elements that resist those efforts.

Both of these movements were characterized by a belief that the only way to fix problems was to get serious about them and stop all of this debate "nonsense". I believe this is what Winston Churchill was referring to when he said that "no folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism."

So there's no sense in getting indignant when I've stepped on your idealist toes. Suck it up, and if you really think your original argument that a deficit of twice what was projected is an egregious and unforgiveable error on the part of the Obama administration, then the way that you can win the argument is to identify specific spending increases tied to Obama administration executive policy that caused the error. I'm too lazy to look it up myself, but then, I'm not the one who's trying to win an argument.

The serious governments were the ones that resulted in the most death and oppression of any in history. The only ways to stop arguing with people who are wrong is to convince them their wrong or to kill them off. "Nonsense" is a byproduct of going with the first option.

I looked it up and federal revenue is about $3t, so spending should be somewhere around $4.2t for a net of $1.2t.

So for argument's sake, let's say that the graph projecting a $0.6t deficit in 2012 was based on projected revenue of $3.3t and projected spending of $3.9t. $3t is 9% lower than $3.3t and 4.2t is 8% more than $3.9t.

Just to get a feel for things, let's do the calculation again assuming the graph was based on $3t in revenue and $3.6t in spending. Then the $4.2t would be 17% higher than expected.

Deficit is a net number. It's the difference of two variables that are (reasonably) close to each other. This means that if revenue or spending changes by x% and the other piece stays flat, the deficit changes by more than x% due to leveraging. Making accurate projections of net numbers out more than a year is largely an exercise in futility since any error in either of the two pieces gets leveraged and multiplied into a larger error in the net. Worse still, revenue and entitlement spending are negatively correlated so their errors tend not to offset each other.

For the record, I don't fully disagree with you. The democrats are resisting attempts to rebalance an unmaintainable status quo (although to their credit, most of the republican proposals to rebalance things at best fix one thing and break many other things).

That's the same as asking if you can preserve the inevitability of error and death.

What you can do is trade one kind of error for another or use up one thing to temporarily save another. That's all you're ever doing in life. We end up arguing with each other over what we should and shouldn't use up and what we should try to save. Lots of people respond to this by picking a few things to try to hold on to and damning the rest. I don't mind picking a few things to try to protect, it's the "damn the rest" part that bugs me.

All are useless. They all represent futile attempts to preserve at all costs things that can't be preserved.

I agree that this is a big deal, but it's not the entire problem. As I noted, these models don't deal with real probabilities, they're a framework for dealing with market implied probabilities in such a way that arbitrages can be constructed that pay out regardless of the outcomes. It's actually a framework for constructing portfolios that are independent of future outcomes, not one that actually predicts them, although the distinction is lost on a lot of people.