Cobb

Cultural Appropriation & The Beloved Community

This could generate some interesting discussions. I should say ahead of this that I've said 'cynical' more times than I should, whereas I mean skeptical. I don't mock people who have a notion towards the beloved community or a cultural nationalism. Obviously my parents generation actually made it. They made 'black' out of 'negro'. I simply don't see people of that calibre engaged in The Struggle. That is because, according to my reasoning, the Struggle was merely to be American Middle Class, a fait accompli. Even DuBois' Talented Tenth, well he was just talking about college education. Anyway, flavor can still be interesting if the underlying stuff is nutritious.

The Decade That Was

This decade I left the enterprise software game and entered the open source software part of the industry. I left on-premise and moved to cloud. I went from strictly database design to that plus API level programming. I moved from ksh + Perl to bash + Ruby and played with Go and Python. I went from mostly doing data marts and outsourcing data warehouse to mostly doing data warehouse backends and data management. I went from mostly batch to mostly continuous near-realtime feeds. I completely dropped Wintel and went over to Mac + Linux. Although I always had Ubuntu, I picked up Alpine, Kali, Centos. I didn't do Hadoop at all. I went from being a traveling consultant to working at home. I became much more of a Los Angeles person than in the previous two decades. 

I engaged in a lot more business running responsibilities and a great deal more sales and marketing. I learned to do a lot more marketing which had been intimidating and mysterious. I shifted my writing attitude to be more wry and less provocative. 

I stopped following politics in the prior decade, but weighed in on a lot. I switched from Republican to Independent. I made sense of the difference between Liberals, Leftists and Progressives and evaluated them from a moral point of view. I moved from blogging more to Facebook. I attended a large number of professional meetups. I moved more off of Facebook and more to Quora. I joined Instagram, Twitter and Reddit. I wrote fan fiction. I built a computer rack and began puttering at home with that. 

I put one kid into the military and two kids through college. I moved from a large beach community to a smaller downscale suburb. I got rid of by BMW and bought a Toyota SUV. I played with a motorcycle then got rid of it. I stopped playing beach volleyball. I became more of a patriarch in the family as my brother died and my son, mother and father suffered serious illnesses. I decided that I definitely want a Porsche. I participated in more activities that are affiliated with military service as a Blue Star dad. I bought a lot of knives. I did a GoRuck light, and an all day ruck walk. Oh yeah and tea. I have given up Red Bull for loose leaf Earl Grey tea. 

I started circuit training and lost 15 pounds and put on muscle. I had a lot of dental work finally done. I earned a yellow belt in TKD. I learned to prepare marvelous salads. I cut down my fast food intake. I started wearing boots, tac pants and T-shirts with slogans. I put bumperstickers on my truck. I continued to wear my hair, and moved to keeping the beard short and clean. I started reading a great deal more science fiction as well has historical fiction. I built up my bar and learned to make some new cocktails. I settled on my favorite spirits. I tried and failed to find a local bar where everybody knows my name and ended up at a breakfast joint. I made new friends and solidified old friendships. I changed my attitude about money and adopted a barbell strategy. I massively increased my creditworthiness, and rang up a bunch of debt. I made a pile of money on Bitcoin and Amazon stock. I paid off my tax debts and then cranked them up again. 

I developed my peasant theory and made a lot of progress on my novel. I began and mostly completed my martial education. I purchased two pistols and learned how to shoot them in a combat style. I attended CERT training and a citizens police academy. I attended the FBI citizens academy. I attended a NAMI program. Each of these were at least 12 weeks long. I attended a variety of church services and cleared up my position on Christianity. I studied Stoic philosophy and that continues. I started the American Wag podcast with my best friend Marc. I volunteered and organized for Rights International. 

I marginally increased my Spanish. I visited Germany, Switzerland, Australia and Colombia. I learned to love Las Vegas, New Orleans and Bogota. I cranked up my cigar habit but drank a lot less. I began a love affair with ramen. I got used to taking pills. I went through anxiety and depression and spent a lot of time in therapy. I improved my cardio, flexibility, strength and endurance. I have made peace with yoga. I began taking a great deal more video diary and slowed down my still photography. I have increased the size of 'The Terabyte' by 20 fold and now run Southwall. I admitted my love affair with cars and followed Formula 1 and IMSA racing. 

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The next decade. 

My intention is to dramatically reduce my consumption and learn to live simpler and cleaner. I aim to produce rather than to interact. I intend to cap my martial education by practicing BJJ and learning to hunt with a rifle. I want to start my own company with venture capital. I want to buy and build a Porsche. I want to marry off my daughters, and bury my parents with the least amount of fuss possible. I want to produce a more coherent set of writings and video. I am aiming for completion. I expect to retire never. I want to visit southeast Asia and Tokyo. I'd like to get to London again and see if I really want to live in Texas. I want to begin composing and performing music again. I will try guitar and piano. I would like to correspond with my intellectual heroes and gain some academic associations. I would like to build my final audiophile system. I'd like to improve my horsemanship and go on a horseback vacation. 

 

 

Venezuela Defied the Market

Venezuela promised and delivered the cheapest gasoline on the planet. You could get gas for literally something like 5 cents per gallon. Therefore to keep the refineries running, the government had to pay the difference. There is no refinery on the planet that can produce gasoline in significant quantities for mere pennies per gallon. Hell, some of the feedstock components cost way more than that. Lanthanum oxide[1] catalysts for one, and the price for that spiked in 2011. So obviously there where heavy government subsidies.

At some point all such freebies come to an end. The Venezuelan government had to raise the price of gasoline[2]. It’s no joke that when gas only costs a nickel, when you raise the price to a quarter it might not seem like much. But it’s still five times the cost. The Venezuelan’s predictably freaked out.

But you have to understand that Venezuela was not a true multiparty democracy. When Chavez took over in 1999, he literally rewrote the constitution of Venezuela. His socialists ran everything. So when he said to PDVSA that they will produce gasoline at whatever price he decreed, those who resisted were sacked. Not just executives. The entire board of directors. They were replaced by his cronies. The employees went on strike, and he fired them all.

The government continued to play games and so could survive by exporting oil when prices were high. It all collapsed with the price of oil, America’s fracking and shale oil ended up exported to VZ after their largest refinery suffered the biggest explosion[3] and fire in the world in a decade, killing 42 injuring hundreds and knocking production offline. 2015 marked the beginning of the end. Oil prices sank from 115/bbl to 53/bbl in six months. This was VZ’s single industry. Everything the corrupt government could do was predicated on the spread they could profit from during the ‘peak oil’ scare years. So instead of the oil industry collapsing, the entire economy failed.

Middle class people with skills knew, especially considering how Chavez summarily fired 20,000 striking oil workers, it was time to go. The brain drain accelerated.

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So in summary. The single governing socialist party subsidized gasoline for the masses. They paid for it in an environment of rising market prices for oil that they refused to pass on to the consumer. They did this by cutting deals with other countries and undercutting market prices elsewhere. They, meaning the government, meaning the single party, meaning Chavez and his cronies pocketed the money by purposefully defying the market.

When the price of oil dropped, the party was over, the government raised the price of gasoline causing inflation throughout the economy. There was nothing the government could do but print more money. It was an economic disaster that the people of VZ are still paying for.

Footnotes

[1] Fluid catalytic cracking - Wikipedia

[2] Hugo Chávez challenges Venezuelan 'birthright' to cheap gas

[3] Venezuelan Refinery Under Scrutiny After Deadly Blaze

On Surveillance Capitalism

Surveillance implies law enforcement. Capitalism implies commerce. So surveillance capitalism is basically the business of creating tech that police and feds use to capture criminals. I suspect thus, that Motorola would be the biggest surveillance capitalists, and whatever hedge funds create ETFs for surveillance devices. What’s the controversy?

I don’t think the phrase means what you think it means. Zuboff has invented a phenomenon that is little more than common sense. Google and Facebook are not anything more than guidance counselors for the masses. They pay attention to the forgotten people who are the consuming public and they are the new Madison avenue with psychographics in addition to demographics.

In one way, people should be glad that narrow behavioral psychographics are being used rather than broad racial and ethnic stereotypes. One should prefer mathematically disciplined behavioral predictions rather than religious biases or bigotry.

If you watch the new comedy by Chinese comic Ronny Chieng[1], pay close attention to his bit about Amazon Prime, and you will see the essence of what is driving this market. It is the fanatical drive of consumers for instant gratification. Without that, no capital would be raised because revenue driving such matters would not exist.

I have had at least two Echo Dots in my house for at least three years and I have purchased absolutely zero from Amazon via that electronic pathway. All they do is tell me the weather and turn on my lights. Occasionally they will solve trivia questions and tell me what movies are playing. But they cannot shop for me because I don’t ask them to. It is entirely unprofitable for them to try and guess my shopping needs because I shop for myself.

So here’s the thing that I understand having been in the Business Intelligence field since before Zuboff wrote her first excellent book, The Age of the Smart Machine, and Rockarts The Rise of Managerial Computing. The gruff way to put it is that non-STEM academic disciplines have been selling a pig in a poke to generations. We have overproduced in IT and the reason why millions of people are staring at mobile computing devices is because of the failure of Humanities. You have created a programmable generation that behaves quite predictably enough for us to profit with digital understanding better than your philosophy. Maybe next we’ll start a religion. Pokemon Go manages peoples time better than most business managers. Who’s fault is that?

If you are a consumer, consuming the content of Hollywood writers and all of that can be delivered digitally rather than in person, perhaps you were mistaken to dismiss the human contact and physical environments provided by Starbucks.

Again I say it this way. For all of the millions of unheard people who want “our voices to be heard”, why shouldn’t we be pleased that Facebook is listening, every day?

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The alternative is a protocol I am working on tentatively called the Circle Protocol. You can read about it here[2].

Footnotes

[1] ronny chieng netflix - Google Search

[2] Circles of Trust