Cobb

How to Hide 1Kg of Diamonds

So let’s start with giving an evaluation. A parcel of stones at VVG1 to VVG2 at an average size of .35 carats with F-G color will net out to about $3250 per carat. 1kg of such stones will be about 14,285 stones worth about 46.5 million dollars US. So really the question is how would you hide about 15,000 little things worth 45 million bucks. Your ability to hide them depends largely upon one thing, which is your ability to sell them.

If you have no ability to sell any of the stones, then you can only use conventional means, IE something anybody could think up on a middle class salary. In which case you might as well just throw them in the ocean because you’re going to get yourself killed or jailed the moment one person finds out. So there’s a Clean Approach and a Dirty Approach.

Clean Approach
So the first thing a smart guy will do is to approach someone with moolah and someone you can trust with your life. So for me, I happen to know a couple such people as I am fortunate in that regard. One of them is a Wall Street broker. He would know someone who deals with that level of investment with whom I would partner. I convert a fraction of my diamonds to cash, essentially 2 million worth, and give the other people the impression that this is the extent of my cache. I then set up an entity through which I can employ my own skills and improve them. This would include a cursory understanding of the diamond trade and a couple of trips to such traders and producers. The aim of these trips is to determine how far I can get away with selling diamonds legitimately without being a known quantity in the business. In other words, I’m setting up a diamond laundering business, but I can remain overground and live fairly large.

Dirty Approach
The other way to go is go underground, which means I live low rather like a card sharp. I produce the occasional rock in card games, to used car dealers, to pawn shops all at a level that people will immediately be able to handle and not talk about. In this case I have to do a lot of low rent stashing and have a 5 year plan to raise about 200k per year.

OK so either approach gets me to the point at which I can use sophisticated means to hide my stash. It costs money to hide money.

The Stashes

One - The Big Pentagram
I’m thinking undeveloped land in New Zealand would be the best thing for buried treasure. It’s not hard to get there. It’s not a dodgy place. I’d keep the biggest fraction there, roughly half, in five plots underground in a pattern. How about a pentagram 100 meters across? Uncleared woods. GPS tracked. Iron rebar markers with RFID tags. On a hill. (25 million)

Two - Obvious
I’m going to make a mistake. So it might as well be a stupid mistake. So I’m going to seed the stupid mistake ahead of time so the over-confident detective gets to talk shit. Which means I’m going to put the stash under my mother’s grave, or in a mausoleum niche having bribed a groundskeeper at a cemetery in my town. I will be observed making regular trips. (2 million)

Three - Attorney Client Privilege
This is the first technically challenging one to place. I troll around to find an attorney like Go Call Saul from Breaking Bad. Living in LA with its drug trade, I’m sure I can find a gang attorney relatively easily. I will put it into this attorney’s hands. I don’t know or don’t care where the attorney puts it, but he only gets his cut as trustee based on his ability to sell the diamonds himself. This is the one I plan to live from. (7 million)

Four - Charity
I use geocaching to place a handful of random stones into that game. Once a year I travel out of the state and place a rock into a geocache. I drop a rock off into the coffers of various churches in my travels. (<1 million)

Five - Rich Bitches
I develop a rapport with douchebags of all sorts who can fence this kind of stuff on their own. I develop a reputation and then flame out quickly. It will cost me getting my ass kicked but among that crowd I will clearly appear broke and flamed out. Kills suspicion. (1 million)

Six - Other Hidey Holes
Smaller versions of the pentagram. All self-service all visited during peak tourist season.

1. Black River National Forest: Michigan
2. Mount Washington: New Hampshire
3. Hot Springs: Arkansas
4. Sturgis: South Dakota
5. Gifford Woods State Park: Vermont

And I periodically check Quora, detective novels and CIA spycraft legends just to make sure I’m up on the best ideas. After all, I’ve got nothing else to do.

How To Hide 1Kg of Diamonds

So let’s start with giving an evaluation. A parcel of stones at VVG1 to VVG2 at an average size of .35 carats with F-G color will net out to about $3250 per carat. 1kg of such stones will be about 14,285 stones worth about 46.5 million dollars US. So really the question is how would you hide about 15,000 little things worth 45 million bucks. Your ability to hide them depends largely upon one thing, which is your ability to sell them.

If you have no ability to sell any of the stones, then you can only use conventional means, IE something anybody could think up on a middle class salary. In which case you might as well just throw them in the ocean because you’re going to get yourself killed or jailed the moment one person finds out. So there’s a Clean Approach and a Dirty Approach.

Clean Approach
So the first thing a smart guy will do is to approach someone with moolah and someone you can trust with your life. So for me, I happen to know a couple such people as I am fortunate in that regard. One of them is a Wall Street broker. He would know someone who deals with that level of investment with whom I would partner. I convert a fraction of my diamonds to cash, essentially 2 million worth, and give the other people the impression that this is the extent of my cache. I then set up an entity through which I can employ my own skills and improve them. This would include a cursory understanding of the diamond trade and a couple of trips to such traders and producers. The aim of these trips is to determine how far I can get away with selling diamonds legitimately without being a known quantity in the business. In other words, I’m setting up a diamond laundering business, but I can remain overground and live fairly large.

Dirty Approach
The other way to go is go underground, which means I live low rather like a card sharp. I produce the occasional rock in card games, to used car dealers, to pawn shops all at a level that people will immediately be able to handle and not talk about. In this case I have to do a lot of low rent stashing and have a 5 year plan to raise about 200k per year.

OK so either approach gets me to the point at which I can use sophisticated means to hide my stash. It costs money to hide money.

The Stashes

One - The Big Pentagram
I’m thinking undeveloped land in New Zealand would be the best thing for buried treasure. It’s not hard to get there. It’s not a dodgy place. I’d keep the biggest fraction there, roughly half, in five plots underground in a pattern. How about a pentagram 100 meters across? Uncleared woods. GPS tracked. Iron rebar markers with RFID tags. On a hill. (25 million)

Two - Obvious
I’m going to make a mistake. So it might as well be a stupid mistake. So I’m going to seed the stupid mistake ahead of time so the over-confident detective gets to talk shit. Which means I’m going to put the stash under my mother’s grave, or in a mausoleum niche having bribed a groundskeeper at a cemetery in my town. I will be observed making regular trips. (2 million)

Three - Attorney Client Privilege
This is the first technically challenging one to place. I troll around to find an attorney like Go Call Saul from Breaking Bad. Living in LA with its drug trade, I’m sure I can find a gang attorney relatively easily. I will put it into this attorney’s hands. I don’t know or don’t care where the attorney puts it, but he only gets his cut as trustee based on his ability to sell the diamonds himself. This is the one I plan to live from. (7 million)

Four - Charity
I use geocaching to place a handful of random stones into that game. Once a year I travel out of the state and place a rock into a geocache. I drop a rock off into the coffers of various churches in my travels. (<1 million)

Five - Rich Bitches
I develop a rapport with douchebags of all sorts who can fence this kind of stuff on their own. I develop a reputation and then flame out quickly. It will cost me getting my ass kicked but among that crowd I will clearly appear broke and flamed out. Kills suspicion. (1 million)

Six - Other Hidey Holes
Smaller versions of the pentagram. All self-service all visited during peak tourist season.

1. Black River National Forest: Michigan
2. Mount Washington: New Hampshire
3. Hot Springs: Arkansas
4. Sturgis: South Dakota
5. Gifford Woods State Park: Vermont

And I periodically check Quora, detective novels and CIA spycraft legends just to make sure I’m up on the best ideas. After all, I’ve got nothing else to do.

Terms of Endearment

I don't say 'male' or 'female'. Not even for newborn infants.

What I mostly say is 'dude' when I am slowing down to describe something basic to a man who has temporarily lost his mind. For them 'Dude' is a preface to a basic fact. As in "Dude, the earth is round."

In passing I will describe chicks and dudes as people with no particular sophistication. Like, some chick ran her Prius into a telephone pole. Some dude slipped on a banana peel. This could be a dumb mistake because if I thought it was something the idiot could have been predicted to screw up, I will call them an idiot. I will almost never call an idiot female a knucklehead. A knucklehead is a generally transgressive dude who is goes beyond being a problem as to one who causes trouble.

I have described, on many an occasion, and perhaps out loud that a bastard is a man who has been abused and unloved in such a way as they have been convinced that this is the way of the world. Or at least it is the way they will treat others, with no respect except for those who adhere to rules while waiting like a buzzard for them to break one. A bastard usually has an absent or asshole father although occasionally bastards are orphans. The female equivalent of a bastard is a bitch. I don't often think that men behave as bastards, rather that they inherently are. A bitch on the other hand may just be acting like a bitch. A powerful bastard often has the temerity to be violent and may act decisively without remorse. A bitch will not be violent although a crazy bitch will. Bastards and bitches are vindictive and 90% of the time not soulless, but often have no tact and aren't interested in criticism of their methods. They have a right to be hostile, according to themselves. A 'bastard' who is merely acting out is dick and dick moves abound. Someone who is acting like a dick, as with a good plurality of bitches, may often be rescued from their evil ways given that there are sufficiently courageous individuals who will point out their social transgressions.

Ladies and gentlemen are self-aware women and men who strive to behave appropriately. However it is not altogether reasonable to expect such from the average Joe. Speaking of which, I make no claims for the average Jane. More often than not I will use the term 'average bear' to refer to someone of average intelligence with no bearing on their comportment. Nevertheless I am favorably disposed to the American peasantry. It is for this reason that while I may be dismissive of the comportment of yokels and bohunks, terms I prefer to 'bumpkins', I don't dismiss them entirely. I am not generally offended by yokels but I hold them in lower regards than rednecks. Rednecks are trying to uphold some kind of code. Similarly I am not as offended by people I regard as 'ghetto' and hold them in lower regards than homies who also are trying to be righteous in their own peculiar way. But while I'm in this particular domain, let me remind you of the three degrees of stupidity. 

Men and women who are not particularly interested in striving for the respectability of ladies and gentlemen, I refer to as guys and gals. However like the French and Spanish, any mixed group will be referred to as guys in passing. If I have no reason to make particular distinctions for their physical capabilities or emotional dimensions, they will be guys. As in "Are you sure you guys want to eat at this restaurant?" But I will, uniquely refer to gals collectively as women who compete in vigorous ways. I think this is unique. So definitely gals are superior to chicks. Also, I will occasionally think to myself about broads and dames. I don't happen to meet such women on a regular basis and don't often have an occasion to speak or write about them, but a certain hands on hips attitude of a female bartender who is smoking is reminiscent of a broad or dame. They won't necessarily be unattractive, merely rough hewn. The male equivalent of a broad or a dame I would generally refer to as a character. One worth mentioning would be a 'character straight out of Characterville' as used by Schatze Page from the film "How to Marry a Millionaire", a dame portrayed by Lauren Bacall. A female soldier is a gal. A female drill sergeant is a broad or a dame, but rarely will I leave 'broad' or 'dame' unadorned by the proper number of adjectives.

As I think on it, I would be rather embarrassed to refer to a gentleman as a dude, or a lady as a chick. Nevertheless there are various shades of knuckleheads who will be called out of name with some measure of opprobrium. My mind goes to the worst epithets I can think of, those I think of as lower than idiots. After all, idiots are problems, knuckleheads are trouble. Right now I am told that a 'cunt' is the lowest of the low, but the term has never had any great emotional resonance with me. Nevertheless I interpret some cunt as a particularly nasty, creepy or sheisty bastard. I might be able to wrangle some respect for a clever bastard or a cheeky bastard as they may be nothing much worse than an asshole on a bad day. By the way if you are not familiar with my use of the term 'sheisty' I mean purposefully deceitful. But I do appreciate that someone called a cunt is irretrievable as in "Eat shit and die, you miserable cunt." Excellent parting words, and not something you could ever be expected to be forgiven for or apologize for. So in this regard I am much more apt to be conventional with my ultimate insulting terms. 'Motherfucker' is a word that is fat and juicy in my mouth and I feel quite delicious in pronouncing it in the direction of the right human shitstain.  But there is, incidentally a certain kind of cretinous coward I find particularly odious and these times seem to be presenting me with more opportunities to mock them derisively. I think it must be repeated, however, that 'cunt' just doesn't register much more than a 6 on a scale of 1 to 10. Without further ado I present you with 'twunt', a combination twit, twat and cunt. That would be a stupid, cowardly bastard who makes too much noise and is incapable of anything beyond noxious bleating. A twunt will bear false witness against his or her neighbor in a heartbeat. Fucking twunt. Pussies I can understand. But a conniving twunt is like that little sickly twisted beak creature yammering in front of Jabba the Hutt. A cutthroat who can't even heft the knife. Hmm. Mayhaps the very existence of my invention of 'twunt' is capable of lifting 'cunt' out of its relative lightweight status. In thinking once more about cunts, I also don't see how calling any woman a cunt is so horrible although I wouldn't because I don't use the word, but it occurs to me that there is a connotation of uselessness in the common use of the term. So add to nasty, creepy, and sheisty, worthless. Worthless, no-count trifling motherfuckers. That would be someone who is not even capable of being likely to harm himself or others but remains a constant nagging pain in the ass.

It is much more likely that I will call out assholes. Now I happen to think of myself as an asshole. An asshole is someone who doesn't mind offending people he disagrees with. In fact, an asshole is someone who exhibits more than an average amount of disagreeableness. Not one who is not merely persistent or persnickety but who carries a bit of a grudge in their disputations. An asshole spends more than their share of oxygen in putting the competition down. And yet I respect that assholes are generally attempting to defend some principle or adhere to some code, much like rednecks and homeboys. So they might actually be a clever or cheeky bastard. Nevertheless, all bastards need to occasionally come to Jesus and confess whether or not they are respectful of ladies and gentlemen. If not, they are consigned to the bastard column. Here is my message to assholes.

Now somebody once said that they had the perfect moniker for 'racist, privileged, white male' in the generic politically correct argot. They thought better of the generic demonization and said that if people would use this term, they would instantly know it to be true and righteously appropriate. That term is 'douche' aka 'douchebag' with its attendant verbal form douchebaggery. I agree wholeheartedly. Everybody knows a douche. Everybody hates a douche. 

All of these people are socially acceptable. I would never seek to have any law to remove the most trifling twunt or the most insouciant douche from society. An anti-fragile society needs such people to push the envelope. Unfortunately, we are becoming a more fragile society. Lots of people say so but I will say that it's happening for a reason. That reason is that we are in an epistemological crisis. We are simply inundated with too much information that makes it appear as though certain aspects of our lives and our world cannot be understood. People don't know how to determine the truth in a universally accepted manner, and many doubt such a method exists. So people either retreat into STEM or throw their hands in the air and decide that they just can't care. That's why you hear a lot of people saying, or implying 'fuck that'. They're brittle. They can't go there. This too is all well and good so long as the law remains enforced. All this to say that criminals are still criminals. It's one thing to be difficult and quite something else to be vicious. 

My aim therefore in this short list of terms of endearment is to clarify elaborately on what you need to know about my generally precise use of terminology to describe my fellow humans, and understand that I am not necessarily being dismissive. I am judging. We all must. I will judge openly yet with some amount of reserve.

I imagine that there are some silly bastards who can't seem to get enough of the crumbs of identity they snatch from the floor of society. I have seen on more than a few profiles a kind of announcement of preferred pronouns, which to me sounds a bit too much like a personal ad. I like that people have the imagination required to overcome the vast suckitude of modern life made boring by the brilliant arts and crafts of convenience, but if it begins with pronouns assuming the role of titles, well it's hard not to laugh.

It occurs to me that some fragment of our society requires close inspection. That is the inspection of tattooed flesh. I don't know what to think about that, as I have never had the experience of having been invited to examine a warm naked body festooned with artificial colors. Quite frankly I care more about clothes and acrobatics, but I'm starting to grasp the narcissistic appeal of second party navel gazing. So while I haven't solidified my disdain for the parochial tribalism of the tattooed, it has been gelling for some time now. I think I'll let it thaw. After all, my truck has bumper stickers.

If this then is a short compendium of characters identified by their attitudes, I hope it helps bring into use the idea of a vocabulary of casual regard and mockery that we must use and tolerate of necessity. As much as we will dislike and disregard each other, we should not mistake small or great flaws of character to be confused with criminal intent. There's a lot more of us we need to work with without the coercion of law and the escalation towards a police state.

So stop being such a silly bastard and go find an asshole you can like. Find a twunt to pity. Dude, you can do this. It will improve our society.

 

In Defense of Aquaman

Somebody asked me, because why I dunno, which superhero I would rather be. For some reason I have been thinking about them, and it occurred to me in a flash that I'd like to be Aquaman. There are several things that he has in his favor.

Firstly, Aquaman is genuine. He doesn't wear a mask. He doesn't have a secret identity. He doesn't pretend to be somebody he is not. He is genuine royalty.

Secondly, he's not some alien coming to Earth to save puny humans from themselves. He is genuinely from the Earth, from the legendary Atlantis - the most perfected Earth city ever.

Aquaman is not the first superhero you think about. That's good. He's got better things to do. He's not slumming around like Clark Kent or Peter Parker hanging out at some newspaper just looking for trouble. He doesn't believe in nation building or any ideology. He's just hanging out with his fish friends.

Aquaman doesn't have any arch-nemesis always threatening him. He's not burdened with the problem of killing somebody off so he can have peace. He's not psychologically co-dependent on some evil twin psyche. He doesn't have any rivals in his own domain.

Aquaman doesn't have ridiculous powers. He can't single-handedly destroy cities. His powers operate at the heroic level, not at the god level. So he can be trusted not to let his whim and failure wrack too much destruction.

All said, I like Aquaman, who is clearly an environmentalist, defending the seven seas.

The Modesty Point

If you interview someone. If you talk to someone about themselves. You will get one of two variations of confidence. The modest confidence and the bold confidence. It's difficult to know which one to trust.

What strikes me at the moment is that the person who is modest is probably either, unclear of where they might stand or quite aware of people who are superior to them in the context of the subject being discussed. The person who is bold is probably either, unclear of where they might stand or completely unaware of people who are superior to them. Which to trust? There is also the matter of the interlocutor. The modest person may consider that the interviewer is smart and is asking questions they already know the answer to. The bold person may consider that the interviewer needs instruction and context. On the other hand, the modest person may assume that the interviewer may know nothing and be embarrassed by a frank discussion of facts. The bold person may assume an interactive Socratic confirmation or disconfirmation.

I tend to be bold and make no assumptions about the interlocutor. I expect both theoretical and experiential disconfirmation. My interest is 'Chinese'. What can the two of us do with what we have?

A Memory of Banking Before Computer Networks

I’ll talk about retail banking in 1980 when I was a teller.

First of all, banks opened at 10am and closed at 3pm, and they were never open on the weekend. If you needed cash only a very few banks had ATMs and there were no ATM networks to speak of. The protocols for Cirrus and the others had yet to be invented and adopted. Also, if you traveled, there would be no banks in say Las Vegas that were the same as your banks in California. No banks were licensed to do business across state lines. So you really needed a credit card, and they were hard to come by. Most people used travelers checks.

So banking was slower and geographically limited and it meant a great deal if you had a credit card or American Express card. There was no Discover. There were no debit cards that were acceptable outside of your bank’s ATM network, and bank ATM networks went bank by bank (until around 1986 or so). So the idea of using a bank card at a supermarket was ridiculous. To get a credit card for a gas station or a department store was a huge privilege. There weren’t many general purpose credit cards.

Nobody had automatic overdraft protection. If you bounced a check, the branch manager at your bank would get a greenbar report of all of the overdraft checks and he would approve or deny an overdraft according to his familiarity with your account and business.

Ordinary checks written say to your supermarket could take several days to clear. This was called float. It was relatively easy to float a check - so you’d write a check on Monday and you could be reasonably certain it wouldn’t hit your bank until Thursday or Friday. And of course there was no banking on the weekend, so you could easily float a check over the weekend. There was no bank by phone, so if you didn’t know how to balance your checkbook you couldn’t just go to a phone booth and dial your bank. You had to find a branch office near where you were and wait in line for a teller, and a teller would tell you your balance. If you were lucky, they could tell you which of your checks cleared and were paid.

You wouldn’t know how your stocks were doing unless you read the paper (the WSJ of course) on a daily basis. Interday trading was unheard of. You had to call your broker and hope he would take your call. But I digress.

Deposits also took a long time to clear, so you could deposit a check on Monday and it wouldn’t clear until Wednesday or Thursday. If it was drawn on a bank from out of state, they might even put a 2 day hold on it or give you partial credit.

Very few tellers had cash counting machines and they were unreliable. So cash deposits were counted by hand, twice.

There was a world of bookkeepers, clerks, typists, stenographers, secretaries and receptionists who handled the bureaucracy of every business. So if you had sloppy handwriting, you couldn’t get an entry level white collar job, period. I ended up at the bank because I got one question wrong on an accounting test for the Beverly Hills equivalent of WeWork in 1980. My girlfriend got a job as a receptionist (lowest on the totem pole, you had to be cute and have a good telephone voice). BTW, there was no voicemail, no email, no fax. You had messengers, couriers and other schleping bagboys delivering telegrams and such. There was no encryption. People had to be trusted.

In other words, altogether things were slower and people had to be trusted more.

 

A Democratic Chaos Theory

My major take on the entire question of income inequality is that the only thing that's going to break it, income inequality being a bad measure of quality of life, is if everyone suffers. What establishes any meritocracy or any system that can be predictably exploited by the masses is consistency. You have to be able to understand a level playing field so that level playing fields and consequent fair rules can be propagated throughout society. This takes time and discipline.

But what if your desire was to disable the corruptions of the powerful? Given that what establishes much of monopoly is regulatory capture, what if democracy itself was used against level regulatory playing fields. In one sense this is what President Trump is doing to the trade relationship between the US and China. He is being unpredictably arbitrary with his use of tariffs. What nobody really knows is which tariff he might raise or lower in punitive fashion and exactly which domestic businesses it might effect. For those of my associates who couldn't wait to see Trump's brand of chaos upset the Beltway Establishment, this is punk music to their ears.

So while I think power should be distributed to the masses and Federal powers limited primarily because I am against the principle of monolithic scaling, I think it might be possible to establish a level of populist chaos that results in the creative destruction of regulatory capture. But short of this being done experimentally it is interesting to me to capture the marginal changes of policy in various industries and see what exactly the uninformed public is capable of doing. It seems to me that there are limits on the predictive abilities of lobbyists and in the implementations of hindsight as well and that those changes wrought by new regulations propagate in unexpected ways.

I come at this from the perspective of what the reasonable limits of populist, disruptive or revolutionary politics might be. How successful is reform? How timely? How consistently is energy expended? How many reconsiderations are necessary? How many police actions are required, expected, carried out?

Some Thoughts about Space Colonization

Some perspective I have been missing in all of the fabulousity leading up to the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing tossed me for a loop last week. In all of the things I have been ingesting on rocketry it had only been buried in the back of my mind that the space race was not merely ideological and patriotic but in fact funded by the research behind ICBMs. In other words, putting a man on the moon wasn't really much more than another way to scale up the capabilities of the military industrial complex. Whoosh!.

What is easy to forget in the hype is that we didn't merely put a man on the moon, we took 24 men to the moon and back. My favorite, Michael Collins, drove around it while Armstrong and Aldrin left footsteps, planted a flag and took pictures. But there were many others who sat on top of the most powerful machine every built, the Saturn 5. And each of those rockets had five monstrous F1 engines. While those didn't power any of our ballistic missiles, Aerojet, Rocketdyne and Aerospace Corp learned a lot from the lessons.

So when I hear people quoting Elon Musk, whose SpaceX has done some very impressive rocketry say we should go to Mars, I'm a bit more hesitant. Like millions of Mikes born in the 60s when that was the most popular American boy's name, I wanted to be an astronaut. I read science fiction and Starman Jones was probably the most influential book of my pre-teen life. But it is clear now that nothing about the manned space program was intended to scale to the dimensions of colonization. Considering the ribbing astronauts got from military pilots there's more than a little truth that they were just handsome window dressing distracting from a MAD economy. The oratory from President Kennedy takes on a sheen of irony and slight of hand now in retrospect. I didn't become an astronaut nor an astrogator. I don't think Earthlings will get the opportunity to flee this planet.

For all of the interest on global warming or climate change or the de-humanization of forests, you would think that before we start talking about space habs, we might try much of that here. It seems to me that even given the pretense of mass colonization, Earthers are going to have to learn to live indoors in the dead cold or boiling heat for a long time. Longer than the Biodome. Longer meaning for life. So why not try and build a city somewhere in the Namib or the Arctic circle. What mix of people would not drive each other mad? How do you make water in the Sahara for 75 people in a habitat. What is the appropriate sexual balance? How many children, handicapped and seniors are necessary for human sanity and compassion to survive in desolate isolation?

These are not things most people think about as the millionaires put down their payments for space tourist reservations. Maybe we ought to. Everything cannot be saved by rockets. It certainly was not why they came about.

Ecosystem Engineering

So if you can CRISPR an infertile mosquito and half of the worlds mosquitoes literally screw themselves into extinction you will have eliminated a lot of malaria. You will also have eliminated a lot of bird food. How many humans will live? How many birds will die? If you knew the answer to that question and network searched all of the ecospherically related questions, you might end up with something that ends up counting all sorts of animals of particular interest. The trick of course is to simulate an entire ecosystem, and having done so with a complex enough model, reduce the number of unintended consequences, or at least recognize some of them in realtime for the next iteration of the model.

The biggest problem with this will be scaling moments. What happens with the death of 20 billion mosquitoes may be a completely different phenomenon than what happens with the death of a mere 2 million. This is a field of endeavor that I imagine. Look how primitive putting a wristband on the leg of a condor is compared to this.

I cannot see that the ethics of this are any more significant than the ethics of farming. Farming is certainly exactly that same thing - ecosystem engineering, in which the DNA and destiny of any number of organic species is manipulated and subordinated in a controlled manner to yield benefits specifically for the dietary requirements of humans. You control the territory. Map off a piece of the earth and subject it to human science, technology and other fiddling.

I recall some research done a long time about about wolf populations somewhere in the colder bits of Canada. At the time people could not believe that these arctic wolves could survive without eating livestock, and so farmers were shooting them. Only one researcher was brave enough to hang out at those latitudes away from supermarkets for months to study these wolves. As he came close to starving, he found himself regularly dining on roasted rats, and suddenly it became clear that large mammals could survive indefinitely on such a diet - which nobody believed before his documentation. Since then this has always been a part of my thinking and threw a great number of monster movies under the relentless logical bus in my mind. How can anything so huge survive to be strong enough to knock down buildings if all they are going to eat is a tiny human or two?

These are the matters of caloric thermodynamics to be considered. It takes energy, and these paths of energy are what should be measurable to enable such tracking of ecosystem dynamics. I don't know what shortcuts are taken in the supercomputing simulation of nuclear detonations, but there is a clue in there somewhere.

Leadership: The Hybrid Model

I am becoming more convinced that what is miraculous about AI should not seem miraculous to us any more than the miracle of the Triceratops. AI is a creation of the evolution of human thought pursuant to particular ends. If it reaches those ends, that doesn't make it generally useful or sustainable. As soon as people get bored with AI and the margins for AI development decreases, the industry and its products will suffer like flat screen TV repair. 

I read an excellent introduction to a new product called LF this morning and it has got my mind spinning and connecting a large number of dots. I will archive that original post here. In summary, it offers an interesting insight into sustainability by making the convincing observation that system developers fall in love with elegant models and tend to shy away from hybrids. I mean you teach theory, right? You cannot teach leadership. Leadership that works (as you see I'm skipping ahead to the lede) does so because it is agile. It keeps the goal in mind and it uses a variety of delivery methods for carrots and sticks contingent on its ability to see and sense. The operant phrase is in the quote:.

"Decentralize until it hurts, then centralize until it works."  

The next thing that happened was that I watch videos of Ronald Reagan and noticed how he stumbled over his answer about what leadership is. That's ok. A dictionary definition would not suffice. Reagan became clear when he reflected on his own values and his own stories. That's a very good way for a certain type of leader to operate - on the confidence with the methods that have personally worked before, yet with an understanding that whatever you do know or don't know, responsibility ends with you. If you are decided to not let theoretical impurity discourage you, ie if you are not afraid to be heretical for the purposes of a specific solution, then along with sharing the credit for success, there is nothing you can't accomplish. 

I like the idea of abandoning a slavish dedication to systemic elegance. Sometimes you have to get your hands dirty.

A Note About the Black American Elites

(from the Quora Archives - Feb 2016)

Q: Do they mostly live in DC and ATL?

A: It's more or less true. Among my peers who generally have graduate degrees, there are a handful of cities that are considered when they want to start off their careers. I would say that there is a select subset of folks who, like me, got fairly deeply into black organizations, clubs or fraternal orgs in college. So we had a certain social credibility that we wanted to extend into our professional lives. So for that kind of glory, we would naturally ask, where are the smartest, coolest most well-connected black folks going to be found in America?

The DC area became one of those spots primarily because of the number of political connections that could be had. While the Congressional Black Caucus was in its heyday and one might be within whispering distance of power brokers like Ron Brown or Kweisi Mfume, there was no better place to be than inside the Beltway. So what generally happened was that the reputation and the actual demographics of Prince George's County went through the roof. 'PG' County was still pretty high up the list last time I checked.

It bears repeating that among the black elite, there are hangouts and vacation spots that are popular just as with all elites. Again I can only speak about what was hot back in the late 80s to mid 90s when I was one of those singles trying to maximize. All you have to look for, really, was the National Brotherhood of Skiiers Summits, or perhaps a Sinbad concert in Jamaica. Also the Essence Awards were a very cool place to make such connections. Talking to those folks, you could easily find out where the cool kids were living.

I lived for a short time adjacent to Fort Greene in Brooklyn where Spike Lee hung out. Soon after I got married, I headed down (by mutual agreement) to Atlanta. I still have fond memories of tooling through the suburbs just East of downtown out Cascade Road and admiring that particular set of upscale black residences. Oh. look that's where Evander Holyfield lives. Oh, Gladys Knight lives over in that neighborhood. In the end, I returned to Los Angeles, but for a time I was seriously flirting with that particular suburban lifestyle. It's all about the right neighborhood and the right church in the right city.

What's particularly appealing about these enclaves is that they come automatically with a Cosby-Show prestige. (No matter what Cosby does now, does not erase that glory which was the Huxtables). It's something that matters less these days, but back in the times before people even considered Colin Powell, this was about as prestigious as you could get.

Understand that this primarily applies to black Americans in the upper middle class, folks who can pick and choose more or less where they want to live. But rich black Americans require a little less of this prestige. I mean when you actually are Evander Holyfield or Prince, you can build your house where ever and *you* make the neighborhood, rather than the neighborhood making you.

Los Angeles still has some prestige. There are established neighborhoods like View Park, Ladera Heights and Baldwin Hills that still have drawing power. Also certain parts of Altadena and Pasadena have that old school appeal. But as I talk you young folks now coming out of grad programs with minds for money, they are not so concerned with such associations. They are buying real estate for market value in unfashionable neighborhoods, improving them and then selling them or renting them out. Similarly, my kids now in their 20s pay little attention to the old school prestige of these traditionally upscale black neighborhoods.

I think that there is nothing particularly unusual about this. Black America is simply a much larger ethnic group and every part of it does not mainstream or rise in society at once. I've known folks with five generations of college whose fortunes have risen and fallen and risen again, all with different relationships with these neighborhoods and their equivalents in foreign countries. But I think there will always be some upscale black folks around DC, ATL, NYC and LA. That's an American tradition. (Chicago, I don't know.)

 

A Manly Dump

This isn't about them being a trashman, it's about me being a trashman. You see I didn't call Republic Services to come pick up my icky unwanteds, I called them to find out where I could dump them myself. I got an address in Compton, I took a UHaul truck full of trash, garbage, old furniture and a 12 year old flat screen that I paid 1400 for.

There's nothing weirder than sitting in line between two garbage trucks. That's what I did for about 15 minutes at the West gate of the facility in Compton. When it was my turn, I pulled up my truck onto the scale (whoo a little bouncy there) got out and talked to the man in the booth. He told me that it costs 115 per ton to dump my stuff, asked me what I had to get rid of and directed me to a lane in the yard.

I have never been to a landfill or a dump, but I have fed pigs. This dump does not smell as bad as a pig sty, which isn't saying much. Basically it smells like old garbage, and of course there are gulls crawling all over the place. There is a giant concrete structure with 6 lanes. Garbage trucks are in the noisy process of dumping their contents and somewhere in the huge pit below, a bulldozer roars and scrapes. Finally the boss directs me over to lane six and says dump it here. I'm a little hesitant because all I can see is a huge pile of old mattresses. Dude, I have wood and steel.

I put on my gloves and my son and I start tossing junk out of the back of the 17 foot UHaul truck into a growing mess behind it. I gotta tell you it's a manly feeling to watch an old bookcase split into pieces when you give it the heave ho onto the concrete. It's all noise and destruction. And stink. Yeah lots of stink too. We had gloves but not masks. Despite the smell, and perhaps because of it, I experienced a kind of bourgeois cleansing watching that old Samsung get dashed to bits.

It took about 10 minutes to send about 1000 pounds of junk to wherever it goes from here. I tell you it's quite an invigorating bit of exercise. We weighed out and got our receipt. Man that was fun.

One Little Two Little Three Little Indians

Did Amerindians get reparations for the attrocities committed on them by European Americans and African Americans(Buffalo Soldiers)?

 

No.

Each of these tribal groups can be thought of as something akin to small nations that ultimately made war with each other and with the US. The best short way to describe it is as bad diplomacy that ended in war with the US winning all of the wars.

Many of the battles of these wars could be considered atrocities, but they were on a relatively small scale. Granted most of these tribes were also very small so relatively speaking they could be called massacres. But the full scale and scope of these small, violent conflicts, were not great systematic exercises in force by the US. From my limited research, it cannot be said that the US ever used a fraction of its war making capacity against the various tribes as compared with its wars against itself (Civil War) or with Mexico[1] or Great Britain[2]. Instead, it is better characterized as a series of sporadic incursions.

Consider the largest and most famous of these Indian wars. The Great Sioux War of 1876 included the Battle of the Little Big Horn also known as Custer’s Last Stand. The entire war resulted in less than 600 killed and wounded, total for both sides[3]. The legendary forced removal of Indians from the South known as the Trail of Tears took place over a period of over 15 years. Large numbers are cited but the details[4] show a different picture.

In all of the conflicts with Indians here in North America, there were always political partisans on both sides of the issue, often with the wrong issues at hand. In retrospect it is only if you try to summarize the entire history into a short paragraph that it sounds like a systematic campaign of genocide.

When I look at this history I think it is most important to observe the specific actors and their intentions, capabilities and contexts in order to make proper judgements. Or as young people might say today “It is racist to bundle Chippewas, Seminoles, Creeks, Comanche, Sioux, Apache and hundreds of other ‘Indians’ as if they were all the same.” It’s just as wrong to say they had common interests today as it was during the time of the conflicts. So no single settlement can possibly be reached. Indeed this was certainly the case then, as now. No single chief could speak for all Indians as no President could speak for all Americans.

What each of these peoples got were the deals they negotiated and the wars they engaged. There are therefore hundreds of answers, none of which falls neatly into a bucket of ‘reparations for atrocities’.

Footnotes

[1] Mexican–American War - Wikipedia

[2] War of 1812 - Wikipedia

[3] Great Sioux War of 1876 - Wikipedia

[4] Trail of Tears - Wikipedia

My Three Favorite Americans

This is a hard question for me. That’s because one of my rules is “Only be a fan of the dead.” That way you’re never disappointed by their possible future behavior. Also, there are things that I care about that few people do, and it wouldn’t be helpful if I talked about the T50 . The T50 are wise writers who are alive and I want to read every book they write. The last person I added is not American.

So what is it about an American that would make them a favorite keeping in mind that I need to feel that they are uniquely American? Well there’s too much to list. Still, I know it when I see it.

So my three favorite Americans are:

• Joe Rogan
• Mike Rowe
• Neal Stephenson

Why:
Joe Rogan is the kind of person you might want to dismiss as a knucklehead. He is the direct opposite. Like all great standup comedians, he entertains the bizarre and he has an excellent grasp of what makes people tick of ‘ordinary psychology’. He has a tangible ethos about what he listens to, an excellent bullshit detector and a winning way with communications. His life journey has gone in weird unexpected directions and he has emerged sane, admirable and curious. I’m sure this dude has some of the greatest stories to tell, ever.

 

Mike Rowe is just a winner. I love everything about his wit, his self-deprecation, his attitude and his grace. He’s a good guy, personified. He knows how to lay the smackdown on nonsense and hypocrisy without being a nag or an asshole. Kind of directly opposite of Joe Rogan who would be the first to admit he’s an asshole (but my kind of asshole), Mike tries and succeeds at being a gentleman. Not prissy, but a real honest stand up guy who also doesn’t go for false modesty. Plus his name is Mike. That’s American as it gets.

 

Neal Stephenson is the right kind of intellectual. He has discipline and imagination, and dammit he’s just really smart. He’s an outstanding writer and he loves the big, the huge and the ginormous. He is one of the few rationally grounded writers who can do excellent historical fiction and excellent real-world reporting. He’s brainy and intellectually adventurous, but he’s not a revolutionary. He, like Rowe, appreciates the skills that ordinary people develop and understands what happens when that body of knowledge clashes with the knowledge of experts and geniuses. He paints worlds. He loves swords.

These are my three favorite Americans. I’d love to see them in the same room.

The Most Important Inequality

Q: Do you notice the American society changing?

A: Yes. I think it is inevitable that American society changes. What is most important, I think, is what parents expect of their children with regard to the amount of responsibility they take upon themselves. And what I perceive is that this has been minimal. That there has been a smaller than usual group of Americans growing up who feel compelled to take responsibility for themselves and the people around them. Instead, a larger than usual group of Americans feel that people owe them.

And so for those who take responsibility, more will be demanded of them. They may or may not be able to meet that demand. And for those who do not take responsibility, they will be unwilling and likely incompetent to meet that same demand.

This divide, more than any, is the most important inequality in society. To put it bluntly, do you “follow your passion” or do you “make yourself useful”?

 

Two and a Half Self-Hating Asians

Alright we are really getting down to it aren’t we? I’m going to tell two (and a half) stories that I recall from personal experience. But I need to qualify it in the following way, seriously.

1. There’s a very big difference between generations where English is ESL and where it’s naturally spoken at home.
2. In my experience, Asians in LA more than other places are more comfortable, BUT none feel properly represented in any media.

So pretty much everything you’re going to hear about ‘Asians’ is some form of a stereotype. Asians simply cannot control their own image in America. They control their own image much less so than black Americans or Latinos. I understand very much how it is to be someone completely other than what people expect you to be and how much contempt that can cause. The basic compensating attitude is, “You are so wrong that it’s not even worth it to correct you or even let you know how wrong you are.”

OK all that aside.

The first story is the one about the 3rd best project manager I ever worked with. He was a sergeant in the army on Taiwan. And I’ll tell you that one of the fiercest woman I have ever met was a Taiwanese whose family lost everything in the Revolution. Meaning literally rich and well educated to refugee in forced marches. She came to the US and she was super smart, super disciplined and good looking too. But she had no time to play. I asked her why and she told me that story about her family. She came to the US to start from scratch and claw her way up to the wealth and dignity her family had. Anyway, it’s not the kind of story you often hear, but DAMN!

So this project manager who served in Taiwan surely had parents of that sort as well, who lost everything. And one day he’s on the phone with his son. Now imagine you come to the US, this guy is spending all of his money to send his son to an expensive private school, and the kid is fat and getting pushed around, and is generally a loser. Well, we’re all in an open floor plan cubicle farm and he is just letting his son have it. He’s cursing him out in two languages. And it just goes on for 20 minutes. Can you imagine? The guy is completely humiliated by his son and practically disowns him in front of everyone at work. That’s just sad.

Second story is a girl named M. She is from Tokyo, her friend is from Okinawa. I meet them in a fancy beach cafe in SoCal. Her family has money and so she had saved enough to just leave Japan. Her family disagrees and sends, basically, a chaperone. So she’s living with this dude in West Hollywood. (Oh, did I mention we started seeing each other?, Yeah we both had a little bit of jungle fever.) So she doesn’t speak much English, and my Nihongo is pathetic. I’m reading her manga backwards.

But basically she confesses that she hates her culture. She needed to leave Japan to be free. She tells me in the way that I guess some rich girls must feel, that her family and traditions are all stifling. She hates Japanese men. And I ask her to describe it. We’re sitting on the beach watching the sunset, and she says Japanese men just don’t appreciate the natural beauty of a sunset. They have no joyful spirit. They just drink and work themselves to death and take their frustrations out on women. They all try to conform. She found them super-icky.

Her chaperone was her age too and he was also traditional, and when the three of us were together it was, uncomfortably tense and weird. She had to prepare the meal, and they got into a little fight about whether I should eat at the same time, who ate first and all kinds of the equivalent of Japanese Downton Abbey shit. All the while being super polite and not breaking protocol.

She was very unhappy about breaking tradition — her self-esteem was in conflict with her desire. She needed and wanted respect but for being someone she was not allowed to be, and didn’t quite know how to be. Plus she had to try to communicate these feelings in a foreign language. So then sometimes she just wanted to get drunk and dance, like a college freshman trying to be cool and enjoy a strange party.

—

I can’t say these are simple ‘self-hating’ people. I sensed them in very troubling conflicts with what they grew up to be and what they wanted to be and it not happening for them they way they wanted. I witnessed them stressed to the breaking point. I say this with a lot more wisdom than I had at the time, but I remember these two people well. One Taiwanese middle aged man (1998), one Japanese young woman (1987). Both here in Los Angeles.

—

Here’s the half story. This was a young Korean woman who was very hipster, and very forward about the difficulty she had with FOBs. She would wear shirts like ‘Got Rice?’, just to be ironic and snarky. But most of the time she would just start sharing too much information about what it’s like to be called a ‘banana’. All the freaking time. I can’t even remember how I knew her. I just remember she kept talking about her white boyfriend and exactly what kind of white boyfriend she liked. Nobody asked her. And then she would self-edit herself and then try to test if you looked at her funny when she started these rants. I mean she was smart, but anybody would say she was confused and it got to the point where it was really annoying. I think was on some kind of road trip with her carpooling someplace and I just couldn’t wait to get away from her. Jeez.

—

I tell these stories because I’m a good listener and I also want to remember. I’m not trying to validate ‘self-hating’ because everybody wants to be different and better than they are. Most keep it to themselves. Sometimes we get to see. I think when we get to see, we should find a way to let people be validated in what they aim to be, especially when they’re trying to escape. It’s not easy to do.

 

My Remarks on Peterson

I'm a big fan of Peterson for a lot of reasons, and I think most people are predisposed to dislike or distrust him because he is not political, but is in fact scientific. The person he is most like is the Berkeley physics prof Richard A Muller who became famous by talking about the physical science that any American President should know. I also find his independence very much like that of Dick Feynman. He is, as he says, surfing the 100 foot wave, and I expect that in the short term he will remain unsponsored and thus gangbanged by big media. I find his sense of integrity absolutely extraordinary.

What Petersen cannot do is stop all sorts of partisans from excerpting 10 minute sections of his lectures and headlining them like the NY Post. What very few people have done is read his books or find actual flaws in his methodology.

I find it interesting, most of all, that he is the kind of intellectual who talks about great literature, and seeks to connect dots within the tradition of Western culture.

And I also admire that he takes a long view - as such he is perfectly willing to say 'we don't know'. I found that particularly interesting when he talks about women in the white collar workplace and what is actually acceptable. It was really hilarious when he matter of factly said that women wearing makeup is sexually provocative, from a dispassionate scientific point of view. So where should a business draw the line when it comes to fraternization given such facts? He doesn't know, so he doesn't say.

He has harsh words for Progressives that mirror my own and he absolutely destroys the methodology of Peggy McIntosh, the inventor of 'white privilege' without calling her out by name. He deals very frankly with personality and gives a breath of fresh air for people who are like me, sick and tired of hearing about race, gender and sexual preference as if all discrimination on the planet were determined by these attributes.

There's no question in my mind that he is genuine and not cynical. He is emotionally authentic and it shows. It makes him so very different from all of the talking heads, because in the end, he wants to be helpful more than he wants to show off his intellect. But he really throws the hammer down when it comes to being serious about what is good peer-reviewed academic work with rigorous methodology and what is not. This is, I think, more than anything what gets under the skin of university types. And I think he is genuniely impressed about his ability to reach hundreds of thousands more people through social media than he did as a university lecturer and thesis advisor.

I first encountered Peterson on Joe Rogan's video podcast over the Evergreen State College fiasco. Liked him immediately and found him more interesting than the guy it happened to.

I've seen that Christian apologists have a tough time with him because he is not devout although he takes very seriously the evolution of thought from religious and classic knowledge. IE Peterson recognizes how one invents religion in the self-discovery of pre-literate and pre-scientific societies. But ti's going to be a slog to get through that book - I understand the gist.

The thing that I appreciate most about Peterson.. well I don't know quite yet. He's surprisingly good all over the place. But the most novel idea that he has armed me with is the context of evolution on human behavior with an understanding that it is millions of years old. Human beings are not so presciently self-conscious and capable of maintaining abstract thought as they are in actually experiencing being. Or to put it my way, our intellectual muscle memory is much stronger than our conceptual capacity. There are things we have evolved to understand that are out of touch with things we expect to be conventional wisdom, and a lot of that has to do with the power of sexual selection among other things. In a funny way, he also reminds me of Penn Gilette. He's giving away secrets of the science of psychology by plain speaking it all. The dude is super transparent.

So of course this evolutionary weight puts him at odds with cultural Marxist who wish to go all materialist and erase history and religious tradition, and in this he's perfectly aligned with Stephen Pinker on that whole blank slate controversy. But since Peterson, unlike Pinker, is not satisfied with a statistical accounting of history, Peterson gives a lot more consideration to great authors, especially Neitszche, Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn. So in his attacks on Progressives and social Marxists, he illustrates the totalitarian component from the psychological perspective. IE, what kind of personality defect gives rise to the compulsion to change other people's behavior rather than to fix oneself? So of course he comes down hard on political correctness, the Socialist Left and SJWs.

 

Pareto & Extremistan vs Equality

Why don't socialism and communism work?

The most brilliant answer I have ever heard I actually learned yesterday, and it works in complete harmony with another idea I’ve known for a while. Two different smart dudes, same general principle, sorta. It's math.

Jordan Peterson & Pareto Law
What state socialism and what Marx himself did not recognize was the Pareto Law. The Pareto Law works in capitalism in a way that everybody understands. When you have a lot of money, it ends up accumulating in the hands of a few people. When you have a lot of power and influence, it ends up accumulating in the hands of a few people. Famous people who were famous when you were born, are STILL famous now. Marx rightly understand that criticism of capitalism, but didn’t understand how many systems it applied to. It applies to socialism and communism as well. It’s universal. When people say that the Soviets just made mistakes and that a few in the party got too much power, they are wrong. It’s how power works, among other systems that obey Pareto Law.

Pareto Law works like this. If you take 1000 composers , over time, about 32 of those composers will get 50% of the attention. If you have 10,000 rock songs about 100 of them will get 50% of the airplay.

Nassim Taleb & Extremistan
Taleb describes human variability in terms of Medocristan and Extremistan. If you describe certain variabilities like height, you will get a very reasonable bell curve distribution. The range of that distribution will be within the same order of magnitude. This is Mediocristan. Height, weight, IQ, golf scores: these are typical human attributes that live in Mediocristan. You can expect someone to be 6 feet tall. If you have a football stadium full of people and take a representative sampling you might get a few adults somewhere around 4 and a half feet on the short side and a few somewhere around 7 feet on the tall side. But you would never get anybody ten times taller than 7 feet or ten times shorter than 4.5 feet. That’s Mediocristan.

Now change that to hits on their YouTube channel. Now you’re in Extremistan. You might find somebody with 1000 views per year, 100,000 views per year or even 10 million views per year. Many orders of magnitude different. When people think of income inequality, they think income should be one of those things bounded by small multiples, not several orders of magnitude. But income, like fame works in the domain of numbers called Exteremistan.

So economies and matters of wealth and power are systems that.

• Belong in the realm of Extremistan
• Operate under Pareto Law

Both capitalism and communism have these bounds. The difference is that in socialism and communism the power and the money all accrues to the (single) political party in control of the government. Under capitalism, power accrues to the government and money to the capitalists. So it has that particular benefit over communism and socialism that it is less likely to be authoritarian.

Americans generally liked Obama’s Neoliberalism which basically means let the capitalists run wild, just tax the hell out of them to pay for our social programs.

So under state socialism or communism, the state will get all of the power and the money, and certain members of the party will get the lion’s share of that. When they say for you to sacrifice your ‘surplus’ wheat or coal or whatever it is you produce, you have no choice. You will produce your quota and you will get the price they dictate. Extra productive people (who have skills in Extremistan) will be forced to give up more because they will be compared to people with average skills.

Look what happened to the Kulak farmers in the Soviet Union. They were murdered because of their skill in farming - they made everybody else look bad. Why? because Crop yeilds are in Extremistan. You either grow 20,000 pounds of corn per acre like a good farmer or you grow zero, like a bonehead like me. So when the state says “Every farmer will produce an average of 10,000 bushels of wheat and be paid 1.99 per year per bushel”. What do you think happened? I tell you what happened, the excellent farmers where shot for acting like capitalists, and the newb farmers were shot for not fulfilling their patriotic quota.

A market mechanism sounds like the obvious answer. It is. But socialist states refuse market mechanisms because they apply ‘equality’ on first principles. This ‘equality’ is mathematically impossible. 

Human Memory is not Computer Storage

Steven Pinker is my go to authority in this. He explains something I now understand about how memory is ‘retrieved’. Part of intelligence is the way you organize information in your mind. The better you organize it, the easier it is for you to remember.

In fact, ‘memory’ is not memory, it is the active re-creation of ideas and events based on the way they were organized in the first place.

This has a great advantage so that you can abstract ideas and events and then deal with them as somewhat different versions of a basic concept. So if you become, say, a baseball play by play announcer, you don’t have to remember the path of every ball from the mound to the plate (which might take a ‘gigabyte’ of visual storage), you just say the pitch was a ball or a strike. I can say ‘baseball game’ and immediately (if you understand baseball) you have the context for a class of events. When you’re watching baseball and you don’t understand the game, you have to store a lot more information. When you understand baseball, it’s easy.

Another example is you are talking to a stranger vs you are talking to a friend. With a friend you have context, therefore less storage required. This is why two people who were at the exact same party will remember the same conversation differently. They hear the same words and sentences, but they make different assumptions about what the person speaking was trying to say. So you could have a third person describe motivations and then suddenly have an aha moment, “Oh that’s why they said that, I thought they meant..” People remember differently because interpret and organize context differently, and thus they re-create events differently.

The more associations you give a particular event or idea, the more ways it is accessed in your mind. If you associate songs, or smells or how your body was feeling, you remember better. If you have an experience with a framework of theories, you remember better. If somebody keeps telling you the same story and you can hear their voice telling you, you remember better.This is (simplistically) the way that the mind works with the brain being the apparatus. If an old person has a healthy brain, then nothing changes. But if they have a disorganized way of creating memories, it won’t make sense coming out.

So it’s really not about how much storage, but how efficiently ideas and events can be re-created based on their intelligent way of contextualizing such ideas and events. This is why intelligent people seem to have better memories or *more* memory even though their brains are the same size. Their context for performance of certain things is better, they can get ‘in the zone’ quicker. And scatterbrained people remember crazy stuff all the time. Same ‘memory’ different organization, different re-creation.

 

Thoughts About the Crossover Kid

It's an interesting observation. I've been thinking about re-titling my autobiography 'The Crossover Kid', and I'll think a bit more about that as I go to my 40th high school reunion. But it was a very big deal in the mid 70s to consider assimilation and integration at length. It was clear among myself and my peers that we should not suffer for those social issues that seemed irreconcilable to our parents. It was, in fact, easy enough to understand (both, multiple) mainstream cultures and fit in. What was the point of having a foreign language requirement if you weren't going to speak? What was the point of having black literature if you didn't expect everyone to read it? What was the point of having black music on the radio if you didn't expect everyone to get up and boogie? And the fact of the matter was, there were many (overenthusiastic) white liberals who were also down for the formula. So there was a kind of pressure to accept Lionel punk-ass Ritchie as a role model even if you preferred George funky-ass Clinton. So even a partial and false semi-integration was preferable to isolation and segregation. Not everyone was liberal or willing to share culture, but wasn't that the same problem that they had at Animal House? The difficulty was and remains that the mainstream liberals aren't sure themselves if they are accepting inferiority or superiority. Ultimately, Howard Cosell called Muhammad Ali by his proper name and accepted his superiority. And it rolls like that. Now you have open competition and an opportunity to raise the flag with your own hands, no matter where they came from.

 

In all cases, you cannot be beating somebody over the head with your self-righteousness, because if you were all that, why bother with the mainstream at all? If you can't give, then you can't take. So what's the difference between your self-righteous discrimination and anyone else's?

 

Of course the (knee jerk) answer is power, but nobody wanting mainstream acceptance is really playing a power game. They are playing bourgeois crossover games, and the American bourgeois has no real power. Which is why nobody really cares about married gays and the country hasn't changed because they exist.

 

__

 

I don't think anarchists or atheists have the benefit of hitchhiking on a crossover archtype like Lionel Ritchie. I think they are just inter-sectional out the wazoo and wind up being ultimately individuals. Thus they have to get along on their own merit without having a round hole to hide in. It's courageous as anything, but at some level you have to represent something larger than yourself, or be Muhammad Ali.

An Introduction to Physics

God is the professor who left the universe as an exercise for you to figure out on your own.

We know he introduced quantum mechanics to make it unpredictable.

So there is a chance that He doesn't know all the answers.

Therefore there is an equal chance by studying the universe, that you are doing God's work.

Refugees & the Second Amendment

What if every country's citizens had the right to bear arms as we do in America? Well, from my way of seeing things, the creation of South Sudan wouldn’t have been necessary because women and children would have had the ultimate protection.

Think of it this way. In every African nation that has child soldiers (and they're all boys), they can oppress populations simply because even such a child can wield sufficient power to create refugees. The same goes for the victims of ISIS.

Right now, everywhere in the world that is experiencing civil war that has no gun rights for the citizenry are at the mercy of mercenaries and arms dealers. That also means, for the entire history of the Cold War, that the US and Russia got involved to arm rebel forces. If those people had the rights to bear arms in their own countries, they could have purchased them legally in peacetime and been more self-reliant, and the impudence of tyrants would have been dissuaded.

Every time you look at the sad face of a refugee, remember that they would have defended their own homes with lethal force if they had that right.

Go ahead. Google it. "African mother with rifle". I challenge you to find 10 pictures on the entire planet. It should make you vomit. 

 

The Human Shark

In the news today, "Ancient shark with 300 teeth found by scientists". It turns out that this guy is about 80million years old, give or take 5 million. What evolution is it doing? It's not. Why has evolution left the sharks alone? Well, it's something we don't often think about, and quite frankly I'm not going to do a lot of thinking about here. But I will propose the question, and maybe some of my friends here will know better than I. 

What if we are only speculating about the different hominids? I mean what if, as I've heard more recently, Homo Sapiens actually did breed with the Neanderthals and with earlier hominids like Heidelbergensis, Erectus and Ergaster? I remember when I was a kid, I heard a lot more about Homo Erectus, and Homo Erectus is about 1.3 million years old. So let us speculate that we went back a million years in our little time machine. Obviously we'd clean up a few of those dudes and chicks and hang out with them. But would they be sexy to us? I'm thinking they would be. And I'm thinking we'd try them out. And what a surprise if babies happened!

That would prove that our ideas about speciation as far as humans are concerned is all speculation. How could we prove that the DNA is just that distant enough to say Erectus was real species barrier? I don't know. Maybe somebody spent the time on this question that just popped into my head. But what if human beings are about as perfected as we get in terms of speciation? We are already adapted to our environment as well as a shark is to the sea, and we don't need to evolve. Evolution is not this thing that relentlessly changes us. We relentlessly change ourselves. But we are not and have not faced an extinction event. If H. Erectus is our actually reproductive genetic blood, for a million years, maybe this is as far as evolution needs to take us, absent a nuclear holocaust. See what I'm saying? 

The other implication here is that just like all dogs are just dogs, all humans are just humans. We pretend that breeds are more differentiating than they actually are. I find it difficult to believe that vets learn in their schools that you must operate on poodles differently than bulldogs. There's no DNA barrier. It's just perception. We know that to be true of race. It's just human breeding for shallow effect. That means that 'social Darwinism' is really the only evolution that's going on, which is to say no actual biological evolution, just lethal discrimination. So if there is no actual scientifically empirical evidence for human evolution on the scale of half a million years at the DNA level, it's very clear that there's nothing we've got that the Romans didn't have, except for a better way of specializing ourselves into extremes. Usain Bolt and Angela Merkel can have a baby tomorrow. OK well, maybe Angela is past it, but you get my drift. The kid won't be as exceptional as either parent. 

So I think that leaves a lot more room for what we believe about 'genetics', but nothing anywhere close to speciation. That also means those Neanderthals were probably not as stupid on average as the average stupid person today. This argues for a very broad interpretation of the continuity of humanity as a lot more constant where it really counts, across the millennia. I take that to implicate our tendency to overhype our environmental circumstances. The guy with the iPhone X is really not better than the guy with no phone at all. And that means that stupid people aren't really that stupid. We laugh at Chihuahuas, but they still actually bite like wolves. 

Finally, this leaves me in an interesting place with regard to Extremistan. If more things are actually just social Darwinism, maybe we're just jawboning ourselves into superiority and inferiority. Maybe this is the secret the wealthy and powerful don't want us to know. Could it be? Nahh. Ok maybe. 

 

 

Suckers for Adjectives

This morning I ate a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch for breakfast. I changed from Cheerios which was for last week. As I opened up this new box, I noticed the words. Prime Ingredient Whole Grain. Now being an American, you know and I know that there is something supposedly healthy about 'whole grain'. In fact, 'whole grain goodness' is some marketing phrase I'm sure you are familiar with. Whole grain what? 

Today's gripe is that we're all hung up on adjectives. So long as it's the 'Top 10', then we'll pay attention. We don't care if it's the top ten worst one-hit wonders of the 70s or the top ten blunders of the Trump White House. So long as it's the top ten, or the Best or the Coolest or the Guinness World's oldest bodybuilder. 

What happened to the value of nouns, and where did all the proper nouns go? I know we don't teach kids in public school how to diagram sentences any longer, but you'd think at least a majority of us would... I can accept that we're all about extremes and the extremes are interesting, but it's always easy to look at the extremes of whatever. Sometimes the solidity of a mediocre fundamental good is worth more of our attention.

This is, I think, the Kant in me talking. I don't know for sure, and I'm not sure I want to. There's no easier way to jump meta than to guess what a famous philosopher said about it. Hmm, is it the easiest? 

 

Is Visualization Smart or Dumb?

I hate emoticons, but I'm starting to use them with greater frequency.

My gut tells me that visual communications of this sort are dumbing down literacy, and I'm trying to communicate that with regularity by expressing my distaste. But there is a possibility that there may be some good to come of visual communications of a sort. I'm just not convinced that it will be done right.

When I think of visualization I understand first and foremost that when the motion picture was invented, its originators considered it to be an extraordinarily powerful medium for the purposes of instruction. Talking about how to plant a row of corn could never compete with showing a film of a farmer doing this with close-ups of his hands in the soil. Similarly, today we are regaled with the promise of virtual reality goggles with augmentation that can show a repairman at a remote location how to fix a piece of equipment he's never seen before. But television has also shown people how Lucille Ball might fake a commercial for Vitameatavegimin and all sorts of things that we've never seen before.

I will revisit this subject in due time. I am recalibrating my thoughts having completed Kevin Kelly's latest book.

Ignoring the Present & PARC

Ignoring the present is best accomplished by filling one’s day with fulfilling work building something that does not yet exist largely in the public consciousness. Then simply tune out the news. It is a habit of mind that is best sustained when one has colleagues with similar orientations.

The nature of that work can be of any creative sort, and if one is particularly imaginative and self-confident, tuning out the present is not so difficult.

I cannot stress how important taking in long periods of study and reading and writing are crucial to the process, but also play. In my time at Xerox I was always two degrees from PARC, through the decentralized and office systems business units. So I was continually hearing stories and occasionally getting my hands on hacks. What was true then is true now. Get some idea about the technology’s ability and then imagine a future where everybody can do it.

For example, back in the mid 80s the CD format was just emerging. But scientists at PARC and engineers in the business units were already thinking about how storage density and transfer speeds in such portable media could be extended. This was in a world where there were probably only 10 CD pressing factories on the planet. So my friends and I were into bartering, buying , selling and trading them. That was the first business model - back in the days when (dig this), video stores only had VHS tapes AND their databases were not networked across stores. But it was easy for us to imagine what is basically the current video on demand business a good two decades before Netflix went online.

I also particularly remember a story about PARC staffers having ‘smart badges’. These were ID tags that announced personal ring tones that let a person know who was entering their office without looking up from their work. We were certainly able to to write musical (but not MIDI) code that personalized our email inbox alerts. So yeah basically we were thinking about ringtones in ‘86.

It’s not so difficult to live in your own imaginative private Idaho. The incredibly difficult part is to get what is obvious to forward thinking geeks, to get financed and organized into a successful enterprise. I think that has always been the case.

I believe PARC was the last ‘PARC’ because the age of monolithic top down government and corporate funding really receded in the era of Venture Capital. With the research and development that is going on now with blockchain accounting and token economies, I think financial thinkers are going to make the biggest changes in the world in the next 20 years.

There’s a dude named Clay Shirky[1] whom I haven’t read in a while, but has a very good handle on economies of attention and the monetization of surplus human ‘time’. Think about it this way. Cellphones have monetized human talk. That’s massive. So the world economy has expanded because you think you’re only working 8 hours a day, but actually you are working for attention aggregators almost every moment you are awake. So the trick is to figure out what interesting and compelling things people do take place outside of work and what kind of devices and economies could spring from that.

Oh by the way, also check out the Long Now Foundation[2]. And for what it’s worth, I’ve been thinking[3] about how people might avoid the plague of ‘fake news’. It’s the same as it ever was. Cloister yourself and read only the most advanced thinking you can understand.

You know what’s funny? When I was a freshman in computer science, I thought I’d never be able to write essays with footnotes. Now this software generates them for me. Thanks Ted Nelson[4].

Footnotes

[1] Clay Shirky's Internet Writings

[2] The Long Now Foundation

[3] Scrums of the Interwebz

[4] Ted Nelson Home Page

 

Victor

Victor lived on 30th Street a block and a half from my house. He was, for a short time, my best friend. He was a smart, good looking kid and he was proprietary. He was self-possesed. I learned rather early that when he said no, he meant no. Like most of the children in my life as a child, he possessed something I wanted but did not have. In this case it was a small electric keyboard made by a company called Emenee. He also had bongos which I was not so interested in. I insisted that he had more bongo skills and even if I had very few piano skills, it would be better for the music if he played the bongos. So we practiced together and came up with a funky song, perfected it and played it for his father. We were cool. Now that I think about it, freaky as it may sound, I think the name of our song was 'Egyptian Strut'. That was around 1972. After we tired of that song, Victor decided he should play the Emenee from then on, and no meant no. I wasn't interested in bongos. So I said no, too.   

The early 1970s was a very interesting time for our neighborhood. We got a McDonalds. We lost a go cart track. We got a Dodge Daytona Charger at the dealership on Crenshaw and 29th Street which spun on an elevated circular stage in the showroom. We got a Datsun dealer. We got what had to be the first Taco Bell on the planet, complete with firepit and something called a 'Bellbeefer'. It took the place of the Lonnie's Go Karts where the local narcs told us to beware of teenagers selling amphetamines and 'bennies'. Victor's dad got a 260Z. Faster than the 240Z. Victor bet me that it could do 60MPH in second gear. I didn't believe him. I lost the bet. 

Victor and I drifted apart for reasons I cannot remember but may have something to do with a girl named Anita. More likely it was that I shipped off to Jesuit school. By the time I was 17 and had dropped out of college, I was surprised to see Victor working at the local Boys Market. Or perhaps it was a bit earlier because he was proud of a job I couldn't imagine anyone being proud of. I ended up doing similar work for a lot less money at Fedco in 1979. Teamsters made less money than Retail Clerks when it came to bagging groceries. I didn't spend enough time at Fedco to work the warehouse. In 1980 my life changed again. It would be a long time before I ever thought of, or found Victor again.

A few weeks ago, he showed up on Facebook. 

Victor is a bike nut, and that doesn't surprise me. I could sense early on his capacity for hard work. I knew his father. It's kind of interesting that we have cycling in common although I never got as serious as Victor evidently is. He's clearly a successful businessman and has what look to be awesome kids. I'm happy for him. And I wonder who he is and where he has been. 

--

The rest of this is about me as I have been doing some introspection and much more writing lately. I remember discovering about two or three years ago that my IQ puts me in the 98th percentile or thereabouts. The idea floated into my head yesterday as I consider how difficult it has been over my lifetime to find and keep friends. Not because I am anti-social but because I have become accustomed to being the only one I know who thinks about what I think about to the lengths I think about them.  This very essay will be about the 9300th thing I've composed for this blog, much of which is dedicated to thinking about why people think the way they do. I think too much, I take my thoughts too seriously. That's what people tell me, so I let them be right and I try not to tell them they are boring to their faces. It doesn't make me anti-social, I keep saying, but I do deal with the distance, dissonance and dislocation. 

The smartest man in the world told me that there's something about bloggers that he's known that make them roll down the hill to hell and suicide a bit faster than the average bear. That's not good. I have more than enough ego to survive in splendid isolation. But I've done so, I think as Victor has done so, because we understood that we had to work ourselves out of a hole and become whole. And that's about all I have to say about that, other that Victor is named well.

 

The Return of Chappelle

Dave Chappelle has aged well. When I look at him in his new Netflix special, I'm liking him still. Not more, not less, but aside from the fact that he has to keep up with and comment on a broader set of popular culture topics than I have patience for, I feel like he's keeping up with me. Which is to say he's handled his subjects without an embarassment of goofy sentiments. He's keeping it right.

The first thing I remembered about Chappelle is that he's smarter than his audience. It's something I noticed when I went to see him at the Wiltern several years back on what I suppose was his last bit of standup before he went dark. I found myself laughing a half second before everybody else in the crowd and getting his subtlety when others around me were silent. He has a talent for saying the obvious and then pulling aside in a smooth way that people don't expect. I think perhaps his LA audience couldn't handle his adeptness with the absurdity of their desires as he told his joke about a backstage incident with some big name movie producers.

Anyway, I'm blasting several blogs out of draft. I'm finding that a short form works fine and a lot of thoughts don't really need expansion. I recommend you see his new specials, and also the giant Philadelphia concert of Kevin Hart. Private school is killing a certain blackness, and these comfortable multi-millionaires are not keeping it ghetto for the sake of their audiences, but the gap is showing.

The Palm Springs Phenomenon

The malls are the soon to be ghost towns
So long, farewell, good-bye. --Modest Mouse

There are two ideas that come to mind when I think of Palm Springs. It's nice to be my age, because I have two ideas and three stories. One of the stories involves dirtbikes and golf bunkers, but that's another story. This is about one of the two ideas, that I am naming the Palm Springs Phenomenon. It is prompted by a headline I read off Facebook. The whole story is here. 

The song 'Teeth Like God's Shoeshine' asks the question "Do you have a lot of what you need to survive?" We do, for the time being. We also have a lot of stuff we don't need. It's rather odd to think that there are people on the planet who will never have a garage, much less enough junk to have a garage sale. But when you're rich in America, you have an estate sale when you get low on cash and you don't want to sell the vacation house. Or maybe the vacation house itself is part of the estate sale. When I had money to burn and a house less than chock full of requisites, the Spousal Unit and I would go hunting for garage sales and estate sales. I'm not ashamed to say that it took over 30 years of working in my career before I had enough credit to afford the furniture that all the marketing in the world made me lust after. Now I have the big leather sofa and love seat. Thanks Synchrony Bank! 

But isn't this a nice virtuous circle? As soon as I could afford that cowboy comfort, I put the old sofa out on the curb and it was gone in a couple days. And so it makes me think of Palm Springs with its strip of art shops. Now I've met and talked to a few antiquarians and art & crafts dealers and I know that they do what I did, which is troll estate sales for great buys. So it suddenly occurred to me that the Palm Springs strip was very much like other such quaint little expensive business districts. They are right on a main drag which is the first major boulevard that runs parallel to some hills. Hills are where the rich people live, and it's convenient for the ladies of leisure to drive down the hill to the shopping place, indulge their peculiar senses of taste and buy expensive crap to tote back up the hill and show off in their living rooms, parlors and salons. That is until such time as they, die, go broke, or run out of space and donate such queer objets d'art to some charity. Or have an estate sale. Then it's right back into the hands of the not so rich lady who runs the antique shop.

Now surely there are some other virtuous loops of free markets I have left unmentioned. We don't want to give them short shrift, but this particular idea gains significantly in resonance to the affairs of the common man when whole retail chains find themselves on the auction block. On my last trip to Chicago, I learned that Mr. Aaron Montgomery Ward was quite a heroic figure. At least the plaque in that park I read gave me the decided impression. I would like to have as nice an epitaph as he. But what if the luxury of shopping disappears altogether for the common man? What if some large portion of us who think we are economically significant are just working bullshit jobs on Palm Canyon Drive? What if some large fraction of America are just wannabe antiquarians thinking we add value? Well, that would be frightening. 

I suppose we all get displaced sooner or later. Enjoy the bright lights while they're still shining. 

 

Judge Me Not, AI

Q: Why do judges and prosecutors push back against data-driven decisionmaking?

A: I would hope that they do so for the same reasons I would do so as a professional with over 25 years of building data-driven business systems. People simply do not want to be judged by machines.

The slightly longer answer is that most people are aware of paradoxes that a bit of discussion and negotiation can resolve. Computer systems are not capable of ex-post facto discussion and negotiation. Once you have decided to trust data out of a computer, you are stuck. In a few limited domains, this is acceptable, but not in most.
There are all sorts of movies that dramatize this. I would challenge anyone to get through one season’s episodes of Law & Order and try to apply data-driven decision making to the scenarios presented.

In politics, opposition to Obamacare was posed in the rhetoric of ‘death panels’. Imagine, if you will, that healthcare in your city were managed by a emergency room triage system rather than by humans. Whom would you trust to program such a system that makes you wait for treatment?
I could develop a system that takes all of the data known to insurance companies and give you a health profile. I could take your SAT score, your caloric input, your FICO score, your body mass index and your driving record (for examples) and assign you a new number which is averaged against everyone in the US. How much of what people think of you would you like to have invested in this one number?

think many Americans in particular and Westerners in general have forgotten something about the literature that reminded us of the alienation of modern culture. Everybody who wears a tattoo in defiance of conformity implicitly understands something about this alienation, but tattoos and ‘tattoo culutre’ are commodified as well. We all recognize ‘hipsters’ as people who try to escape the mainstream, and yet even hipsters are cliche. There will always be a human need to be recognized by society in more dimensions than computers will ever capture. I’m bringing in the angle of literature, art and society as a counterpoint to that which is digitized and digitizable.  It’s not about exactly how many basketballs Michael Jordan put through the hoop, it’s not the data about Michael Jordan. It’s about Michael Jordan.

In the end, every one of us has an ego that is screaming “Don’t you know who I am?”. Who we are will not be found in the data. Why we did it will not be found in the data. Sure, decide the MTBF of my car’s crankshaft with your IoT storm, but judge me on my character. 

The Saga Continues

It has been about two months since I finished Darth Plagueis, and something about the depth at which its author, James Luceno, has considered the Star Wars galaxy has faded a bit from memory. Today I am about 27 hours from seeing the next installment, Episode VII, and I am struck by the extent to which the collection of stories may become legend. I am convinced that 100 years from now, Darth Vader's helmet and his theme music will remain recognizable. We are in that era we often wonder about. Did Italians have any idea that La Traviata would be now what it was then? These space operas of ours are both popular and flecked with elements of genius. With Star Wars, it is clearly the music, as it is also with Halo, but I digress. 

At this moment in time, the latest film in the series has made over a billion dollars worldwide in about two weeks. This is a new class of production, methinks. 

If Star Wars should be about anything, then it should be a meditation on the use of force. The Force. You see Anakin Skywalker was 'the One' to bring balance to The Force. In the end he did so as Vader whose extraordinary skill and exceptional experiences gave him reasons to doubt both the Jedi and the Sith. Watching Episode III, even through the bad acting made me feel a great deal of sympathy for young Skywalker's tortured existence. The central deprivation of love which is the discipline of the Jedi only saves them in that Vader has betrayed that discipline in having the twins Luke and Leia. It is his love for Luke that has him dispose of the Emperor, Darth Sidious. 

In A New Hope, there is a total of 6 known force users;

Luke, Leia, Obi-Wan, Yoda, Palpatine and Vader.

Four are Jedi, two are Sith.

By midway through Return of the Jedi, both Obi-wan and Yoda have fallen, leaving 4 known force users.

Then, when Luke is aboard the Death Star, about to be struck down by the Empire (believed to be the last remaining Jedi and offspring of Anakin Skywalker), Vader saves his son and throws Palpatine into the main core reactor of the Death Star - which stops the assumingly last remaining Jedi from dying and shows there is still good in Vader.

Vader defeated both the Jedi and the Sith - the Jedi in Revenge of the Sith, the Sith in Return of the Jedi - and it is for this reason that he has brought balance to the force; it's just nobody in the films considered to bring true balance between good and evil, you need to eliminate both.

These mechanics can provide drama as the pendulum swings from Sith to Jedi as time goes on and the series goes forward. If those in possession of the property would spend some time examining the effects of the rules of the Sith and the Jedi and their effects on the people of the Galaxy, that would be a useful expansion of the story. So far it has pretty much been all about palace intrigue at the highest level. Only in The Empire Strikes Back could we see how Vader's Army extended its influence to other worlds, particularly Bespin and the exile of Yoda on Dagoba. Still, these were fairly close to the story of the force users, but we did at least see the bald commander who took audible cues from Lando Calrissian three degrees of separation from Luke. As well, those who reported to Jabba were equally far. 

There being hundreds of known worlds in the Galaxy, it seems unlikely that there would be but one intrigue of Force users. This is something that must be dealt with head on in the upcoming series. As a long time KOTOR player, fleshing out the differing approaches to the understanding, study and use of the Force has been made manifest in other media. The films should catch up as the saga continues.

20th Century Mortality

There's a great spreadsheet here.

 

The Long Island Kitty

I've been getting a lot of questions lately about microagressions. So microaggressions are slights and insults that make you feel persecuted. Taken separately, they're dismissible. Taken collectively they might contribute to a nervous breakdown. This term 'microaggression' is too new to be in your spell checker today, but the chatting classes are all over it.

I have some difficulty, despite my penchant for formality and many things erudite to see apply the adjective 'racist' to the term microagression, although I understand this is the entire point of raising awareness of this new first world problem. The difficulty stems from my thick skin (see Six Pounds of Racism) but also from my profound distaste for zero-tolerance and appreciation of the moral hazards therein. 

The interesting difficulty with this particular bellweather, if it can appropriately be called that, is that one should expect to hear it testified to primarily from those folks with a greater presumable purchase in society. That is to say that this form of 'racism' particularly burns those folks in the upper classes of society. I think it should be obvious that thrown at someone like world-renowned scientist Neil DeGrasse Tyson, the epithet 'nigger' would be considerably more painful to him than thrown at world-renowned rapper Snoop Dogg. I think it's reasonable to make this assumption based on their own public frequency in using the term themselves, although psychologically it's anybody's guess how thick anyone's skin is. That is the point of Six Pounds. Clearly however, those for whom 'microagression' is a debilitating issue have much more delicate sensibilities. 

Whether or not one's psyche is weak or strong in this matter, the ubiquity of the chatting around microagression gives some people pause to reconsider the old chestnut that 'we are all of us racists deep down'. I defy that prescription, but I don't intend on proving it. I'm not so sure that the social soup I swim in is particularly characterized by its amenability to logical proofs, otherwise the microagression meme would have self-destructed at the mere mention of the term 'hate crime'. You would think that even the homicide count now slightly faded from memory of the #blacklivesmatter political flash mob would obliterate any discussion of microagression. But I suspect both mobs seek to reinforce each other in their never ending quest to 'have a serious national discussion about race'. That is, after all, their desire lo these many decades. The problem is, of course, that society doesn't take them as seriously as they would like to be taken. Chalk up one more frustration, as Bernie Sanders no dobut acknowledges, in the latent fury of activists desperate to snatch the mic. 

So my little story goes a little something like this.

I am engaged to be married and I have flown across country from New York to fetch my fiancee, who lived at the time in a pleasant duplex on Beverly Glen in West LA. We pack up her Nissan Pulsar and hit the road on a cross-country journey back to New York. I love everything about her except her cat, Lucy which she took in just after the Northridge Quake sent animals scurrying in fright. Dog person that I am, even I can sympathize with that. Besides, I knew a cat was coming, one way or another so I have even decided to learn how to give the little beastie carsick pills. By the time we get to her hometown of Detroit, I've got the skill. Several days later, we wind up in Long Island and stay with my uncle one of its wooded suburbs while we hunt for apartments. 

The cat gets loose. So now I have to be a good hubby to be and prove my love for the critter by hunting it down in this strange and foreboding place which is not-inexpensive suburb of Westbury, NY. I find myself creeping around this neighborhood peeking into people's yards and gardens. I have no idea where.. oh wait there she is. Lucky me I found her within 30 minutes of skulking around. Get the picture? Black man nobody knows from out of town checking around suspiciously in the bushes of million dollar houses. Of course I know I have a perfectly legitimate reason to be doing so. I have a cat to return, but what about the suspicious racist suburbanites of New York, and their evil henchmen in squad cars?  Anyway, after some coaxing and a lot of bloody scratching, I've nabbed the cat and took her back to my fiancee. Huh? What do you mean that's not the right cat? I'm done. I have a laugh, some Bactine and a beer. I let the other cat go back in the yard where I found it. Two hours later, Lucy ambles back on her own. I hate cats.

But I wasn't questioned, detained, arrested or shot for prowling around a neighborhood in suburban New York and stealing somebody else's cat in a bold daylight robbery. Cats are more trouble than people. But only if you're me. Your mileage with the Prison Industrial Complex may differ.  As for microaggression, I actually kidnapped somebody's cat. Am I going to Progressive Hell?

The Islamic States of America

As Cobb readers know, I'm hanging out with FBI folks these days. One of the agents I spoke with spent years trailing Azzam the American. Like most thoughtful Marine Corps troops and long war veterans he has had plenty of time to consider how Islamic jihadis actually are. He knows his Koran better than most of his foes in Afghanistan. Bottom line is that he understands as do most thoughtful people that Islam is not the enemy and jihadis are more fanatic and dangerous than religious. I don't want to go down the rabbit hole of 'moderate Islam' nor defend too great a tie between current monotheisms and common law. But some scholars (Scheherazade S. Rehman∗ Hossein Askari, 2010) did some interesting research into an idealized interpretation of the Koran vis a vis 'economic justice'. 

Abstract
Given the post-9/11 climate of global uncertainty, suspicion, hostility, and fear, interest in the relationship between religion and economics, politics, and social behavior has been rekindled. In particular, there has been considerable attention afforded to the impact of religion on economic, social, and political development and vice versa. However, before the impact of religion on economic performance or the impact of economic performance on religion can be examined, one should first ascertain the religiosity of a country. In this case, “how Islamic are Islamic countries?” or “what is their degree of ‘Islamicity?”’ In this paper, we assess, on a very preliminary basis, the adherence of Islamic countries to Islamic economic teachings and develop an Economic IslamicityIndex (EI2) to assess the extent that self-declared Islamic countries adhere to Islamic doctrines and teachings. We do this by measuring 208 countries’ adherence to Islamic Economic principles using as proxies 113 measurable variables.

Results
The results of the Economic Islamicity EI2 Index can be seen in Table II, ranking 208 countries according to the 12 Islamic economic principals mentioned earlier, which are represented through 113 different proxies. These very preliminary results would indicate that the so-called and self-declared Islamic countries have not by-and-large adhered to Islamic principles. The average ranking of Islamic countries is 133 for the group of 56 Islamic countries. Islamic countries as a whole did not fare very well in an index that measures the degree of economic Islamicity. The highest ranked Islamic country is Malaysia (ranked 33rd), followed in order by Kuwait, Kazakhstan, Brunei, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, and Turkey (see Table II). 

You'll have to look up the entire paper to see the interesting results. But here's a clue. Ireland is #1, and the US isn't far behind. America is more Islamic than you think (in the top 8%), and that's not a bad thing.

27 Ways to be a Classic Man

From time to time we need to be reminded that not many writers in the English tongue have improved on Rudyard Kipling's classic poem 'If'. With Kipling in mind, I make a list of 27 items contemporaries might find useful.

1. The classic man has approximately 1/3 the number of shoes of his wife. He knows which few are his favorites and understands the rest are not purchased with his tastes in mind. He leaves her to her budget.

2. The classic man is comfortable at all times because he knows whatever can go wrong inevitably will. He never uses terms like 'swimmingly', instead he measures stresses at the weakest links and prepares for their breaking.

3. The classic man prefers not to eat movie theater food, and only goes for big screen blockbuster openings with his friends or family. He expects the chaos of crowds as part of the moviegoing experience. 

4. The classic man indulges with moderation, and always has his steaks cooked to order. 

5. The classic man always gives himself plenty of time when out and about in his vehicle. He never particularly minds the extra walk from the far corners of the parking lot.  

6. The classic man's bedtime routine frequently involves passing out from a long day's work, but his morning routine is disciplined.

7. The classic man reserves very little of of his capacity for critical judgment on the subject of sugary soft drinks. Whiskey on the other hand...

8. The classic man's erudition is developed and deployed for the sake of unambiguity and wit. He always communicates with respect for the listener, never to prove his superiority. However the classic man has stinging comebacks for insulting posers. 

9. The classic man's gentleness instructs his sons. His strength instructs his daughters. His unconditional love binds them all. 

10. The classic man takes pride in all of his manual labors and chores in which he aims to be swift and thorough. He always avoids cutting corners and shoddy work. 

11. The classic man's business is not in the street. When he uses the web, it is not to be anonymous or crude. 

12. The classic man orders toiletries and other staples well in advance of their necessary use. Since he loyal to his brands, surprises are not in order. 

13. The classic man has broad tastes in music and literature and is always curious to know what his acquaintances are enjoying. He is never too far from the fashion but slavish to none. He is, despite his habits, always prepared to be pleasantly surprised. 

14. The classic man accepts change in technologies and methodologies with an eye to their purpose and effectiveness. He will often be stubborn in holding to an old-fashioned habit or two, not to be perverse but for the sake of his actual enjoyment of the practice. The classic man never forgets Chesterton's fence. 

15. The classic man's home looks lived in because it is. It is orderly after his fashion and it speaks volumes about who he is. 

16. The classic man is chivalric in all things. He will unselfishly protect the weak from predators wherever he is. He will balance his instinct to be the hero with practical situational awareness, but he will not stand idly by or simply record crime when he can intervene or encourage others to assist him.

17. The classic man has the right tool for the job, but it's all about the job, not about the tool. 

18. The classic man may have the occasion to repeat himself for the benefit of those who don't quite understand the universality of his principles. 

19. The classic man indulges in the sentimental and romantic with verve, but understands they are no substitute for virtue.

20. The classic man shares his burdens with those he respects most and in that way reinforces his desire to overcome those burdens.  

21. The classic man enjoys slapstick in his children as well as their clever wit.

22. The classic man is modest with his endowments and does not titillate his neighbors. 

23. The classic man has read at least 75% of the books on his shelves and always has reference books. He is entirely comfortable with digital libraries. 

24. The classic man is dependably available according to his commitments. If he needs to be on call, then he is on call. No excuses. 

25. The classic man will prepare himself morally and practically to make life and death decisions and will not shy from those areas of life which may ultimately demand it of him. 

26. The classic man strives to be reminded of the true dimensions of human tragedy He is not petty. 

27. The classic man dances, sometimes with discipline, sometimes with abandon, always with heart. 

A Clayite Whig

Today I came across somebody who called himself a Clayite Whig. Hmmm.

Henry Clay, Sr. (April 12, 1777 – June 29, 1852) was an American lawyer, politician, and skilled orator who represented Kentucky in both the United States Senate and House of Representatives. He served three non-consecutive terms as Speaker of the House of Representatives and was also Secretary of State from 1825 to 1829. He lost his campaigns for president in 1824, 1832 and 1844.

Clay was a very dominant figure in both the First and Second Party systems. As a leading war hawk in 1812, he favored war with Britain and played a significant role in leading the nation to war in the War of 1812.^[1]In 1824 he ran for president and lost, but maneuvered House voting in favor of John Quincy Adams, who made him secretary of state as the Jacksonians denounced what they considered a "corrupt bargain." He ran and lost again in 1832 and 1844 as the candidate of the Whig Party, which he founded and usually dominated. Clay was the foremost proponent of the American System, fighting for an increase in tariffs to foster industry in the United States, the use of federal funding to build and maintain infrastructure, and a strong national bank. He opposed the annexation of Texas, fearing it would inject the slavery issue into politics. Clay also opposed the Mexican-American War and the "Manifest Destiny" policy of Democrats, which cost him votes in the close Election of 1844. Dubbed the "Great Pacificator," Clay brokered important compromises during the Nullification Crisis and on the slavery issue. As part of the "Great Triumvirate" or "Immortal Trio," along with his colleagues Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun, he was instrumental in formulating theMissouri Compromise of 1820 and the Compromise of 1850. He was viewed as the primary representative of Western interests in this group, and was given the names "Henry of the West" and "The Western Star."^[2]Being a plantation owner, Clay held slaves during his lifetime, but freed them in his will.^[3]

Abraham Lincoln, the Whig leader in Illinois, was a great admirer of Clay, saying he was "my ideal of a great man." Lincoln wholeheartedly supported Clay's economic programs.^[4] In 1957, a Senate Committee selected Clay as one of the five greatest U.S. Senators, along with Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, Robert La Follette, and Robert A. Taft.^[5]

Whatever Happened to Timothy Leary?

Is there a Left or Liberal or Progressive principle involving the desirability of altered consciousness, a la Timothy Leary, in support of the decriminalization of some drugs, or is it rather a question of liberty? In clean slate, blue sky world, suppose you had a list of 400 mind-altering substances to license or ban for human consumption. Would it depend upon the pharmacological effect, the popularity of the drug, the tradition of use, the safety, the price, the pleasure principle?

OTOH, if it was about liberty, and we freed and repaired every drug convict, would the current bans still be supported? Just curious.

The Difference Between Horseshit and Bullshit

I am particularly fond of the term bodewash, for what it's worth. Yet I think that there are appropriate axes of shit that should be navigated with some care. 

The other night, as my clan-mates and I were engaged in the Iron Banner, a certain combination of unfortunate and somewhat unanticipated circumstances prompted one of them to roar, "You've got to be fucking kidding me!" And then on another occasion, "You've got to be fucking shitting me!"  I pause a moment to think about those outbursts as they indicate someone rationally making moves when suddenly gravity is reversed. 

Horseshit is a term which I think applies to a specific instance of falsity. And in that regard it would be less of an insult to 'call horseshit' on a particular matter. If I am saying that some situation is full of shit, it is generally horseshit to which I am referring. Likewise, I think my gaming friend had a moment of outrage, and the surprise of "You've got to be shitting me" must be inferred to indicate horseshit. 

If the same thing happened over and over, I'm sure he would have thrown down the controller and walked out of the room exclaiming "This is bullshit!" Bullshit thus in contrast requires that one recognize and implicate a continuous and purposeful production of shit. An average cow is double the weight of an average mare and the average cattle herd is generally much larger than the average herd of horses, although I cannot say my experience with these observations is expert. Nevertheless, it's useful to consider these facts with the understanding that the bulls will produce more shit. 

It is also useful to note that horses are much taller than cattle, run faster and range further. Thus their noses are not as likely to detect their own shit, whereas bullshit is generally found fairly closely to the bull. 

The Downside Again

A couple years ago, when I was absorbing the wit and wisdom of Nutnfancy and developing my Peasant Theory (now mostly complete), I started The Downside Blog. The Downside Blog was kind of a prepperish journal of observing things that fail and processes that might fail in order for its readers to be cognizant of such things ahead of time. It turned out that a couple years ago was not a good time to start a new blog, and quite frankly I didn't have the patience for it. This morning I thought about that subject again. This time I'm considering it in the context of psychology.

Psychology is my daughter's major. I'd like her to consider cognitive science and so I gifted her the most recent book by Dan Ariely, Irrationally Yours. When she decided on that major, I found that I had a lot more to say about psychology than I thought.

What has always intrigued me about cognitive science has to do with the practical aspects of the acceptability of facts embedded in compute systems. If you are seeking an answer to a question and the answer is to be found in a computer, do you accept it? If you are seeking a solution to a problem and that solution lives in a process or institution that is unfamiliar to you, do you accept the agency of that process or institution? Generally, what are the factors that keep people from actually doing what they say they want to do, given the opportunity. You may be familiar with this cartoon which was a favorite amongst the software sales teams I used to hang out with in the late 90s. 

As I've mentioned, the reasons for my Peasant Theory were manifold. Chief among them was the idea that when people don't have trust for institutions, democratic and business institutions specifically, they tend towards tribalism. Organizationally, when flat, egalitarian organizations fail, people tend to fall back to hierarchical, authoritarian organizations. While I haven't been very specific about it, I tend to consider global trade and free markets as very flat and egalitarian, given the relative absence of regulatory capture and oligopoly. Also I should say that I have a great deal of confidence that hierarchical organizations don't scale. Towers of Babel fall, while suburbs do not. 

In considering the downside of things as I mused this morning, I thought about my friend whose job it is to run companies that have been criminally mismanaged. There's money in that business. As there is money in police and fire work, in soldiering and in disaster relief. There is an upside to the downside and this has been fascinating to me, but not for any perverse reason. In fact, I am rather wary of that tipping point, wondering if in various parts of our society that tipping point has been past, in which it is more profitable to destroy that which is weak than to reform it. 

Perhaps it is because I have been outside of the corporate loop in my small business that I sympathize with those who say there's something morally bereft in our leadership class. I wonder if the nation is being financialized when I think about AirBnB more capitalized than Marriott. 

I don't have much to recommend for what is becoming of my stoicism this morning. l have plucked my mind from the Matrix and living in truth without wishful thinking has filled me with a kind of sadness in regarding humanity that I cannot describe. I think perhaps that I have turned a melancholy corner that can only be remedied by fun and beauty, both to be found in ritual and discipline. But I think that will only be personal, or intimate at best. I am considering that looking over the horizon that I don't want to remain long in the solutions business. I don't want to profit as Cassandra, no matter how correct I might be. It is only too sad to understand the downside. 

Psychologically, I am curious as to how I will deal with this, precisely whether I will let go of the discipline of avoiding wishful thinking and creative solutions in order to be happy. I do not wish to retreat from society. Perhaps there is a spot of zen in my mind I will find in rituals of the body. 

Markets and Solitude

Solitude.

When you have money, you can generally, in civilized places, purchase whatever you need to sustain yourself. You can do so without having to explain your reasons. You pay cash, you get goods. The marketplace is a brilliant invention that allows us to minimize our interactions with people to the simple. If you've ever been in a situation where someone is over-explaining everything and trying to draw you into the complications and frustrations of their lives, you understand what a blessing it is to have them finally shut up. All of us want them to shut up, don't we?

But sometimes that person is your idiot boss, your nagging spouse, your teenaged child, that cop who pulled you over, your sick aunt, your hardheaded father, your demanding mother, your prattling professor, your overbearing minister, your whiney little sister and you just can't get away to find a moment's peace! You want to, desperately, but you're on the hook. You made a promise. You need their approval. You owe them a debt. You ignore them at your peril. And you cannot be free.

Ahh but the saving graces of money. When you have money, you don't have to listen. You can make a few exchanges in the marketplace and buy sanctuary. No questions asked. No strings attached. Yes it's true, money depersonalizes. You can turn complex human interaction into a simple, bloodless transaction. You can abstract away all feeling and emotion. You can just pay cash. Sometimes, that is exactly what you need. Here's a dollar, go play on the freeway. Sometimes you need that extended period of time to keep people at arm's length. Just imagine if you had to pay all your bills by barter. Oh. Here comes the electricity man to my doorstep. I'll pay him in poetry. No, wait, it's the student loan gal I've been paying every month for 6 years. I have to fix her a sit-down breakfast and talk about college, again. But we don't have to suffer like that. We have PayPal and electronic banking. We can get rid of all those mendacious creeps with a few clicks. What a brilliant thing to turn all of those people into transactions.

Until you run out of money. Then instead of paying by debit card and making them go away by pushing four buttons in sequence, you have to (oh God help us) pay attention. Paying attention is the most odious kind of payment there is. And the poorer you are, the more attention you have to pay.

They say that it would be a super power if you could read people's minds, but would we really want to? I mean if they can't speak it in words, then it's just as confused inside their heads as it is in our ears. We do read people's minds. It's called paying attention when they talk. Let's be honest, there ain't that many people we want to hear out. But when we're forced to pay attention, that's the hell on earth. Do you doubt me?

What if you were poor and could only afford to listen to free broadcast radio? You'd have to listen to pop music all the time. All you could afford is Justin Bieber and Rush Limbaugh, because they're free. What if you had to listen to TV pitchmen? Shamwow anyone? What if you couldn't afford education and all of the politicians ideas sounded reasonable to you? What if every rap song sounded like good advice? What if you had to listen all of those annoying relatives because you can't afford your own place? What if you had no money? You'd have to pay attention to all the free dreck from every media orifice and human piehole. Why? I just said it, you can't afford your own place.

Money can buy you your own place. It can buy you freedom from obligations. It can buy you solitude and time to be with your own best friend in the world. You.

The Cost of the Answer

If you want to know what I believe, it is that the answer is out there. You just don't want to figure it out.

I had an interesting experience the other day over at Quora. Quora is a general question and answer forum that uses some decently new technology that helps their interface evolve. It's a kind a combination between an interactive Wikipedia,  a dumbed down StackOverflow, and a polite Reddit. It can be both fascinating and unnerving. I spend about an hour a day answering some decent questions that are posed and several more minutes gaping incredulously at the vapidity of the rest.

Anyway I decided to ask a question pointing to something specific about the statistical juju behind all of the silly 'What kind of X are you?' surveys that I get from time to time. How do they correlate your answers to 10 questions into a prescription that says 'Aries' or 'Libertarian'? I guess that it's something related to cluster analysis, but I wanted pointers to code or whatever real statisticians call it. In case you're wondering, I want to get started building the Lorite Interrogator. Well the memorable answer that I got was something to the effect of "Well I could give you an answer but before I do I need to know if you're capable of understanding it. Please give me your background."  That was an intriguing response, but somewhat nervy too. But I wanted to know badly enough to respond in full. In the end, the person who asked for my vitae just gave a thumbs up to that response, but never answered the question. So I was basically stuck with nothing better than Wikipedia. Quora fail.

The failure gave me something to think about - which was that by describing my own qualifications to understand a sophisticated response, I has essentially proven to myself that I have no excuses not to take a graduate level course. After all, I wanted a pointer to a book and/or an algorithm in the first place. I want to know about statistics what experts know. As the idea has been on my mind of late, I wandered over to the UCLA Extension online. It turns out that the books required for their $700 course costs about $400. 

It's going to cost me $1100 and three months to know what I really want to know. Now that I'm aware of the costs, I'm not sure I want to know that badly. Actually, I do want to know that badly, I just don't have the time or the cash at the moment. 

What I believe is that everybody makes economic decisions like this all of the time, particularly about how much they believe they need to know. Most of the time, I think people are lazy, and laziness can be a virtue. One wants to follow an 80/20 rule - that's certainly why I asked at Quora in the first place, considering that I have the email of Emanual Derman. 

The implications of this, to me, are clear. Most people would rather ask their way up a presumed chain of knowledge for free. The free ask is 'just above my head' or 'just enough knowledge to be dangerous'. In other words, there is a presumption that there is a cheat, a cheap and easy epiphany, just a question or two away, and this assumption,  exacerbated by the ease of using the Internet, makes the cost of a complete answer, ie real education, seem higher than it actually is. People can and will use socialized 'uncommon' knowledge more readily than they will pay for expert and complete knowledge.

There's the fundament. Where is the tipping point when colleges are already too expensive? 

Cobb's Culture Ship Names

Culture Ship Names

--A Pool of Culture Ship Names--

I’ve Got the Water, Who Has the Board?
Lambs Eat Ivy
A Descent into the Maelstrom
Over My Dead Body
Propria Persona
Charmed, I'm Sure
Irregardless
Pack A Lunch
Pocket Lint
Never A Dull Moment
Cliche'd Cliche
Quietly Brusque
To The Manner Born
Ballbuster
Pun Punter
Not That There's Anything Wrong With That
I'd Rather You Not
Who's Crying Now?

The Persistence of 360

Somebody asked questions the other day about why America.. whoa here we go.. was too stupid to adapt the metric system like Europe. Well the obvious conventional wisdom is that we're stupid and have bad habits. But let's think about that for a moment.

Let's start with a yard. Not your yard, a yardstick. But your yard could be measured with a yardstick just as easily as it could be measured with a meter stick. Why? Because we know what a yard is and we know what a meter is and we know arithmetic. 

Let's say your yard is rather large, like mine. It would then be 50 feet by 40 feet = 2000 square feet. Now there's something very nice about feet that we know, because feet divide into 12 inches. 12 is a special number because you can easily divide it in halves, thirds and quarters, and that is what you generally do with land. Yards are conveniently 3 feet. 36 can be divided very nicely too. But when you look at 360, then you get something that's rather strikingly brilliant. 

360 can be divided by 2,3,4,5,6,8,9,10,12,15,18 and 20. That's rather clever don't you think? You can't do that with decimals so easily, and after all the point of any system is not that things can be measured. After all we could invent meters and re-invent them to be any arbitrary length and do the arithmetic. The strength of the metric system lies in its ability to scale by orders of magnitude. But scaling by orders of magnitude is not something that happens very often in the human scale. In engineering, sure. But not in home construction, food recipes, human measurement or any other of a dozen activities (hmm dozen) that we are regularly involved in. Now we could go into all of the ways we measure all of the things we do from miles per hour to paper sizes, but that long long discussion actually gets to the heart of Metric vs Imperial. In short, however, this is all about fractions. Or if you like to be mathematical about it, it's about superior highly composite numbers.

Now a friend told me that there are two kinds of engineers in the world. The kind that have put a man on the moon, and the kind that use the metric system. The picture above is taken from his machine shop. It sounds like braggadocio until you listen for another minute. Then the man says 'SAE'. Now anybody who's turned a wrench in their lives knows something about SAE sockets vs Metric sockets. But if you look at what SAE actually was and is, things get very interesting. 

Check out this dude Kettering. I don't know about you, but to me that's a career full of wowsers. 186 patents is no accident. He helped build GM into the world's largest company. But what's fascinating, as when I listen enough, is to learn how many parts in the world's market for parts are of SAE measure rather than of metric. I often think in terms of meters nowadays, but only for things that are linear. I will always think of pies when I have to divide, and I will think of fractions. But isn't it interesting, just looking at the picture, which is a better, simpler, faster way to measure? 

Maybe the metric system is why we haven't put another man on the moon. 

Now I'm going to show the other side here, because what we've done in America which is metric to the bone before just about every other nation is in our currency. More than just about anything, currency lies in the realm of Extremistan. Orders of magnitude are quite proper here. But at the small level of the ordinary consumer, we don't do much with pricing that accords to common 360 sense.

For example. In old money there were 12 pence to the shilling. That would be quite nice if you purchased many things by the dozen. If a dozen eggs cost a shilling, a half dozen eggs would be sixpence. A smart shopkeeper would try to price such things that way for the convenience of his customers. Then again, one might be a bit too clever (by half?) using the same system to obfuscate, as bakers may have throwing in for their extra sized dozen. We certainly don't price things logically at the farmer's market level, but clearly decimal pricing let's us see unit prices reflect economies of scale in bulk pricing.  So for things that scale orders of magnitude, decimal is better. 

By the way, what time is it?

A Third is Given

The reason kids don't decide is that they know that whatever they decide, there will be a community for them. They are swayed in and out of things and places. It's where you're at, dude.

We live in a society where the meta is part of the discussion and we have decided that certain matters are unresolvable. This is the land of the non-excluded middle. Everything is true, everything is false, everything is true and false. What this means is that bullies rule, but are always subverted.

--

Godbey thinks I might have been the one who put some of this in mind, but it wasn't me directly, I don't think. Still I do think about the possibility of determining the truth of things. Yet I know that people will decide without going the last mile to find out the truth or falsity of things because we are demonstrably not in the land of great men who pass judgment. I ask people 'Who is your Leviathan' and they don't even bother trying to find out. Everything just sloshes around and people who put things in buckets are ignorable nerds. So nobody goes to Buddha to ask if things are true or false, and Buddha doesn't have to come up with catuskoti answers. Buddha doesn't exist in our society, Google does. And Google just tells you what the most popular answers are.

Over at Quora, a lot of people ask what's it like to be somebody who is somebody. There is the somebody who is the somebody and everybody else cheats and cheeses in the games that somebody invented, because rules are just power controls which are disposable as soon as the somebody is deposed. In the meantime, suck ass. 

To the core:

Let’s start by turning back the clock. It is India in the fifth century BCE, the age of the historical Buddha, and a rather peculiar principle of reasoning appears to be in general use. This principle is called the catuskoti, meaning ‘four corners’. It insists that there are four possibilities regarding any statement: it might be true (and true only), false (and false only), both true and false, or neither true nor false.

We know that the catuskoti was in the air because of certain questions that people asked the Buddha, in exchanges that come down to us in the sutras. Questions such as: what happens to enlightened people after they die? It was commonly assumed that an unenlightened person would keep being reborn, but the whole point of enlightenment was to get out of this vicious circle. And then what? Did you exist, not, both or neither? The Buddha’s disciples clearly expected him to endorse one and only one of these possibilities. This, it appears, was just how people thought.

At around the same time, 5,000km to the west in Ancient Athens, Aristotle was laying the foundations of Western logic along very different lines. Among his innovations were two singularly important rules. One of them was the Principle of Excluded Middle (PEM), which says that every claim must be either true or false with no other options (the Latin name for this rule, tertium non datur, means literally ‘a third is not given’). The other rule was the Principle of Non-Contradiction (PNC): nothing can be both true and false at the same time.

Writing in his Metaphysics, Aristotle defended both of these principles against transgressors such as Heraklitus (nicknamed ‘the Obscure’). Unfortunately, Aristotle’s own arguments are somewhat tortured – to put it mildly – and modern scholars find it difficult even to say what they are supposed to be. Yet Aristotle succeeded in locking the PEM and the PNC into Western orthodoxy, where they have remained ever since. Only a few intrepid spirits, most notably G W F Hegel in the 19th century, ever thought to challenge them. And now many of Aristotle’s intellectual descendants find it very difficult to imagine life without them.

That is why Western thinkers – even those sympathetic to Buddhist thought – have struggled to grasp how something such as the catuskoti might be possible. Never mind a third not being given, here was a fourth – and that fourth was itself a contradiction. How to make sense of that?"

I think I remember something about Hegel's metaphysics. My essential take is that truth forms cannot become ossified, because as we say 'the journey is the destination'. In other words, nothing remains true simply by declaration, nor does anything remain false by declaration. To Hegel, you do not come upon knowledge in a pure form of truth or falsity, but through revelation through the work of discovery. Key word here is *work*. It takes energy to see what is true or false, and you only see when you are expending this energy. The answer is not '42'. '42' is an abstraction of the work of the greatest calculating mind, and the only way to know the truth of that answer is to actually do that work, which is of course impossible for everyon who is not that machine. But if you want an answer without doing the work and appealing to authority, it may as well be 42, which is as good as any other. Since Google is free, we are free to use and discard the results. So nothing at all is true or false, or mostly true or mostly false or both true and false, it is all in the process of being comprehended within Goedelian limits, and so it is all of that. 

In this way the kids of today have it right.  And yet in the end, somebody has to be authoritarian. Here's the scary part. The authority is energy. 

So we get back to the relativism of the hated Foucault who gives us the 'regimes of truth' concept. He's right about that. What's true is determined, not according to some Platonic form, but by the state of the masses' conventional wisdom, which is in turn shaped, if not determined, by the influence of the powers that be. 

But here's the thing. Human beings in their thinking machinery have no halting problem. Life cannot afford not to accept contradictions, otherwise we would be very poor at adapting to mind-blowing change. Our heads do not literally explode, we make some rationalizations and some abstractions and convenient bias confirmations and strategic forgetting in the retelling of our narratives. And we adapt. So what was true yesterday is not true today. But if you want a flat answer from the Buddha, he would have to tell you that this thing is true and false, because he must account for human possibilities of dealing with it throughout time.

I like how Aeon describes a function and a relationship in the bridge between mathematics and philosophy. 

At the core of the explanation, one has to grasp a very basic mathematical distinction. I speak of the difference between a relation and a function. A relation is something that relates a certain kind of object to some number of others (zero, one, two, etc). A function, on the other hand, is a special kind of relation that links each such object to exactly one thing. Suppose we are talking about people. Mother of and father of are functions, because every person has exactly one (biological) mother and exactly one father. But son of and daughter of are relations, because parents might have any number of sons and daughters. Functions give a unique output; relations can give any number of outputs. Keep that distinction in mind; we’ll come back to it a lot.

We are chockablock with dysfunctional relationships. But they are indeed relationships, and we make lots of them, whether or not they have a function. It doesn't matter does it? We are related and we're all relatives. Call it relativism. Everything is true. Everything is false. Everything is relative until you get all functional. 

But when you apply enough force and power into something it has to behave in more deterministic ways, neh? Scary. 

That's all I have.

 

 

A Rude Review of National Anthems

A few years ago I found myself comparing women singing Christmas songs. I started and I couldn't stop, not even for Celine Dion. Now I find myself listening to national anthems and I have to be judgmental.
 
Brazil
This is actually a marvelous song. I find the lyrics admirable and that music a perfect mix of martial and lyrical. 

Finland
It's smooth and sounds like it should be sung in church. I like it very much. Not bad at all.

Czeck Republic
Kind of sing-songy and romantic. It sounds like it could be the theme for a Judy Garland movie. I just see a woman in a long dress singing on top of a mountain meadow.

Sweden
No. Puts me to sleep. Something's just ineffably wrong with it. 

Portugal
Dignified for sure, in a kind of low key way. Not bad.

Korea
That's immediately sounding like a national anthem. Magnificent, florid lyrics with drama. Still, why do they have to sing the same thing three times?

Ukraine
This is one of my favorites. Just soaring dramatic and lyrics so well comported to the melody. A little weird at the end.

Chile
OK This one sounds like circus music. Ick. Stretching out simple words over long notes. Rep

Cuba
Can you say Oompa? Yuk. It just evokes a parade of strutting teenagers. Sad. Just sad.

Croatia
Romantic and prideful, understated and dignified. Lyrics about oak trees and mountains. Gotta love it. 

Netherlands
It's difficult for me to be cool with songs about blood. War I can deal with, just the word 'blood' doesn't work for me. It's a bit of a dirge this one. Dignified for sure, but a little on the churchy side. 

Brunei
I'm kind of sure I got a bad version of this. Sounds like they had too many 13 year old kids singing in it. Kind of directionless music and phrasing. 

Germany
This is actually one of the greatest anthems out there. Catchy and magnificent at once. Gets to you. I've heard a number of arrangements of this so it's probably not fair to those others I've heard only this time. 

France
Speaking of blood. France has the the most disturbing lyrics of all. It's hard to get over that. But you've got to give them a hat tip for the music. It couldn't be much of anything else but a national anthem.

India
It works. Miraculously this has India all over it. Just a droning kind of drug of a song, puts me into a trance.

Russia
The Russian national anthem is probably the greatest of them all. It just begs to be sung by masses of men and women. Swelling bosoms from left to right. Even in its quiet moments it never loses track of the victorious strains. Poetic throughout and just flat glorious. 

Japan
OK I just don't like this. It is absolutely very Japanese and has a kind of unapproachably haunting beauty, but it's a tone poem, not an anthem. 

China
Scary confidence in that choppy lyricism. Sophisticated for certain but bloody again. Yike. 

Bangladesh
After listening to the marching Chinese, the fragrance of mango groves is a welcome respite. Still, I don't get it. Very villagey sounding. 

Nepal
Wonderful. A perfect mix for a small country. 

Canada
Oh! When done right, this is bloody brilliant. Definitely in the top ten.

Italy
I hate the arrangement I'm listening to. I'm thinking there must be a version that doesn't make it sound like a circus march, but maybe not.
 
South Africa
Hard for me to be objective about this one. Like Germany, England and Russia, I've known this one for a while and hummed it often. Corny. It grows on you.

Turkey
The blood in this one is nicely sculpted. But like the language, it's quirky and unsubtle. 

Greece
Gotta love the lyrics to this one. Hard to beat. Of all the repetitive anthems, I suppose these are the least tedious. 

Azerbaijan
Why does this sound like the overture to an epic black and white movie made in 1925? Yike. Self importantly beautiful.

Spain
The most tortured lyrics ruin a song that.. well, I'd just like to hear the instrumental version. Just too monosyllabic. No flow whatsoever.

Bulgaria
Deliciously dramatic. And oh those minor keys! Mother give us manly strength. What a charmingly magnificent song. This is what a national anthem should be.

Dominican Republic
Of all the Latin nations, these guys have done it right. Booyah. Thank you. I was beginning to think Spanish was a language just incompatible with a properly lyrical anthem. 

UK
Yeah this one works. You kind of get the idea that they might have invented the very idea of a national anthem. Not that I'm biased or anything. Heh. 

US
Often misunderstood, but bloody brilliant when done right. Definitely in the top five.

Egypt
Very simple and elegant. I have a feeling that the lyrics, which I don't have, would make it suck, but the instrumental is pretty good. 

East Germany
You're not likely to hear this one anytime soon, but if you get the chance, it's gorgeous. Just wow. 

Cote D'Ivoire
A proper anthem. Straightforward, crisp and clean.

Ethiopia
Sounds just like music from a great John Ford movie. Sleepy in the middle and gets lost a bit, but recovers nicely. 

Iran
A stately march, but it doesn't go anywhere musically. Like they wanted to keep it down to the fewest notes possible. 

Iraq
Very Soviet. Holy smokes. Am I listening to the right version? I can see the warheads on parade. 

Australia
A sweet combination of modesty and pomposity. Starts off meek then punches you in the jaw. It works.

 OK that's enough. 

The Ethiopian Sea Cliff

I just got my latest book from the guy who writes XKCD. The inside dust cover is a map of the world as represented if there was a wormhole from Earth to Mars at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. As you might guess, there isn't much water left.

My biggest project, were I to become president of the US would be to initiate a water project that drains the Great Lakes, maybe a foot or two, and irrigates the desert Southwest. Starting by filling the Great Salt Lake, it would be the coolest thing since the Panama Canal. Sez me.

On the other hand, since there isn't likely to be any wormholes sucking away our oceans, it might be a better project to place some nuclear powerplants on the coastline and desalinate a river of water going back from the ocean into some parched nations that could use it. I just love the idea of a river that starts from the ocean and flows inland - an artificial estuary that begins on a sea cliff.

You see if you're going to build a nuclear power and desalination plant it's going to take a community of hard working, well educated civilians protected by some special arrangement. A sea cliff would be a very nice place to live, walking distance from your job at the plant. 

Just saying. 

Why Programmers Appear To Have Quiet Personalities

Back in the 80s when the world was new, I was a programmer. I would engage my professors and they would exhibit something I call programmer's dyslexia. This happens when you ask a good question that has many implications.

A good programmer will always think of the 0 case, the 1 case and the infinite case. Any calculation will fit into that and so we are always quantifying how much it takes to grind out an answer. But that also means we have to categorize our assumptions in order to come up with a reasonably proper answer. It was easier to ask such questions when the world was new, but now a lot of them have been asked and answered (I leave it to you as an exercise to qualify the query space of the Web itself).

You should ascertain by this that the quietude of good programmers is born of respect. You are either asking a question with a trivially easy answer and so we are redirecting insults to our internal dev/null, or you are asking a question that needs greater specificity or you are asking a well-qualified question that requires significant thought. The second type of question can yield great amounts of humor. For example, my wife has the habit of asking me questions like. "Honey would you like me to fix you a snack now or can you wait 45 minutes to dinner?" Now to me this is a simple yes or no question. But it requires a yes and a no. So I will say "No, yes", and then she will become confused. She wants me to say something inefficiently verbose, like "I'm kind of hungry right now but if you're fixing something really nice for dinner then I'll just grab myself a beer and wait." To a programmer, "No, yes" is the proper answer, to my wife and the rest of humanity, we are just being cryptic assholes. So sometimes we have to refrain from using our own unique sense of humor and send those responses down another path to the same mental bitbucket. That path often triggers a bit of emotional resentment.

Those of us who adapt well understand that and so we have developed fluffy verbose social skins over our lean, mean logical question parsers. But we often have to worldswap and figure out our contexts to check which skin to implement. Depending upon our environment, this takes a noticeable amount of time. Some of us even attempt to build human interpreters on the spot because the questions we get are so stochastic and meaningless that we simply don't have a map to the proper context. Sometimes it's easier to put on the 'asshole' skin (c. f. ehrlich@aviato).

Programmers are not quiet people. Our brains are always busy doing things, and we are always shouting at ourselves. What you are encountering is a very sophisticated set of filtering mechanisms that generate something approaching a simulation of civility, because most of the time your questions are not as interesting as the questions we ask ourselves, and you're interrupting us, dammit.

Be glad you don't know programmers without filters and social skins as we are wont to replace you with a very small bash script.

Apple Beats

The purchase of Beats by Apple is such an obvious and welcome development, I'm only really surprised that in the end it was Beats. As an ex-audiophile, I have been waiting for this move for quite some time and what sticks out in my mind primarily is the manufacturing facilities that this purchase entails. 

Apple already has made the claim that it is one of the world's largest producers of small magnets of the sort required for headphones. Beats started day one with the premise that most consumer headphones were ridiculous and unable to reproduce the serious bass a studio musician in hiphop needs to hear. Dre would know. More than any other figure, he made the leap from music to film and is basically the man who got hiphop soundtracks in hundreds of films starting in the mid 90s. By the time Space Jam made it all silly in 1998, Dre was already floating in millions. And ultimately Beats have been a huge success in the market.

So how seriously is Apple going to take the potential for a new digital standard and higher quality audio electronics in its product offerings? I find it difficult to believe that the iTunes store would offer FLAC over its own AAC format at a premium price, but it could happen. I find it less difficult to believe that Apple would move towards hi-fidelity electronics attached to Apple TV and the Mac Pro. Once again, Apple is capable of being everything Sony once was when it comes to manufacturing consumer electronics. Some of that *must* be high end. 

Bang & Olafson, Jambox, Beats and a host of other manufacturers have made serious middlebrow efforts to capture the outputs of the revolution in digital music that is sourced from iPhones and iPods. The markup on some of these products is ridiculous. In that crowded market, Beats subsumed into Apple can win big. 

So now we have to start dealing with Apple like Kodak. If Kodak film begat a whole ecosystem of products, so will Apple digital music. None of this seemed probable in 1995. It is now inevitable. Too bad for Sonos and Nest.

My International Emergent Middle Class

I don't blog so much here at Cobb as I used to. That may or may not change. I've been going through some nasty stuff. Maybe more on that later, probably not. It's personal.

I have been spending less time on Facebook and more time on Quora. Quora is that social artifact that comes closest to my design of XRepublic. I am much closer to the ability to build XRepublic than at any time in my life, but here's what I'm thinking today. You see, a lot of the new followers to my comments at Quora have Asian names, both East Asian and Indian. It is reminding me about something I used to talk more about - The Emergent.

I am very close to taking for granted that there will be no global catastrophe in my lifetime. But even if there is, I have a high degree of confidence that a lot our current knowledge will be preserved. Perhaps not instantiated in a sustainably real society, but preserved. So my worst case scenario predicts monastic life Anathem-style.

As we are not faced with any global crisis at the moment, but crawling out of a financial depression in life's rocky road (we meaning the West, not including Greece so much), there remains an ample amount of hope. And humanity's good graces upon itself are sufficient to inspire the proper people to keep working in the proper direction. Good guys persist. And so lots of economists and others are predicting that in 50 years there will be a global middle class. There is one now but it's rather disjointed and just finding its feet like a newborn colt. But we will become connected and we will find our footing. We will emerge healthy, literate and able. 

I expect very much that the next billion will follow, more or less in the footsteps of we, the Emergent of America. America's definition of the West, I think, will ultimately succeed and prosper. In that I guess I need to speak more about North America and a bit less about the chatting class of the US. I accept that a great swath of them have lost touch with reality. They'll find it under duress, so I won't belabor the point. But for those of us in the Emergent middle class, those of us who have found within the past two generations an adequate amount of higher education and profitable employment, we remain close enough to duress to not lose touch. That means a great deal. And so now I will presume to communicate my lessons at that level as I have finally met, in my early 50s, that amount of confidence that allows me to consider more than just my community, state and nation, but the world itself. 

Cobb now speaks to The Next Billion as a stoic survivor in the United States. Hopefully with wisdom appropriate to the peacetime in which I have lived my life. I know something worth preserving, that is the good life one can attain in today's global infrastructure at the level of the middle class effort. It's a good place to be and I would like to continue to discuss its ethics, values, pleasures and dangers. 

Technology, Diverse Empowerment & Slavish Dependency

I went to a store. I can’t remember the name of the store or what I was buying there, but what I remembered was that there was music. There shouldn’t have been music in this store, there should have been Muzak. But today’s Muzak is all the same kind of confused soft rock & roll. Stuff like Goyte.  

Technology allows Stuff Like Goyte, something catchy, simple, overexposed and annoying to be called entertainment because of what? A lack of discrimination. When you allow technology to ‘empower’ the ordinary Joe, then you have to understand that the ordinary Joe will exploit the opportunity at every turn. That’s how we know technology has value, because people use it to their advantage. And because they do it will be all in your face until you force it away or turn away yourself. If you want to immerse yourself in the creativity of the common man, this is your era. You have Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Vines and dozens of other social media services.  You will have a diverse experience. You will see everybody's point of view, and you'll never have to decide. You'll never have to sacrifice. You'll never have to discriminate. Social media presents perfect empathy for everyone. All you do is open your ears and eyes and every possible point of view is represented. It is a cornucopia of the common. 

If you want quality, then work is required. More work than ever before. 

It's hard to imagine that Beethoven's deafness was a horrible defect. He could certainly hear the music in his head with no distractions whatsoever. The distractions of common knowledge and conventional wisdom are pervasive today. Even colleges are pervasive. You can get a lot of intelligent opinion through computer mediated communications. But once you step above the common, it becomes awfully difficult to determine if what you are finding is actual. Once again, there is technology which aids and abets the intelligent, chatting class. If you choose to find out the series of events surrounding the burning of the Amerian Embassy in Libya and the murders of its officers, you will hear every theory possible. What actually happened would be a state secret, but you'll have all the smart theories, plus there will be some counterintelligence planted in that swirl of narrative as well. 

We are entering a post-industrial twilight in which the ability to see clearly, while everyone's goal, becomes increasingly difficult as we peer through kaliedescopes of computed media. But this shouldn't come as a surprise. When everyone has a cell phone, making long distance calls is no longer an elite activity. When everyone gets to learn to read and write at public school for free, it's harder to write the Great American Novel. When everybody tries to run like Jesse Owens, it's harder to actually win gold at the Olympic Games. Technology has raised the bar for everyone. Citius. Altius. Fortius.

Our freedoms are all relative. What we can do is limited by the context in which we do it.

When I was younger, there was an expression of contempt in the phrase 'cotton-picking' as in "get your cotton-picking hands off me". It's something you don't hear much these days. A machine picks cotton and so that which was menial labor at great cost to the suppleness of the human hand, is now obviated. Nobody has cotton-picking hands any longer. Those people are out of work. So they had to do something more sophisticated that a machine can't do. We didn't think a computer could beat a grand master in chess, but we were wrong, and today, technology can't come close to performing ballet. What elevates us as humans becomes more and more important as technology replaces human work, but also as it empowers the least of us.  We have to discriminate more about what is worth knowing when anybody with a Google device can ask questions and get reasonable answers in seconds. We have to discriminate more about what is worth doing when labor can be mechanized and automated. These are the new lines of class.

In 1964 if you had a car with 200 horsepower and a two-way radio smaller than a shoe, you could have been James Bond. Today if you have that, you're more like Maxwell Smart. There is nothing quite so marking of class these days as the man who walks around in public with a bluetooth earpiece affixed. Ten years ago it was awesome, now it's only awesome in Bulgaria. I have been on the cutting edge of information technology for my entire career; it is my career. I am acutely aware of how to discriminate when it comes to accepting the answers given to any question by a computer. Decision support is my job. And I know when money is aptly spent to support decisions by making the best use of compute power and when it is a waste of time and expense. I know when a computer aided decision augments human intelligence and when it replaces it. I can tell the difference between collaboration with compute resources and slavish dependence. Sometimes the cotton-picker goes free to study ballet, sometimes he gets demoted in pay to someone who merely tends to the machine that replaced him. Sometimes the common man uses his iPad to make the music in his head, sometimes he becomes a prisoner of the iTunes store and can only use the technology to feed a consuming habit. 

Here at Cobb, I have made use of the terms gearhead, hacker and maker. This is the hierarchy in the post-industrial world. Because more of what our contemporary economies produce can be accomplished by smaller groups of people aided by compute power, the goods and services of our economies can be appreciated, modified and created more by individuals. No small group of men could build a railroad, but a small group of programmers could build a Facebook. But even the gearhead is advanced beyond the mere consumer or someone outside of the market altogether. Those who consume or aim to consume cannot afford to discriminate, figuratively or literally. They are as captive as ever before and cannot escape the attractions of Stuff Like Goyte. They are in the mass market, a growing global middle class in the billions. We have uplifted many more than ever before in human history. This *is* a global proletariate being born. But they will be united only by their discriminations because the very diversity of their undisciplined consumption will leave them behind. Why learn English, the language of computer programming and air traffic control, if Wikipedia comes automatically translated into your native idiom? Why learn Math if Siri will add numbers for you? Why learn Piano when Goyte is played wherever you walk? What is the point of being an extraordinarily talented human when you can be an ordinary Joe with extraordinary gifts provided to you by technology? Why pick cotton?

I keep in mind, ever since 9/11/2001, that all systems fail, that is all except pain receptors in the human body. All technology, all systems are designed to operate within certain environmental tolerances for a specified period of time. Stress those tolerances and snap, crackle, pop: system down. Makers are stressing those tolerances every day because they want what they build to exceed one or more of them. Hackers are stressing them to find the limits and gearheads make it their business to know the factors. Consumers and those wishing to consume are just trying to get a ride in the boat, trusting souls. For a maker and hacker and gearhead, (I am all three depending on the target), I want to experience the balance. I create for my consumers to the level of their expertise to enable them to do what I do with my 20 year headstart. That's a product; that's the enablement, the empowerment, the new economy. I could make them slavishly dependent but I choose not to. I want the product to educate as well. I want its guts to be transparent, so that when it fails, all can see how to fix it. This is a principle of integrity that can easily be ignored. It is disrespectful at best, and coercively entrapping and enslaving at bottom. It is the Muzak that cannot be switched off. It is ultimately the company town, the slave plantation whose master rejects the liberating cotton gin. And yet in human skill and nurtured talent is the ability to remain free of such all encompassing systems. When they fail, it is what humans must fall back on anyway. So we should always be mindful of what skills and talents and abilities we give up for the convenience and empowerment of technology.

Closing, I present once again, the irony inherent in our drive to empower through machines. I think it is driven primarily from our fundamental unwillingness to discriminate against people. We are able to empower through devices because of a basic failure to empower through human character. We punt responsibility to machines because we are unwilling to give the appropriate training and responsibility to human labor. In some cases, for picking cotton, that is the proper way to go. In many more cases than we care to examine in these days of social media, we are forgoing human judgment for the sake of empowerment of the indiscriminate masses. We create mass media with mass entertainment and generate Stuff Like Goyte. We pollute investigations with counterintelligence and cults of personality in order to sheild failures of judgment of the elites. We build obfuscating products and interminable co-dependent service contracts. We make things that function against standards.

I think the solution to this problem is found in the drive to embue ourselves with organic skills, to face life off the grid and make ourselves antifragile to the failures of systems. I think socially we should aim for Victorian relationships - to understand with clarity the necessities of life and to judge and discriminate people based upon their ability and willingness to provide them for themselves in all ways. I think we will find that as we reach for the gold medal achievements in life, we will find ourself more dependent on securing products and services from people who live at the silver level. That in order to avoid the catastrophe of humans dependent on systems whose failure is opaque to them in scope and time, that humans must depend on other humans whose capabilities are quite simply transparent to humans. Where only gearheads, hackers and makers can identify the stresses on systems, all of us know what tears mean.

I should like to go to a store where a woman plays a piano. Wouldn't you?