Cobb

The Cobbian Mental Universe

I've got to do at least one essay per week to continue my plodding journey to famousity. I've neglected this for some time in order to deal with a multiplicity of family problems. You don't want to know, moreover I don't want to tell. Nevertheless, I am quickly regaining my balance and it feels good. It has been some time since I've taken an assessment of where I'm going and what I'm doing in concert with you, my readers and fellow travelers on the road to continuous enlightenment and ultimately to wisdom and realization of 'thou art that'. 

Strategery

In the largest sense of my current intellectual pursuits I am moving sideways in my career. I think I have struggled through the last year in dealing with my difficulty in dealing with the fact that I am not coding on a day to day basis. There has been something of a hole in my soul missing the sense of accomplishment that comes with building elegant, logical spaces for my customers to work through their decisions. So I'm stepping back from that with the tacit acknowledgement that it's a two edged sword. I love to code just as I love to write compelling paragraphs in prose. But I need to do other things to make the enterprise of my business perform as it should. Others can code. I am uniquely situated to do those other things. So I will. 

Secondly, my journey through Stoicism continues. I feel very strongly about the gut sense I have developed over the past few years. And so I continue to be refreshed in this, not only by my own work but in concert with the LA Stoic Meetup group, led by DK. Beyond what it means to me in releasing myself from the tyranny of political gossip and blather, it is an important way to engage fellows and the public. I see it as part of my civic duty. In close proximity to the Stoic is the IDW participation that I have attached myself to. My aim in this is to establish and maintain a space for that part of me which is a combat epistemologist. I rigorously parse what people say and am determined to be honest in my feedback. I practice the Abstention Principle in politics, and yet I feel the need to be compellingly disconfirmatory in my political speech. In other words, I don't care who is right. I care what is right. I expect people to be logically consistent as they are capable of being and intend to bring that context right up front, doing so without any particular ambition or agenda other than letting people know there are dispassionate ways to be correct. The difficulty in all of this is that there will always be a temptation to follow too much of my curiosity. I can get bogged down. But I'm also not particularly trying to make friends or make nice. I'm trying to achieve a command of civility in truth telling and sense making. 

Thirdly, I'm aiming to expand the imaginative aspects of my life. Tangential to my desire to clean up my health (which is kind of a barbell effort, live on the border of injury while making myself harder and harder to kill) I'm learning yet another dimension of cooking, eating and drinking. My aim here is to both lose the remaining 22 pounds and to become a master of cooking fish. Check back with me after the summer. 

And finally I am changing my reading a bit. The same informative and entertaining habits are likely to stick, but I want to spend less time putting other people's ideas into my head. That means Blinkist. That means less Audible and more Kindle. It means less Science Fiction and more History. And I'm going to add poetry into the mix. I forgot how satisfying it is to write that way and I haven't in much too long.

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Practicality

In the realm of the technical and professional I a convinced that the future is the Apache Beam framework and that the world of data will approach the realm of IoT. Everything is a data stream, and all applications are the tactical management of these data streams. Operationally this will all be some Kafkaesque future. Confluence are the masters. So we will be replacing databases with streams, and the world of data will be the fast sort and the slow sort. Hmm. I should map Kahneman over that. In the meantime, I'll keep my head above the code and try to start thinking in terms of service products that involve wrangling those streams and sending them where no man has gone before. Also this should be the guiding light for the LOGOS Project that will be my side gig, with a helping of Smart Cities. 

The Stoics and IDW are mostly driven by my primary podcaster Eric Weinstein. So I may very well continue what I've started in putting answer context here and elsewhere. It's coming naturally. The stuff of Weinstein gets my attention, and I think he's broad enough to keep it. So far it's not difficult to keep up, but it has certainly put others, particularly Peterson, on the back burner. I'm sticking to Sam Harris because he too gets my goat in a certain compelling way. But I'm definitely coming around to recognize his way of thinking about meditation. I think we'll have to come up, in toto, with a new religion. I will continue to write here and over at Quora, because Quora is the precursor to LOGOS. Also I expect to do a bit more American Wag. I just dont' have the rhythm yet.  While I'm at it and thinking about a new religion let me give you this aside with regards to my high level look at university. H/T Bryan Alexander:

Aside on the University

I think the university should be in charge of pedagogy and research. I think that scholarship should be exported. I primarily I think that the university is oversubscribed. There are too many of them and we don't need them to be entry level employee generators. The cost of training employees should be born by business. So the entire debt to society universities are costing should be shifted away from the current economy. Trim university systems and make them excellent at pedagogy, scholarship and research.

The matter of pedagogy has the common sense benefit of preserving the culture of academics who perform for academics. We can have a great deal of confidence that will work without much change - but it will only work if scholarship is exported. I want the province of fact checking of the entire realm of knowledge to be shifted from journalism to a kind of partnership of publication. In other words, academics should be paid not so much to train some selection of undergraduates but everyone, and especially global media networks through the same mechanisms they use. I don't want the editorial board of the NYT curating the truth about New York City. I want scholars at CUNY and Colombia doing that. It is therefore the priority of pedagogy to have more integrity than mere publication.

Scholars will do journalism better than journalists will do scholarship, so they must because the incentives for scholars is to be correct and comprehensive. The incentives for journalists is to be first and topical.

The university fails because it is not responsible for the ignorance and lies that are promulgated more rapidly than their pedagogy. It makes the university insular and only responsible for its own truth rather than a truth which should be accessible to the world. If the university cannot reach the world then it will exist in isolation and ultimately be reduced to monasticism.

I am pessimistic that universities can make this change before they are forced into the monastic position. Rather it will be visionary individuals who will do so. I think it will be a long time before the traditional philanthropists admit the necessity of endowing great podcasters. Although there is something to be said in defense of Mercatus. https://www.mercatus.org/

I will write more poetry, so expect more stuff from the Eruditorium. My flirtation with returning to Cobb the Comic is too near realtime and I can't keep all of those characters up to date on things worth remarking on. Twitter speed is what it is and I don't have the patience for it. I could have followed Gen. Q Soliemani into Heaven, but nobody really cares any longer. Comics need to be fast and I don't have a system that's fast enough. 

Exercise, diet blah blah. I'll take pictures and post them on Facebook. I won't mention it again until I lose another bowling ball. I will continue to post reviews on Goodreads, and reblog them here (which I haven't been doing). 

 

 

A Simple Definition and Defense of Western Modernity

Q: Why are intellectuals judgmental and elitist?

A:Because that is the point of disciplined intellectual discovery, to know with certainty that X is right and Y is wrong and to know all the reasons for that to be the case.

We have dozens of ways of thinking about the advantages of disciplined intellectual discovery in Western culture. Here are a few examples:

• “If you had a time machine, would you go back and (kill Hitler, rule over primitives, play the stock market)?” The canonical book is by Mark Twain “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs’s Court”. Obviously the premise is that the modern contemporary person is a beneficiary of the collected wisdom of the past, that prior people did not know.
• “We can put a man on the moon but we can’t X. / It’s not rocket science.”
  We presume that the knowledge to do very complicated and impressive things is already demonstrated. If so, why is this particular problem so difficult to solve?
• “Been there, done that.”
  A very commonplace expression that says that once a lesson has been learned, or something experienced, we are supposed to progress from that point and are bored by repeating something we already know.

I like to repeat the expression “The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.” People who develop some expertise already know what new ideas, products and services are likely to roll out to the general public. Think of them as ‘makers’ and ‘early adopters’ as well as ‘hackers’. People seek to improve a situation whether or not the rest of the public understands what the innovation is, they commit to living in the new, changed way even if it makes them appear strange and unfamiliar to the average Joe.

To be against judgment and ‘elite’ knowledge is to undermine the premises of modern Western societies. Understand that modern is the opposite of tribal. And so to accept modernity is to accept certain things that are not so obvious today. So I’ll take a moment to remind you.

• In a modern society, you accept that expert information can be applied to all people, no matter who they are. You have a right to question based on reason.
• In a modern society, you accept secular meritocracy.
• In a modern society, you accept conformity to norms and standards of your own choosing. You can be an individual.
• In a modern society, you accept that you can give and receive, buy and sell and otherwise interact with people not known to you, not related to you and not like you.
• In a modern society, you accept that you can use money and therefore have a specialized skill whose value can be transferred anywhere.

The opposite is the case in a tribal society:

• In a tribal society, you accept that only certain people can possess certain knowledge. You cannot question certain members of the tribe no matter what the reason.
• In a tribal society, people only inherit status or are granted status by the rulers, but demonstrated skill means nothing without the blessing of a tribal leader.
• In a tribal society, you are what people say you are. You conform to your predetermined role. You have no choice in the matter.
• In a tribal society, you communicate only through pre-existing channels. Never above or below your level. Marriages are arranged, for example.
• In a tribal society, your prospects are set. No matter how skilled you are, your work is owned by the tribe. You cannot rise above your tribal affiliation.

If you look at ‘intellectuals’ as a tribe, then you will believe that everything they do is necessarily elitist and done for the benefit of themselves and their relatives and friends. But Western institutions that are setup to attract, fund and support intellectuals are precisely the opposite. They promote that the new ideas, products and services will outlast the individual lives of their creators and thus can be passed down through the generations. This is the case with Universities, which are open to the public, and with public Corporations whose stocks can be owned by the public. Democracies allocate political power to the government through the participation of the public. This is modern.

If you withdraw your understanding and support for modern institutions, then you can only be a marginal participant in modern society. This is happening in the US. Anti-vaxxers have withdrawn their understanding and support of public health institutions, for example. Anarchists withdraw their understanding and support of the rule of law. Many people are now withdrawing their support and understanding of democratic institutions. I think the most catastrophic failure of Western society would follow the abandonment of the study of the development of Western Civilization itself, and I find evidence of that in the decreasing popularity of Classics and History in the Humanities. In fact, I believe it is an ignorance of these particular subjects that would lead to the inevitability of the interpretation of all intellectual work as tribal.

There is nothing to guarantee that Western civilization continues except its continued understanding, use and defense. So to disregard its intellectual fruits is the first step. This has been the program of historical revisionism aiming to paint Western Civilization as something other than what it is, as in the famous quote attributed to Gandhi .

Currently, many Americans take for granted that their inheritance in the West is strictly a function of free capital markets and science and technology with some small hat tip to the American Constitution - but that the realm of values and morals stands apart from the history of the West. This is unfortunate, shallow and exploitable. I think this failure recognize the depth and importance of Western modernism can likely reach crisis proportions, but in the end Western modernism will win. It is simply the matter of what enables the modern masses over primitive tribes - the durability, capacity and power of modern institutions over the inherent limits of tribal thinking.

Driving Fast

A couple years ago, I rented a new Corvette and took it up the Angeles Crest. I wanted to find out if I just liked fast cars or rather if I just liked driving fast. It turned out and it remains the case that I like driving fast. But like most other things, I'm a formalist and I do my extremes with a modicum of restraint. I like being competent at extreme things, I am not particularly interested at being extremely competent at anything. There is the shadow of my father's most prescient and wise words that hangs over me. "A little bit of everything adds up to a whole lot of nothing."

That is why, in the end, I am much more likely to spend my hard earned money on a moderate Porsche rather than any other fast car. I am attracted to its formality, its capability of achieving without straining, its ability to draw one out of mediocrity without a sharp learning curve. Yeah. That's me. The moderate Porsche guy.

In this, I make the distinction between moderation and mediocrity. After all, I'm still talking about some appreciable measure of extremity. How's about 120 MPH in a 55 zone? This is actually something I'm fairly comfortable doing, and have done several times. The thrill, after all, comes from leaving the mediocre behind. Half the time I hate being boxed in by laggard traffic, but the other half is from the possession of the power and skill to make things happen as quickly as I can think of them. To see across four lanes of traffic through which you can thread a half mile ahead of your current cruising position is a siren call. On a motorcycle it's almost trivial. In a fast car, there is a different kind of risk. In an expensive Porsche, another dimension of risk is added. All that risk aside it's the thrill of moving from a casual 80 to a manic 135, of making the other traffic stand still, to boldly go. That's a kick in the pants, but it's also barrel fishing.

The real test is to measure oneself against oneself. That requires a track and practice, and that is an expensive proposition for the kind of Porsche owner I'm most likely to become in the next couple of years. That's the sad trombone. That said, there is a strong element of wish fulfillment going on here. I've always wanted to own the Porsche and the Rolex. It's a kind of California thing. It's personal. It's what I would hate not achieving, even though I go back and forth about the Rolex and have for the past 15 years. If I never own my own Porsche, and I never drive fast on that mountain road, it will be an experience I would greatly miss. If I never impress a Maitre D with my Explorer GMT, I can live with that.

Deep in my soul there are a couple interesting characters with whom I'm entirely comfortable. One of them is the guy who drives west on Sunset to the sea, but with that jungle music turned up. I already have composed the tune I want playing when the valet returns my hooptie and I prepare to burnout. So all of my cars had to be cool. The Porsche will be cool.

I think it is true that one cannot enjoy multiple cars. It isn't natural. It is an acquired taste, and one that I'm not sure that I want to acquire. Of course I don't know what it means to be retired with disposable capital. But after all of the car shows and auctions I have witnessed - well they're kind of like strip clubs. You're real happy for the guy who just scored but you're really not all that jealous. I can't tell you how much fun it is for me to sit behind my LG flat screen and enjoy the screeching cars at Goodwood, but do I really want to fly out to England to be a guest of a club they would never let me join?

What I can do is join the club I don't have to join, which is the gang of motorheads native of SoCal car culture, the Cult of Mulholland the Tribe of the Angeles Crest, the Crenshaw Cruisers and the Hoonigan Squids of Griffith Park. I was more than just knee deep, then again, not totally deep, but deep enough to be deep. I wonder if, as I look upon these tepid loves, I have ever wanted anything so much as to break all laws. No. I've only wanted to satisfy my self, and I've never been so greedy as to expect it all at once. I've always wanted to live a long and fruitful life. Perhaps I'll become more reckless once my daughters are married.

This weekend, I took myself through a sheepdip of the Porsche Experience and tested my limits on the little track over in Carson. I can say without qualification that it was a breathless experience, and it was very pleasant to learn that I have a solid grasp of the basics. Unlike when I started shooting several years ago, I was not handicapped too badly by my videogame experience. I could tell what driving on virtual tracks had done to mess me up, but I straightened a lot of that out in a hurry. My motorcycle experience served me well in that. But that was all the first step. Now I'm knocking on new doors.

My strengths are in braking. That's the one thing that I got consistent good marks on. I could take the car reasonably up to 80-90% of its ability with good control. My weakness was a lack of understanding of how hard I could corner, ie how much speed I could take into a corner. I was in too much of a hurry to accelerate hard out of a corner rather than to brake less coming in and ride the speed through then power out later and smoother. That's probably a typical videogame error. At times, I was also not looking far enough down the track because I didn't have a good idea how fast I could actually go given the traffic. My biggest error was slow hand speed on the skid pad. Until I figured I could waggle a lot more on the pedal and steering wheel, I was trying to smooth my way into a perfect drift. So I was trying exactly not to be jerky and I think jerky was called for. All in all, I got a good taste of driving fast. God have mercy on my soul.

The next day I did some American muscle in a Mustang. That was quite the different experience as it was mostly done on the legendary Pasadena Freeway and on the 10 West. It mostly consisted of blowing through traffic as described up in the top paragraphs. Satisfying, but silly. I have to say that kind of driving is much more fun if your car is both loud and obnoxious in sound and color. The yellow vette from two years ago was perfect.  The black Mustang, not so much, but since it was a convertible and we wore Ray Bans, it was doucheriffic. I think the only thing that can outdo that kind of badassery would be doing wheelies on bikes.

So there's that.

Peasant Theory and the American Meritocracy

Meritocracy does exist. You’re just not in that league. It is a non-trivial matter to get there.

First of all, as any parent should understand, you don’t have to have a perfect house and a perfect kid to have an excellent family life. So meritocracy is not something everybody needs. In fact, I would argue that meritocracy is only needed for overachievers. But let’s leave that aside for a moment.

I have something called the Peasant Theory. It works like this. There are only three classes of Americans. Rulers, Peasants and the Slice. 90% of all Americans are Peasants. The only thing they control is their own family, maybe.

The Rulers are those people in society who have the power and prestige to give you power and prestige. They are few. You do something for a Ruler because only they can give you something you cannot give yourself. They are the motivation of America. They are not all good, nor are they a club. Some of them are men like Steve Jobs. Some of them are women like Mylie Cyrus. The bottom line is people will run to be associated with them. These are the 1% (which means there are about 3 million of them)

The Slice are those people in society who make things work so that the Rulers can actually rule. In other words, they keep the electricity on. They build and arrange the lights and microphones so that you can actually see and hear Mylie. They design and build the batteries so that your iPhone actually works. These are the 9% who actually know WTF they are doing, all the time.

Now there’s an interesting dynamic between the the top edge of the Peasants and the bottom edge of the Slice. In that realm is the meritocracy. It’s not for everybody.

There is a highly competent realm in the American Peasantry. You know that brilliant computer programmer who refuses to work for Apple. You know that master mechanic whose hot rods can beat any supercar. You know that guy who grinds his own coffee and absolutely hates Starbucks. These people do not care about meritocracy. They’re not trying to sell out. They are not trying to appease or work for the ruling class. They therefore have not power nor prestige. They are amateurs. They are not professionals. Some of them are rebels. Some of them want revolutionary change and know they can never get it given the current ruling class. I call these people the ‘Alternative Slice’.

So let’s slice up the Slice for a moment. Right now, the man in the Oval Office, definitely part of the Rulers, has some broad choice (perhaps getting narrower by the moment) of highly competent members of the Slice to push the buttons, and pull the levers, for the power and prestige of working for the President of the United States of America. That means other members of the Slice are sitting on the bench right now. And the second stringers have a third string too., and the Alternative Slice knows just as much as all the rest.

So what is incredibly important about the US is that our Slice is so large, and manifestly competent. We have a deep bench. One guy gets fired, there’s somebody else ready to go. Always. Why? Because we have a meritocracy. What did I just say?

We have a meritocracy.

If you are not a board certified gynecologist, the ladies of the ruling class in NYC’s upper west side are not going to give you a second look. They talk to each other. America has a Top Ten for every friking thing under the sun. And the Rulers are always spending time and money to put those best things to use. Goods, Services, People. So when you get to be the private pilot for the CEO of Goldman Sachs, you know WTF you are doing, all the time. When you get to be the host of the Tonite Show, you’re at the top of a very large pyramid. Meritocracy.

Now of course, it is absolutely true that there are Rulers who don’t care about your competency, they just want your absolute loyalty. That’s the difference between a Leader and a Boss. It doesn’t matter. They still enable the Slice. So if I’m the scumbag lawyer for the Hollywood producer or the weed carrier for the decrepit aging rock star, dude, I’m still getting paid and on tour with the stars. Slice.

The overwhelming majority of Americans drink beers they don’t know how to brew, wear clothes they don’t know how to sew, eat vegetables they don’t know how to grow, watch crap movies that still look better than anything they could ever film themselves and consume news that literally makes them crazy, yet they are incapable of writing a rebuttal worthy of an editorial column. Most Americans live in the Comments Section. But. Who cares? It’s still a good life.

Here is what we do in America, and it is the right thing to do. We have leagues. We are all amateurs and Peasants, and none of us, EVER want to compete in basketball against LeBron. None of us want to get on stage in front of 20,000 people and have a dance off vs Mylie Cyrus. EVER. Few of us can even stand the humiliation that an average math teacher at an average high school can deal. Who among you would debate your minister? Most of us are mostly specialized in our little jobs and wish. But we get along fine, because we are not subject to capital M Meritocracy. We have leagues. We want to compete at our level.

When you win in a fair competition, at your level, you can be completely satisfied.

If you’re not satisfied, then you become an overachiever, and then you start asking yourself tough questions. Then you get aggressive because you want to dominate. You want not just competence, you want mastery. You want to know as much about that thing as anybody has ever known in the history of mankind, and you don’t give a crap what anybody thinks about it. To hell with them, I’m friken doing this. Or die trying.

These are the people who make the meritocracy. They always have been and they always will be. And the reason they play fair is because they want to KNOW, and the want to DO. Understand that this is completely different from the motivations of the people who want to RULE. Because when you want to be the Boss of Everyone, the ends justify the means. You don’t need to play fair. Playing fair is for little games like basketball and dance contests and college calculus. Rules are for followers. Rulers will break rules to become Ruler and make new rules. And life isn’t fair, and they want to rule in life. The unfair game of life.

Most people are not psychologically prepared to be Rulers, and they are not competent to be in the Slice. But there are many Peasants who take care of their own business, and a few whose desire to become ultra-competent puts them in contact with America’s deep bench.

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What is the cost of corruption, and all other kinds of evils? What is the cost of racism. First of all, if you cannot whip the competition and make them like it, then you’re not trying hard enough to be in the Slice. Do you want to be Ice Cube and be a superstar entertainer ultimately worth $150 million? Then you don’t walk around with picket signs or sign petitions against racism in Hollywood. You fight and risk everything to be Ice Cube. You want to complain about the deprivation of civil rights? Well, sister, you have to get that law degree, clerkship and become the best civil rights attorney in your state. Slice. Working for the Rulers in the capitol.

You want to fight against class? Then you have to become more appealing in every way than the Ruling class. That means you have to steal the Slice away from them and get them to work for you. You want revolution? Are you ready to die? No of course you’re not. You don’t even want guns in your neighborhood. You just want things to be nice, maybe 20% nicer than they are. That’s a good Peasant ambition. Move up to Cadillac from Chevy. (Cadillacs designed by the Slice).

At some point in everyone’s life, they have to figure out what it is that they expect the world to deliver to them and ask why they’re not getting it. Ultimately and for most of us, it is because we haven’t found anything worth fighting and dying for. The overwhelming majority of us are satisfied with a 20% raise, and we are not willing to break a lot of rules to get more.

So will a meritocracy be better for you? Are you really ready to overachieve and become ultracompetent? Well, guess what, there is a Meritocracy out there in America. It’s just not easy to get into it. Be happy in your league. Your league is for you. Play fair. Have fun. Enjoy life. But if you can’t have fun and enjoy life because you know you deserve better, you know which way to go. Right up the side of that mountain. We sincerely wish you the best of luck.

Bring Blogs Back

Everybody who thinks about it knows it to be true. Social media isn't working the way we thought it would. 

There are a lot of reasons. Some are simple and some are rather complex. But let's look at the simplest reason and to my mind, one of the most important. You don't own your own words. When you live on Facebook's property, you don't own your own words. They can be deleted by someone other than you. They can be banned by someone other than you. You can hardly even know what you said a year ago by searching for it. I don't mean to suggest that Facebook alone is capable of this, but it is the 900 pound gorilla. The same things are true of Twitter and the comments sections of hundreds of new media outlets. 

When it comes to participating in the debates that a free and open society require, these social media spaces do not facilitate. That is not why they exist. That is not their business model. They were not created to sustain collaborative thought, but to let everybody connect in social ways. They are not town halls so much as they are gas station bathrooms on the information superhighway. They serve everybody without much discrimination, but their facilities often stink. Sometimes you wonder who came in here to write what you see on the walls, and you cringe. No matter how many bots or attendants you apply to a roadside rest stop, it will never become a town hall. That's something you design from the ground up. Social media needs a redesign.

However, there was a moment of glory in the past in which the level of discourse broadly available to the internet public was better than it is now. That was the age of the blogosphere. As MySpace was dying and Google experimented with something called Orcut, which became very popular in Brazil, the American scene was beginning to get a taste of blogs and bloggers. It was a feast of alternative information written by individuals or edited contributions of blog leagues that set the American political world on fire. It was a place for writers, and it still is. 

As a veteran of early internet sites like The Well and Cafe Utne among others, I have been fortunate to have met some of the most exciting and informative writers anywhere. My history goes back to bitnet, Fido and Compuserv. Since there has been an online, I have been there. And so I have witnessed the temptations presented to bloggers to become more mainstream as previously paper only media publications moved online. Who would not, having become influential on their own, want to become even more influential as a syndicated columnist? And so many of the best bloggers moved on out of self-publication to sponsored work. I cannot say whether or not that affected the quality of their writing or if they have been edited into corners. But it did violate one of the key aspects of the blogosphere itself, which was full individual control. 

A blogger has many responsibilities aside from writing, one of which is to police their comment sections. One needs to decide whether or not to accept paid advertising. One has to decide which other blogs to link to using the novel idea of the trackback process. One has to periodically update the design, and of course one has to pay for their blog to be hosted. I've been paying 15 dollars a month for over 15 years. In 2007, there was a such thing as the Black Blogger of the Year Award dedicated to the late blogger Aaron Hawkins. I won that year owing to my extensive coverage of candidate Barack Obama and the insightful conversations I was able to host at my blog. These days I have about 900 friends on Facebook. Those days I had 1500 hits a day. The greatest responsibility to my mind was to foster the proper environment for conversations that would live on the blog. To welcome the right kind of interlocutors and to push trolls away, to steer debate towards productive an insightful conversation, to entertain tangents that are useful and yet keep the related ideas corralled. It was work. Creative, rewarding work. It required skin in the game, not some disingenuous promise to promote free speech contingent on the arbitrary goodwill of advertisers and marketing networks. 

Today I engage with many of the same writers I've known for 20 years online at Facebook. Many of us are getting tired and have enjoined a litany of complaint. Fake news, censorship, filter bubbles, defriending and the ever present trolling and flame wars are on our frustrated minds. But I think the most egregious problem in social media is its abbreviation.

I don't speak Emoji. And unlike the editors of The New York Post, I can't very often come up with a catchy headline to tweet out. I may be verbose even for an essayist, but the things I find of interest require more than two or three sentences to say. I think that is true of all of human affairs. People should not be forced into abbreviated descriptions of their ideas and their selves by the constraints of social media. I want to be responsible for the claims I make, so having them disappear after I post them serves no good purpose. Abbreviation of time is unacceptable. It's not as if the world doesn't have enough disk space in the cloud to handle all of our words, or even all of our digital video. So why should I have less than everything I want to say be referenceable in an opus of compositions over the years? Why should I not have every objection or agreement from everyone who wants to react to my compositions as well? I get that with my blog. I do not get that with Reddit or WhatsApp. The complexity of human affairs requires more space and time than social media adequately facilitates. It's no wonder that people are so frustrated.

When Google killed Google Reader, the use of RSS syndication of blogs and other online periodical publications fell to a variety of inferior tools. But now an outfit called Feedly handles it well. I still follow a selection of excellent writers in what remains of the blogosphere. Medium.com has also become a popular place for writers in all sorts of subjects. But the domination of social media over the average person's internet reading is beginning to grate on everyone's nerves. I hope to remind people that there are still cultured and informative places of respite from the oligopoly of the mainstream social media, and it is worthy and capable of supporting us all. 

I call on developers to revisit the innovations of the blogosphere and to move forward in their further development. I give props to Typepad and the other blog ecosystems for the steady platforms they have provided for years of reliable operation. I encourage writers new and old to get into blogging and recreate and renew what we know the medium of blogging can do to inform and delight. I call on devotees of the well crafted word and visual arts to put your best work forward. I call on editors in the mainstream to spend time outside of the world of compromise for wealthy producers and nurture and support organic writers in this decentralized medium. 

We must own our own words. We must resist censorship. We must facilitate real informative debate. We must not be policed by bots and algorithms. 

We have done better. We can do better again. Bring blogs back. 

 

 

1970s SoCal Street Culture - DogTown, Crenshaw, Palisades & Hollywood

Thinking of my recent purchase of DogTown & Z-Boys I recall my participation in sports at the very beginnings of extreme sports in the mid 70s Los Angeles. I'm doing a lot more recording of myself these days following what I've read by Kevin Kelly. I do think this new global augmentation of human intelligence is inevitable. So I'm prepared to share more. Recently, as I mentioned on Facebook, I'm thinking a lot about that period in my life as a young teen with the LA County Junior Lifeguard (JG) program in the summer of 75.  I start there and go all over the map. I used first names of people I suspect will still be alive. Be patient. This starts off slow then gets good.

I would like to correct a couple things in this, as I recall that I may have got a timeline a bit mixed up. The Hollywood Roller Rink was opened and in its heyday years before urethane wheels came along for roller skates. So first was Hollywood before I finished high school (in 78) I must have been 13 or even 12 when I used to go there. Reseda, Flippers then Starlight then World on Wheels at Midtown were all after 1979.

• Related:
• Skateboard Christmas
• The Return of Dogtown
• Famous Kids from the GDZs

The Rebirth of the Wall

"How many programmers does it take to change a lightbulb?"
"None. That's a hardware problem" -- old joke

What a lovely thing is work. Putting your brain to somebody else's business and being paid to do so is the desire of every prisoner of the mind. And thus I have been reinvigorated from an unexpected corner. Operations. Hard drives. Routers. /opt. I have just recently discovered the joy of Linux server administration. I have to admit it's a lot more fun when you have three dozen very large servers to administer and everyone around you is quite comfortable that you have root. But this was the joyful gap that I didn't realize existed in all the years I endeavored to pull teeth in corporate IT and get the environment my brilliant developments deserved. I am three degrees of separation from end users, and for the first time in memory, I don't particularly mind it at all. I'm working for the machines.

What's doubly ironic about this is that I made a fairly loud exit from the world of Enterprise six years ago in abject frustration, looking desperately to find my place among open source and the clouds. Now, I want nothing more than to build my own datacenter in my garage. I want a DIY cloud, which is to say a big rack of hardware and some virtualization software. What would be lacking from a real cloud would be a real API, but that will be me. I'm the API of my own cloud and the captain of my soul. I think that making this move towards the machine is the fulfillment of yet another yearning on par with my move to stoicism. I had only thought I was dealing with reality in politics, but what I actually hungered for was the history of political philosophy. Similarly what I want in computing is access to the evolution of hardware and networks. Applications and clicks are as ephemeral as slogans and votes. Everybody does it without thought, what really counts is infrastructure.

Only I see where the whole cloud infrastructure game is going. It's going to oligopoly, with the fourth wildcard. Between the intellectual, legal and industrial capture of Google, Amazon and Microsoft is that nasty fourth thing called the Dark Web, and its next monstrous intervention will be the zero-trust tier of blockchain computing. If you don't know, then consider the history of Bitmain, and know that a man named McAfee is still alive. There is a future out there populated with hackers and systems that are much more immune from the sorts of ordinary disasters and bugs that destroy the lives of Enterprise IT jocks and their sheepy user base. There are two kinds of systems in the world, those who have survived hurricanes of DDOS attacks and those who are still wearing bunny slippers when it sprinkles outside. They don't know what a torrent is. They may not ever learn until it's too late. For those of us who will populate masts we would rather not be lashed to in the coming storms of cyberwar, the hedge is personal hardware and power, private networks and circles of trust. Or so it seems to me right now.

It turns out that grepping log files and shooting pistols are both loads of fun, and skills that require years of practice. But they're also fun. Shooting the zombies of tomorrows apocalypses will not fall merely to the burnt out crusaders longing like for the halcyon fields of home and bipolar yearning for honorable death. It will be fun.

So the first thing that I've done is resurrect a couple old machines from the scrap heap. My old MacBook Pro is now an Ubuntu machine. There's nothing in the Mac world that I need on that machine when I think about it, and bloat has really taken over. It's getting rather obvious and tiresome, Apple. Cut it out. That and an old 386 Dell will host lightweight stuff as yet to be determined. But right now they're running Consul and Zerotier (more on them later). Next I want to get a physical rack and a discarded Dell MD1000. That, I will fill with 7200 RPM terabyte hard drives and lower my cost of S3 storage, which I can and probably will just move all to Glacier. My S3 bill just peaked over $40 a month. No can do. Since I have gotten the new 256GB iPhone, there is essentially no reason for me to have that extra duplicate copy of my 100k pictures on S3. And I'm pretty sure that I have everything Flikr on my own drives too.

The big deal and central object of The Wall is my investment in Vertica and reference data. So I'll have a relatively high powered database server running so that I can practice spinning up entire orchestrated things around referenceable datasets. IE. click on this package and get a full 'enterprise' quality query space, stuff that almost nobody does. I expect to get under the community wire with open source tools, and I am especially looking forward to using Fugue as its applicable to instant-up a data reference stack. The collaboration between AWS and VMWare will help a lot, as will a lot of Hak5 reruns and r/homelab.

Big fun coming.

Ginetta: My Kind of Company

Awesome. That's what I'm talking about.

A Serious Gamer's Thanks to Bungie for The Taken King

I am one of those players who gets it. I have wanted what Destiny primarily is for years and years. A co-op multiplayer FPS with the highest quality graphics and mechanics where I and my friends get to be the hero. Almost every day for a year I have been telling my wife that I'm done with work, now I'm going to go shoot some bad guys. Destiny is deeply satisfying in that way. I used to play Halo & Assassin's Creed. I still play Splinter Cell and I'm looking forward to The Division. But in terms of weapons and capabilities, no avatar in existence compares to my guardians. And now with a third subclass, it gets even better. Everything else feels slow, constricted, flat and retro. I wanted you to know that I put in 1700 hours last year because nothing else compares. Destiny gets 90% of my gaming attention. I've reduced my Gamefly from three to one rental.

I also want you to know that I have quit this forum early on. I understand and respect your patience with your customers. You have to deal with it. I don't. As a software developer, I sympathize with you and I have enormous respect for your ability to execute on the core and deliver all kinds of features and fluff as well. But listening to the whinging about fluff is more than I can stand. Today I see thousands of posts about exploits. If Bungie were a business plan, this room would be full of the managers chirping with glee about how to cheat the customer out of unlimited money. I made an ass of myself here over a year ago explaining how ridiculous it would be for Destiny to have Forge or Split Screen. The hating never stopped. Thanks for backing me up on that (heh). But hey, I game with my friends, and I smack the rest down in the Crucible, even when they use the Last Word I get mine in. (A new weapon should be called Edgewise) So in that way I am happy to have millions of gamers to play with even if I couldn't stand them in person. You're keeping the critical mass high and Destiny has never gone dark (although it has gone beaver and marionberry). Keep it up.

The pivot of The Taken King is testament to how well you are running the company in terms of pure, balls out execution. Nobody can really know all of the decisions you all must take, but I know the tradeoffs must be mind-melting. But you stuck the landing here fellows. No matter what the press says (Forbes, really?) and how often they keep the whining alive, you have stuck to the core and delivered. I am exceedingly pleased with the new Crucible maps I'm getting, the new character dynamics within the Vanguard, the cutscenes and even the music, as monothematic as it is this go round. Special kudos for the questification.

I wanted to make a special note as an FPS guy who also has played a lot of RPG but not MMO. Your decision not to clutter up my screen with text and use voiceover that doesn't interrupt my avatar movement is a strength I really appreciate. I didn't know how much until I took a break and played Elder Scrolls Online this summer. I'm even wondering if I will be able to appreciate Fallout 4. I like being boss man in the Destiny world, and not stopping to talk to NPCs who want me to find their lost uncle. Although it would be super cool if within a raid, the game picked the weakest player and made the other five do an escort mission. Just saying. It's what made the randomization change to Atheon superb. My point is that the risk taken to recast the ghost, I'm sure you've heard before, was gutsy and as I read the availability story, necessary. Good for the scanning adds too in TTK. I really, really like the interactive voice work of the Vanguard during my story missions. And by the way, I don't think people who get into the North vs Dinklage debate appreciate how little that matters to the rest of the world you serve in languages other than English. So long as it's not text. I recall back during the beta, how annoyed I was getting stomped on that moon map and Lord Shaxx yelling at me. You won me over. I love more Shaxx in TTK. Thanks for that.

I have nothing much to say in the gun balance meta wars. But something occurred to me yesterday as I was contemplating your need to keep level 1 enemies in the Cosmodrome where there will be level 40 guardians (and beyond in the future). There must be some interesting curves in the game somewhere as you escalate the guardian powers or provide the illusion of ever increasing power for weapons and armor. At the release of TTK, 170 was the new 365, but surely these must be relative scales and not absolute ones. Anyway, you know what I'm talking about, having changed the sponginess of Valus Ta'aurc. That, to me, is a much more interesting problem for the entire game rather than which particular gun does what. As far as I can see, you've finessed it. But I'm wondering exactly how.

I am impressed with how you have tweaked your economies and currencies several times and various ways. I would really be fascinated to see some of the metrics on that stuff and understand the theory of that particular kind of economy in which players cannot exchange or set their own prices. It works, and please don't change it. But the theory must be fascinating.

All this is to say that there are some of us out here who appreciate the hard thinking that must of necessity go into the design and maintenance of this extraordinarily complex creation that you have made. I happen to think that for some fraction of the post-industrial world will depend upon what you have learned in making Destiny work. You might be as theoretically advanced as the architects of the Matrix, but I'm sure you don't let that overwhelm your egos, because you clearly do not toy with or abuse us. I intuit your purposes and principles and I am, as I said, deeply satisfied by the core and impressed with your delivery and execution. You have my investment of time and my admiration. Starside is a pretty good place becauas ultimately, my guardians are badass. 

Three Phase Induction Motor

Conspicuous Food Consumption

J-Dub is one of my alter-egos, another existential partner although he may not know it. If I were ten years younger I would have taken computers a great deal more seriously. It would have given me more social cover to be an outer geek rather than just an inner geek. And of course if I were a white dude instead of a black dude, I would have a great deal more invested in the logic of organicism. Although I'm not quite sure on that last score because I *am* organic in a new and interesting way, certainly my relationship with being organic would have gone through a different sort of rationale. Nevertheless, J-Dub is a vegetarian and I am not. Nevertheless, I think we share an organic connection with regards to food and other things which needs some fleshing out.

Let me start with the provocation that gets me here and work through its logic and see where it leads. You see it's often difficult for folks I converse with, especially in larger groups, to finish off what may sound like an offhanded comment spewing out of my piehole, when in fact it's just the beginning of a conversation. These are conversations often never completed, and so I sound like more of an asshole than I actually am. Being non-apologetic doesn't help. On the other hand, if you can't continue the conversation, I'm not likely to take you seriously or view you as deserving of the long answer. Thus this blog and its 13 year history.

The ethical difference between store-bought GMO food and store-bought non-GMO food is negligible.

From an organic POV, if you're not growing your own food, you're a beggar trying to be choosy. From that same perspective, the guy shopping at Whole Foods for natural products is just another consumer infusing his consumption with conspicuous social signaling. This is especially hypocritical for those who aren't using their bodies to social effect. Now that's a mouthful, but let me handle the last part of it because that's particularly where I'm coming from lately.

As some readers may know, I'm in the midst of my martial education. This year I am focusing on my own body and diet. It's working very well and I am rather stunningly pleased with the results so far. It's changing the way I live, but there's a lot of detail below that thread. At a higher level, the point of me doing my body conditioning is to put me into a position of providing some social service with my body as a junior sheepdog. These days that doesn't amount to much more than playing bodyguard around friends and family when walking through sketchy turf, but that means a lot to me. I very much like the idea of improving my physique in service of the safety of others. I am broadening the capability of my impulse to be a big brother and a protector of ladies and gentlemen in the context of the decreased sociability of the urban world today. My intent is to make that clear distinction from that and general badassery for which my cool pose might be mistaken. But the point is that I am moral muscle. I intent to bridge the gap between foolish chivalry and 'protect and serve' on the real. My diet serves that purpose. Not just to make me look sexy.

You've perhaps heard the joke, how can you tell which person at the table is a vegan. Don't worry, they'll let you know. That's a cruel joke if applied to someone with peanut or shellfish allergies. The moral distinction is clear. If you serve the wrong food to an allergic, they become poisoned, if you serve the wrong food to a vegan they become offended. The distinction between an insult and an assault should be self-evident. I am always trying to not be rude, but I am not above mocking a vegan who tries to make the political case that serving meat is an assault or worse. 

I think it is reasonable for Monsanto and other food producers to resist labeling of GMO products.  I think it is also reasonable for consumers to expect GMO products to be labeled. But to demand it now, in the context of stark ignorance of what GMO is, augurs in favor of the producers. One is harder pressed to demonstrate the perfidy of producers than the paranoia of consumers. This is one area in which I would like to see more responsibility of scientists and other experts, but in these days, such things are difficult to expect. Consider the retirement of Harold Lewis. Nevertheless, my food expert is Michael Pollan. 

It has been a long time since I conferred with Pollan on any matter, but I like his approach. His simplest advice is to eat food, mostly plants and not too much. On the matter of what is food we get a simple admonishment. If your grandmother wouldn't recognize it, it's probably not food. I join this advice with that of Nassim Taleb who asserts the primacy of recipes handed down through generations. Of all the experimenting mankind has done with every possible thing there is to eat on the planet, it should be no surprise that bread baking has survived. Fifty generations of baking rather outweigh your sudden aversion to gluten. I tie that finally with our very evolution of incisors and large intestines. If God didn't want us to eat meat we would have teeth like horses or stomachs like cows. Nor do humans eat much insect flesh. These are not random circumstances subject to social engineering.

However agriculture is subject to engineering. Given that, one must ask the fundamental question of how agriculture has evolved at all. Or more specifically, what do chicken farmers know about breeding fowl that genetic engineers don't? What stands out in my memory is that all of those fifty generations of farming and breeding was done in almost total ignorance of genetics. What crops and commodities are today is little more than the eugenics of style, or as Pollan puts it, the botany of desire. Nobody raising corn, cabbage or cows knew if there would vitamins and minerals. Figuring out the calories is an entirely new idea, and counting them doesn't help the way we have been sold. Your grandmother doesn't know how many calories are in the tomatoes she grew in the backyard and made into spaghetti sauce. So why should you care? Because you buy it from the supermarket and that's all you know. Food in a box. Trust the label because for everything else, you are unable. Now what's a GMO label? Just another piece of consumer information to be entered into your iPhone app. 

I have two problems with GMO but both are economic in nature, not ethical in nature. The first is the simple matter of monoculture. If GMO methods prove superior to traditional method of hit and miss, then we are possibly depending upon market forces to develop the most efficient crop. That means the overwhelming variety of potatoes might be engineered for french fries, rather than for stews. Not good. Secondly, there is the legitimate question of oligopoly of agribusiness seed stock. 

Neither of these are the sort of matters that can be solved by selective consuming. It's like saying that if I only spend my lifetime purchasing red BMWs, then the car manufacturers of the world will respond. And I certainly do not expect any democratic process or social movement to work in any disciplined way. What I can do however is be a smart shopper and a microproducer, and I can give ethical ends to the means of consuming food. Those ethical ends outweigh the means of production. 

It's in the microproducer angle that I find myself in complete enthusiastic agreement withJ-Dub as regards his intent to get with the growing veggies program. Aside from the fact that I know he thought his way into vegetarianism and does not in any way get self-aggrandizing in his choices, we gel on the ziggurat of skill. We both move from consumer to gearhead, to hacker to maker when it comes to food skills. And it is in this way we share the ethos that pulls us away from the shallow morality of consumerism to the virtue of study and practical mastery in production. 

I don't know if or how I will ever sympathize with the consumer who chooses particular diets. I am rather convinced that people are merely being picky eaters, expressing privileged preferences. Moreover I sense that many people have elevated such preferences to fetishes and are really developing social intolerances and taboos. I don't have any problem with the privileged preferences, and not much with the food snobbishness - but food consumption doesn't weigh much with me morally. I hesitate to, but must make the parellel to sexual appetites, so you can see how this could resonate into another 1500 words. 

I don't much care what people eat, but I don't like the moral pretenses of the politics of consumption. Producer know, consumers guess.

Related articles

Michael Pollan in Conversation

Is Genetically Engineered Food A Fraud?

Class In Session w/ Pops

Pops says:

What follows are hasty reflections on some of what you said via phone Tuesday night.  I wish there had been a way to “tap” the conversation with Dragon…and have your ideas spelled out in writing…ripe and ready.  But I think there is much value in what you shared…recording notwithstanding.

One of a number of interesting “threads” that you weave is what I pick up as your favoring a “group/cadre/collective” of folks who presumably have THE answers to that which ails the rest of us.  You make free and to some extent appropriate use of the word “class.”  In some ways that’s O.K.; but in other ways it has, for me anyway, hints of elitism…of the Eastern parts of this vibrant country at that.  I grew up hearing a whole lot about the elites who secured their educational exposure at the likes of “neighborly” (geographically anyway) places like Yale…or up the coast a tad to Cambridge and Harvard.  My guess is that much if not most of that “feeling” is gone around the country, but perhaps I am wrong.  As a side note, Stanford holds its Western own prestige-wise quite well.  So be it.

Before moving along, although the subject didn’t come up as we talked, I couldn’t help but think of some of the ideas I grasped years ago from my reading of Madame Ayn Rand…Atlas Shrugged in particular.  As you surely recall, Rand has her veritable geniuses taking leave -- with their demonstrated skills -- of a “gimme and ever- ungrateful society.”  With the implied addendum: “If y’all can do ‘it’ without us, have at it.”  There is something delightfully paternalistic about this mindset.

Something that pops out at me, and I don’t know if it is part of your thinking or not: Are there folks who are NOT members of this or these hotshot collectives who are “ordinary folks”?  If we dismiss money as an essential criteria, is there “room” – and I won’t add the phrase “at the top” for others?  Could an ordinary solid citizen take his or her place in those esteemed ranks?  You place a high premium on a social/moral order.  That being the case, I don’t see any built-in impediment precluding the admission of ordinary folks.  But you may have something different in mind.  So be it.

Now here’s my own admitted contradiction.  I remain unabashedly nuts about astronomy.  On the radio today I heard something about a space whatever named Rosetta that is fast approaching something “out there.”  I won’t even try to recall all the details.  What I was drawn to is the tight-knit team responsible for the at least 10 year mission.  This particular effort is a project of the European Space Program; and Americans have had many teams doing the same kind of thing.  My focus is on the skills, discipline and dedication of those who constitute such (elite) teams.  They seemingly are able to set aside “normal” hang-ups and pettiness that get in the way of regular folks.  And that’s exactly as it should be.  They even use a different system to tell time…either ahead of or behind what we take for (earthly) granted.  But as you well know, physical science and social science are radically different.

Jumping around, Donald sterling is a sad and yet real example of why money cannot or should not be salient criteria.  And the same can be said about the athlete who dragged his girl friend out of the elevator.  That’s just totally unacceptable asshole behavior.  And sterling’s comments – however “sincere” – keep him on the sidelines of what I think you have in mind.

Another point: I do think “education” is crucial; but I am not limiting the term to traditional college classroom offerings…although that may well play a significant part.  Exposure or experience is key.    

The military to some extent does present itself as a model of sorts.  The focus with the military is the CODE to which they swear allegiance…and to which military folks are expected to adhere…without exception.  The only problem here is that militaries have the historical role of making real the desires of the nation of which they are a part.  Yup I’m being evasive here: The harsh fact is that any given military exists primarily to kill people who “belong to” or swear allegiance to another nation/country.  No existing or prospect of future war removes the need for a military.  This is a collective that has perpetuity.  And that’s that.

Thoughts on the persistence and “relevance” of the seemingly bothersome atheist to follow.

--

I try to make it clear that mine is a functional description of class. There is no 'ought' or 'should'. There simply are people who understand X, Y and Z and there are the rest of us who don't. Let us forget for the moment the instrumentality of getting a person with capability into a class, rather focus on the capability. We can make judgments about the efficacy of the class mobility process separately. What we do know is that in order to have lights on, we need electricity and although we all may be capable of consuming electricity we are not all capable of producing electricity. And among those who are capable of producing electricity, the means and motivation to do so are not always present. So there are those who have to present the means and motivation to those who Can Do. So the functional definitions can be expressed in another way, there are Enablers, there are Makers and there are Consumers. 

I think anybody's issue with elitism boils down to my previously stated antipathy towards crowdsourcing. But let me qualify that slightly and say that there can be a smart form of Consumerism - ie Consumers can be emergent Enablers. But even still, this requires some market making. There is nothing spontaneous about this. It may be that there are two articles of faith:

• "Ask and ye shall receive"
• "If you build it they will come"

There is no guarantee for either of these, and if they prove true there is always some agency, there is never any magic other than chance. Given enough time, anyone can call chance 'fate' , but we are assuming cause and effect here. You can call the market makers an election, or a business, or a church. But giving the people what they want is a job that somebody has to do. There are no genies. There are real people who are real Enablers and those folks get the Makers together to make something of value to the masses of the common man who can only then consume to their fill and satisfaction. So you may ask and receive but somebody who cares and is capable has to hear your petition. 

Now let's talk about the second article of faith. Note also that there are always makers who make things that they assume is necessary and useful for the masses, and sometimes this works. People can be persuaded that they need something that they don't have and can't make for themselves. The worst case of this? Think heroin dealer. There is also the person  that Taleb calls a charlatain, always selling something that either isn't as good as claimed or harmful in fact. But similarly you cannot simply blame the consumer, there is Enabling going on here. It might take two to tango, but somebody built the dance floor, played the music and facilitated the meeting of the dancers. 

--

There is something delightfully paternalistic about Ayn Rand, which is probably why she appeals to college freshmen, the sorts of youth who have just successfully made the biggest decision in their lives - to study that which will elevate them from the common man. Unfortunately the sort of university education we see today is often far from universal, owing so much of that to its failure to pay appropriate mind to those things have have actually held sway over mankind's history. All this 'nasty brutish and short' history so casually dismissed by our contemporaries with their refrigerators and washing machines - which of course they are completely incapable of building or servicing when broken. Which I hope illustrates my point about what Makers do that Consumers cannot. So long as the shareholders and executive officers of Westinghouse decide to remain in the refrigerator and washing machine market, such consumers can live in relative ignorance and luxury, but maybe one day the Enablers decide it's more profitable to enter another sort of market. Then what? Well, so far that's been outsourced to the Koreans, and it's Samsung who are delivering the goods, but they may get bored of that too. 

There's a moral dimension of dignity to speak about here, but let me refresh you on why I brought all this up in the first place. I said that we have a class of Americans who say 'there ought to be a law' and so they agitate constantly for some government agency. Now I don't have so much of a problem with the intent as I do with the agency. Today on the radio I heard that there are, deep within the unread pages of the Obamacare law, some regulations about breastfeeding. Yes breastfeeding - a word I find rather Orwellian in its own existence. How else to mother's feed infants? Oh wait, we invented alternatives. And somebody built it, and millions of mothers came, and thus an industry of Nuk and Playtex and Gerber. But when the ratchets of law, and government procurement processes are set in place, they may as well be set in stone. But after all that is the point of regulating your population of commoners, neh? For their own good. What's not paternalistic about that? Well, let's look at the word paternalistic.

There is nothing wrong with being paternalistic, if you are responsible.

I want you to take me at my word when I say the best decisions are those made by a singular, paternalistic, responsible figure. And it is this paradigm I place on a pedestal of merit up against the alternatives, namely the crowdsourcers and aggregators. Which is to say quite frankly that the kids don't know what's good for them, because they are not parents, and the Consumers don't know what's good for them because they are not Makers, and the Makers don't know if what they make is any good because they are not Enablers. Each has its strengths and weaknesses but the paternalism stands. It's about expertise and experience, and we cannot afford to live in a world where expertise is dead. We cannot afford to live in a world where decisions are made by committees where the buck never stops. 

Now here's a major indictment, and where I think the Founders may not quite understand what they done wrought. As I have had as a refrain to unbridled wishful thinking and exploitation of the first article of faith in democracy 'Vote and ye shall receive' (c.f. Tytler): "Who is your Leviathan?" Well people have said and voted for health insurance for everyone (Yaaaay!) and who is their Leviathan? Obama, and so Obama hath wrought Obamacare, brought to you by the Executive Branch with a little armtwisting in Congress. But wait, those friggen Founders split the power so that the Judiciary could gum up the whole works, and Congress keeps changing. What is an imperious President to do? Maybe, just maybe health insurance for everyone is something that cannot be magicked into existence in one Presidency. We certainly accepted that as truth when Bill Clinton tried it. And so now that Obamacare is challenged and Obama's ratings are in the GWBush leagues, we have to ask if Obamacare's paternalism is actually responsible. Or in general is this something whose responsibility we can entrust to the sort of government we are supposed to have with Constitutional checks and balances. The solution is not to give more power to one branch of government so the people can have their Leviathan. 

The same, of course, could be said about our 'right' to live in a terror-free zone. Why should we keep stretching the Constitution in order to protect those Consumers from things they cannot protect themselves from (we say paternalistically)? Then again let's look to the classes. Who is going to Enable peace? Who is going to Make peace? Who is going to Consume peace? Maybe we don't need any Leviathans. That is my hope. And guess what? That equals power to the people. That means the Consumers enable themselves and make things for themselves through the agency of themselves. That means paternalism is little more than parents. Ick I know, it sounds like Conservative Christian Family Values .. but then again have you ever heard of any Leftists ever protest against Big Family? Hmmm. 

__

I'll say this finally about Edumacation. Experience is the best teacher, the gallows focus the mind, necessity is the mother of invention, those who can't do teach. You've heard it all before. I am of the opinion that we are a nation of grade inflation and bullshit makework jobs, and we have come to the breaking point of where a college education actually makes Makers out of Consumers. In otherwords, somebody has Enabled a lot of Edumacation in a charlatan type fashion. How did the world possibly function without Title IX? As well as now? Truly? Can I even get an objectively scholarly expert opinion on the matter? 

I'll quote Ralph Waldo Emerson:

4. As our Religion, our Education, our Art look abroad, so does our spirit of society. All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something is taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts. What a contrast between the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American, with a watch, a pencil, and a bill of exchange in his pocket, and the naked New Zealander, whose property is a club, a spear, a mat, and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under! But compare the health of the two men, and you shall see that the white man has lost his aboriginal strength. If the traveller tell us truly, strike the savage with a broad axe, and in a day or two the flesh shall unite and heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow shall send the white to his grave.

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His note-books impair his memory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance-office increases the number of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by a Christianity entrenched in establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian? 

And then Michael Heim on Martin Heidegger:

"According to Heidegger, we notice the eclipse of the truth of being occurring already in Plato's metaphysics. Once the truth of being becomes equated with the light of unchanging intelligibility, the nature of truth shifts to the ability of statements to reflect or refer reliably to entities. With the steadiness of propositional truth comes the tendency to relate to being as a type, a form, or an anticipated shape. With being as a steady form, entities gain their reality through their being typified. Already in Plato we see the seeds of the Western drive to standardize things, to find what is dependable and typical in them. Truth as the disclosure process, as the play of revealing/ concealing disappears behind the scene in which the conscious mind grasps bright objects apprehended as clear, unwavering, rational forms. As humans develop the ability to typify and apprehend formal realities, the loss of truth as emergent disclosure goes unnoticed. All is light and form. Nothing hides behind the truth of beings. But this "nothing" finally makes an appearance after the whole world has become a rigid grid of standardized forms and shapes conceived and engineered by humans. As the wasteland grows, we see the devastation of our fully explicit truths. We see that there is, must be, more. The hidden extra cannot be consciously produced. Only by seeing the limits of standardization can we begin to respond to it. We have to realize that each advance in typifying and standardizing things also implies a tradeoff. When we first reach forward and grasp things, we only see the benefits of our standardization, only the positive side of greater clarity and utility. it is difficult to accept the paradox that not matter how alluring, every gain in fixed intelligibility brings with it a corresponding loss of vivacity. Because we are finite, every gain we make also implies a lost possibility. The loss is especially devastating to those living in the technological world, for here they enjoy everything conveniently at their disposal -- everything that is, except the playful process of discovery itself."

 

So what I expect of class is that we recognize the truth of it. That the only way democratic institutions can work is based upon an aristocracy of merit. And this aristocracy must be aligned with the purposes, and make allowance for the limits of government, educational, religious and business agency. We need to eliminate the wishful thinking of the masses and pretending that there are no Enablers or Makers who know better. And of course it means that we must support the good Enablers and attack the bad ones, as with everyone and everything else.

Here's one more thing about class. Everybody hates a level playing field. Think about it, then read this.

My First AR (Bic Version)

So I decided to shoot an AR-15. Better sooner than later. I watched a video of a convincing argument by Colion Noir about why he should have an assault rifle or a semi-automatic rifle, and I've been trying to figure out the difference between .223 and 5.56. A combination of circumstances that found me at my local range renting an AR. 

I brought my own pistol and rented the AR. The dude gave me basic instructions but there were a couple of weird things. He said only put in 8 rounds (although the magazine holds 10) so it won't jam, and if it does then somebody will come out to the firing line and help me. But the really weird thing was that he used the cap of a Bic pen to stick in a little hole which had previously been some machined part, in order to release the magazine. 

I went to the firing line and took my time, loading up my pistol mags. Then I broke open the box of 20 5.56 rounds that I purchased from the counter and pushed 8 of them into the rifle magazine. I had that same feeling, literally of 'cheap skates' that you get when you rent ice skates at the rink. These ain't the sharpest tools in the shed. I shot the two mags from my pistol, felt good about it and then picked up the rifle.

Slammed the mag in, pulled back the bolt and looked down the iron sights 10 yards to my zombie target, slowly squeeze and boom. Hmm. A bit more kick than I expected, but completely reasonable. The plastic stock wasn't very comfortable but not awkward. I was low and left, but left a neat hole. I shot four more booms and then click. What? So I executed from my training, tap, rack, squeeze. Another click. I tried to put the gun on safety and it wouldn't go. Then I pulled out the magazine, completely forgetting the Bic pen cap. It came right out. There was no cartridge in the chamber. Failure to feed. 

So I slammed it in again, racked the bolt. Click. WTF. I haven't even gotten through one magazine and this piece of crap is already malfunctioning. I removed the magazine (again without the pen cap) and walked over to W. A new friend that I met just that day, W was geared out in a chav suit with a XXL jersey with Run DMC -style fonts. His cap was turned backwards and he wore a single black shooting glove. W had a whole arsenal of pistols in his stall, one of which looked very much like a Desert Eagle, only blacked out. There must have been 8 guns. I didn't watch him shoot, but every thing about him smelled very Wu Tang Clan. W's not somebody to fuck with. I asked him to come over and take a look at my AR. He went through a couple well-practiced motions and remarked that the gun was dry as a bone. No lube. Hmm. Then he handed it back to me. I aimed and got a boom. And then another click. I handed him the pen cap and he nodded thoughtfully, rolled his eyes and uttered two words.

"California shit".

He used the pen cap, replaced the magazine and handed me the gun. I got the last two booms out of it and then realized what he was on about. My rented gun was in the twilight zone between manufacture and legal compliance. In other words it had been crippled in order to make do. Obviously, the normal magazine locking and release mechanism had been altered, so that's why the pen cap was used. My guess was that this was a non-standard magazine, shortened to handle only 10 cartridges at a time, which is the California limit. I hadn't realized that the magazine wasn't locking properly into place - the fit was less than perfect, and less than perfect on a machine such as an AR-15 is sufficiently dangerous to piss me off. A lot. 

In normal life, especially when talking about human effort, perfect is the enemy of good. In engineering, good is the enemy of perfect. When it comes to engineering firearms, perfect is the only thing that's acceptable. I've been overthinking firearms for over a year now, and have had the good fortune to have serious, smart men and women as my shooting buddies. Even now as I improve my shooting skills and expand my knowledge, I am coming to understanding the logic behind the sentiments of the shooting public. Only experts have, or should have, the patience for guns that fail for various reasons. When our gang goes shooting and a gun misbehaves, there's immediately a set of troubleshooting procedures and discussions that go into effect, most of it over my head, but all of it comprehensible if you are a mechanical engineer. 

I have put about 1000 rounds through my new Sig pistol, and oiled it for the first time over the weekend. It has never failed. This AR-15 failed within 5 shots. That's unacceptable. 

Last month or so, I entered the debate surrounding microstamping. I understood quite clearly why shooters would be opposed to some mechanism that changes the trigger system in order to stamp a code onto the brass so that 'criminals could be identified'. You have only to shoot a semi-auto once to recognize that hot brass pops out onto the ground when you shoot. Any 7 year old knows you should pick up your trash and recycle it, but somehow we are to believe that crooks are too stupid to pick up their brass, right? The trigger mechanism, especially in handguns, is one of the most sensitive and determining aspects of their quality. More than anything else, the difference between a good gun and a bad one is the trigger. Microstamping tech is a monkey wrench, which means, to the delight of legislators with a view to suppress the sales of guns in this state, that guns would have to be redesigned. Those that don't, if such a requirement were to pass into law, would be prohibited. There's no gun grabbing going on in California, all the would-be gun grabbers are attacking the supply side. 

Despite Peruta, such protectionists have ample precedent to be hopeful in the auto industry. California standards are different and more stringent for auto emissions than those in other states. We all can remember when catalytic converters in exhaust systems were new (and troublesome), and we can all remember how poorly engineered were the cars of the 80s. Today, cars are over-engineered and have few if any user servicable parts inside. Few people change plugs or use timing lights. Some of that engineering is perfect. But guns aren't cars, and over-engineering bullets and their firing mechanisms is not a good idea. Keeping it simple is the best, and the most elegant design when it comes to firearms are the simplest. Reliability is the most important engineering goal, if I may state the obvious, when it comes to dealing with explosives.

So now I have the real experience of dealing with a faulty firearm. And I tell you I was still angry about it after I left the range. I have always been drawn to the precision of working these machines. That's my gearhead sensibility. I just can't stand the idea of explosives designed by political committees. I don't think any reasonable person would. 

BTW. It should come to you as no surprise that I think there are few things a foolish as firearms manufactured by 3D printers. This ain't Star Trek. 

 

Update: Aha moment. The Bullet Button.

Related articles

Gun Culture Club

My Experience With Guns & Position on Gun Control

California's Microstamping Law Alienates Gun Makers

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?

 

My Experience With Guns & Position on Gun Control

Today I asked this question:

Have you ever shot a gun, what kind, under what conditions and for what purposes? What effect does your personal experience with guns have on your opinion of gun control?

Answering my own question: I have shot a couple pistols, a 12 gauge shotgun and some really beat up 22 rimfire bolt actions owned by the Boy Scouts.  The pistol shooting was very dramatic and I didn't like it. The rifle shooting was tedious, frustrating and boring. The shotgun shooting reminded me of my first time sex, to wit that it was exactly what I thought it would be, I was surprised by how simple it was, and although the movement was surprising the first time, I almost instinctively understood what I was supposed to do. Outside of that first experience I don't particularly like shotgun shooting either.

This year, I aimed to purchase a precision rifle and/or a cowboy lever action but I was short on funds, plus the prices have gone up. I have never considered any need to buy a handgun or shotgun for self-defense. As I have seen and overheard conversations in gun stores, I feel rather about new gun owners what I feel about nouveau riche. They annoy me and I don't trust them. As I want to have a gun, I want it one of two ways. My angle is that of a 'sheepdog' and as a gearhead.

As a gearhead I think about owning guns and understanding all the associated technology, the math of ballistics, the mechanics of trigger mechanisms, the beauty and power of the machines. I appreciate them as stunning mechanical inventions as I do with computers, cars, aircraft, spacecraft. In that regard I'm like a driver, a shooter, a pilot, an astronaut. I want to operate them with skill because of the advantage it gives me. I as I become proficient in that way, I would become a hacker and maybe even a maker. I would like to customize my firearms. I would like to load my own ammo, I have some of the tools already. 

As a sheepdog (& Boy Scout), I think about owning a gun as being an amateur cop, in the exact same way anybody who learns CPR thinks about being an amateur doctor or fireman. It's all about taking an awesome civic responsibility but with a great deal of respect for what the professionals do. I happen to be taking emergency response training now, as well as pursuing my ham radio license.  

As a citizen, I am in conflict with my sheepdog self. Because I want to have all the personal power a cop has without the responsibility of being a sworn officer.  How shall I say it? Prosumer? There's a political part of me that likes the moral cover of the sheepdog, but I'd rather be libertarian about it and just have whatever-damned-gun-I-please-this-is-America-dammit. I say that in the same way that advocates for Gay Marriage argued that what homosexuals do is their own business. What I do with my gun is my own business. My reasons for having one is my own business. You have no right to restrict me in any way associated with criminality. Innocent until proven guilty, you're not going to round me up in your database.

Practically speaking however I believe very strongly that I'm going to do the upper middle class thing, which is to use my education and privilege and brains to do whatever I can do to have as much as possible. And that means I'll join the NRA and be ahead on policy discussions (I have) I will go up a government ladder of certifications, I'll make friends with politicians and first responders, kind of like I do as a computer hacker. While every common man is debating Andriod vs IOS, I'll be hacking. When the NSA is eyeballing, I'll know where and how hackers stay safer than the average Joe. As we speak I'm doing that community emergency response training eight week course. I understand, as the fire captains are telling us, that our first responsibility is to ourselves and our families, then we can help our neighbors without worry. 

This conflicts with my ethics and genuine concern for the common man. I want to live in a country where you don't have to use connections (like I will) in order to exercise the right to know, own and use guns.  And I will complain like a hypocrite when people finally realize, like they did during the LA riots or Katrina storm that protection is not on the way and the ordinary guy got screwed. And I'm going to be saying I told you so from a safe distance.  

So where I come out on gun control based on my gun experience is that, I think I've shot guns like the driver who has learned to drive with a stick. I understand and appreciate the old school fundamentals, and yeah I want more and better custom gear for myself, and I want to get really good. I think everybody should be able to do the same with minimal bureaucracy within reason. But that doesn't make me respect the average gunner any more than I respect the average driver. In fact I think most of them will be privileged fools, because I intend to train and get as good as I can. (In the same way I've been a motorcyclist with the attending superior understanding of the road than ordinary drivers). 

I'd much rather see a 'solution' aimed towards a lightweight liability insurance that people like me can afford and doesn't hurt my access any. I'll make loud noises about abrogation of rights and will not back down on 2A principles. But I will survive, stoically in the very same way that cops and security guards do. I do not have a lot of trust or respect for the laws that will ensue from this debate, in the exact same way I am not pleased with the way this country and government decided on Gay Marriage. I will continue to invest a great deal more trust and respect with people who see things my way as a sheepdog, not because of the credentials they have with the government with their badges, but with their skills and knowledge. If certifications and badges and credentials are what it takes to have possession of a suitible fraction of those skills and knowledge with firearms, then that's what I'm going to do because I think when it comes to gun rights, we are creating second-class citizens and chilling the options for the common man.

In short, if I have to be a gun-nut and a government certified gun-nut, then that's what it takes. I'll hate it, but I'll have my freedom.  

Related by Cobb:

• Reviewing the Moment of Death
• Another Good Group
• A Good Group

 

I should add the following about 'Reviewing the Moment of Death' because beside the fact that I clearly state above that I don't want to be a sworn officer, I am a lot closer to their way of thinking and their attitude of responsibility for the common man than I ever was in my life. And I am actually in the process of preparing myself for that actual responsibility so I don't get caught out. I *am* a sheepdog and actually always have been, but I know I can get myself in trouble out of ignorance in acting out that role. Like I said, in NYC I stopped a robbery on a subway and almost got into a fight between two Nigerian street peddlers before I checked myself. 

That encounter I had in Brooklyn about 20 years ago defined my attitude about guns the majority of my life. I presume that to be similar to many Americans.

1. It's easy to kill with one,
2. I don't want to be a killer. Therefore keep them away from me.

There's something additional about item 2 which is I think most Americans have had a moment of rage or disgust where they felt like somebody deserved to be shot, and could not really justify that emotion. So they want to keep guns away from themselves because they believe that firearms easily translate that emotion into death. (And this is how they feel about TV violence and video game violence, and most depictions of violence - that it's easy.)

It wasn't until I actually started studying and using guns that I realized how wrong the that assumption was. Guns are not magical Krell machines that instantly instantiate monsters from the Id. They are non-trivial technologies that require constant practice for competence. But they are also empowering and they force you to think as if they were magical death machines. This is something I have found extraordinarily well expressed by Eric Raymond. 

Nothing most of us will ever do combines the moral weight of life-or-death choice with the concrete immediacy of the moment as thoroughly as the conscious handling of instruments deliberately designed to kill. As such, there are lessons both merciless and priceless to be learned from bearing arms — lessons which are not merely instructive to the intellect but transformative of one's whole emotional, reflexive, and moral character.

I have been caught in the crossfire of a robbery in which my toddler daughter was present, and I have seen a teenager roll up and point a pistol in a man's face. I now know very well, since I have studied guns and shooting a great deal more of how to think in those situations. I understand the tactics and capabilities of shooters so that I am not purely emotional about the encounter. I think more clearly about what is and is not likely to happen. The emotions of fear and rage don't predominate, and it is my knowledge about guns and ballistics that control those emotions. They don't dispel those emotions, they contain them in a logical framework. I would assert that gun training is the only reasonable way to contain those emotions. That certainly cannot be accomplished by having no experience whatsoever, or by having an objection to experience. 

Consequently, I think that you honestly can divide the American gun culture into camps of shooting ignorance and experience. Note that I am saying there is a gun culture of American consumers of violent entertainment who have never seen an actual shot human or animal corpse or been personally involved in any kind of shooting. And then there is the gun culture of actual shooters, sportsmen, hunters, target shooters (either recreational or competitive), law enforcement, industry folks and military.

About that former group, and I say this as a member of that former group and a big fan of Bruce Willis movies. I find that they are utterly convinced by the portrayals they see of violent death in film, TV and video games and do not have any counter-intelligence that real shooters know about what and how firearm projectiles affect the human body. And it is the hype surrounding mass shootings that is nothing more or less than the awakening of that fictional portrayal in their imaginations. Every action movie is a mass shooting. Every violent video game hero kills 20 before he can be killed. A real shooter knows these things to be preposterous, but the first gun culture of America does not, not specifically.

I don't find this to be anything special. It is merely ignorance vs experience. But also innocence vs experience. It is completely understandable and natural for one to wish to keep one's innocence. I don't want to be a sworn officer, and I like most normal people, am queasy about seeing blood and much more about having blood on my hands. The gun culture I am a part of maintains this quality of human decency, and we also know as sheepdogs that we are part of the barrier against those who do not, whether or not we want to be. We require courage to take responsibility commensurate with our knowledge. That's where I am today. 

Gauss Gun

Chip Yates

DIY or Die

Sophisticated glamorous things fall apart, the prosumer will not hold on.

I have lived long enough to know that the good things in our society come and go. There is always somebody gaming your business plan, and all the gains to be made are at the choice points of inflection. Otherwise, basically nobody cares what you think unless you are paying them to.

Today's news is that Google is turning off reader. This is likely to consign the protocol or RSS to the dustbin of history. Which also means that small players can step up and grab market share for something Google finds too miniscule. RSS has hit the Whoopi number. Whoopi Goldberg famously said of network television, it's the only place where people with 1 million friends are called losers. 

In the space between total industrialization and bespoke craftsmanship is a medium sized long tail. This is the place I have decided to approach. I think I can. As I have been cruising the areas of Etsy and EDC and TNP and Atwood, I have found a goodly number of medium sized joints that remain willing to be of service. And it is in this area that we must make our differentiations. You see, I am convinced, having long ago decided to become a Neo-Victorian, that I am liking where my new tastes are taking me. And I am finding less and less disappointment as the mass marketers gradually degrade their products as they sell them to the late adopters...

Once upon a time there were record players. You had one, remember? When the record skipped, youscotch taped a quarter to it and that fixed it. The record was good for about a hundred more plays and then it went to the shelf, hopefully out of the sun's rays. When I started selling radios, I learned all the parts of a record player were actually components that a bunch of different manufacturers could specialize in and the world opened before me. The 'record player' had a tonearm, cartridge, stylus, turntable with either belt or direct drive a variable speed motor you tuned with a strobe against the platter. It's output went to a phono amp of two sorts depending upon wither your cartridge and stylus were moving magnet or moving coil. This went into the control pre-amp and maybe through an equalizer and then to a power amplifier, or several depending upon whether or not your speaker system was bi-amped with large amps for the bass separate from the midrange and tweeters. Let's not forget subwoofers. All of these could be purchased separately mixed and matched and arranged for a price, but the quality was stellar. A long way from a record player.

Once upon a time there were motorcycles and automobilies you could put together and take apart. There were aftermarkets and technical training schools. But today, not so much. And you cannot buy component stereo any longer - not in the mainstream. 

I just purchased a watch repair kit for $15 at Amazon. It doesn't pay to be a jeweler any longer. I remember the last time I sent my best watch to be cleaned, or my wingtips to be resoled. It was about at the turn of the century, both times by men older than my father, grumpy with fascinating hands. I wonder if these are technologies to be hacked and done by self in the future. I reckon that they must be, because who is going to have money for replacement?

Think about it when your smartphone dies.

Gearheads, Hackers and Makers

We live in a built up world. We survive on the detritus of prior generations, we are an augmented species. We are tool designers and tool builders and tool users. And of course some of us pay a bit more attention to the tools, old and new, that help us become what we want to be.

Gearheads
A gearhead is a user, but a gearhead is a special kind of user. The closest thing we talk about is a 'prosumer'. A gearhead is an aesthete of tools. Look at Gilligan in the opening theme of Gilligan's Island. The mate was a mighty sailing man. See how proud he is of that rope and his gear?  That's a gearhead.

There are dysfunctional gearheads too of course. The most common of which is the fanboy. A fanboy says that Stanley Clarke is the greatest bassist on the planet, which may be true, but he doesn't know why and he doesn't know how Stanley plays. He just knows what he likes - that's his side of the story and he's sticking with it. Fanboys are cool, if you're not put off by obnoxious people. At least they care.

Hackers
Hackers are gearheads who take things apart and put them back together again. They (we) are fascinated that a solution exists and they want to figure out how. The hacker is never satisfied just making something work, they want to get inside the black box and figure out how to make it work better, or make it work differently, or even figure out a way to make it stop working altogether. A hacker tries not to trust anything if he can't figure out where its brain is. That's a Harry Potter metaphor for you. DJs who scratch and mix are hackers. Cooks who mess with recipes are hackers. Even kids who pull the pickles out of their hamburgers are hackers.  

Makers
Yes I like threes and I like hierarchies. Makers top off this one. A maker takes an idea and fabricates a solution. A maker builds a tool or a gadget or a song or a poem or a shed or a shim. Makers want to put their names on things they've built - they are bridge builders. They want to own the process and come up with a totally new way. Sometimes makers are combinators. Annie Hall's style was completely made up. Who knew? Wallace and Grommet are makers. Makers can be, but are not always perfectionists. They're about form, but more about function. They are enablers. Oh, yes and obviously on Gilligan's Island, the Professor is a maker.

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When I think about the distance I've traveled over the past two and a half years in my career, I have had to come to grips with a new set of folks. And within LAMP and Open Source I've had to move from mere gearhead appreciation into hands on hacking and scrutiny. I've done a little making as well. 

Tangential to Neo-Victorianism and Steampunk, I think that the direction of young people is towards these archtypes, with a combination retro and junkyard motif. A lot of things that are manufactured for consumers who are not as aesthtically demanding as gearheads will fail to suffice. Most will be hacked beyond recognition, and those that survive will be the projects of makers.

In some areas, makers of this new sort are completely outclassed. Nobody with a 3D printer is going to make a gun barrel worth beans. Bitcoins will never become real currency even at the level of frequent flyer miles. But in other areas, makers, especially bespoke makers will have a very broad canvas of designs and technologies to draw from. My favorites among these are makers in the automotive sector of the economy. Shops like Deus Ex Machina, the motorcycle builder and ICON, the Toyota truck builder.  

Shiny

Changing my life.