Syncopations

41% Say American Dream is Lost

2011-11-15T09:20:00.000-08:00

Posted in response to a Yahoo! article with the title:

"41% of People Say American Dream Is Lost; 63% Say Economy Getting Worse

A new survey by Yahoo! Finance shows Americans have a disturbing lack of hope and a frightening lack of retirement planning.

Among the highlights of the poll:

-- 41% of Americans say the 'American Dream' has been lost.

-- 37% of adults have NO retirement savings and 38% plan to live off Social Security.

-- 63% of Americans believe the economy is getting worse, including 72% of those over the age of 55."

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Even those of us who HAVE been planning for retirement have been stymied by several things:

1. The stagnant job wages that have been going on for a couple of decades (has not been keeping up with the cost of living).

2. The undermining of the US labor market by sending jobs to sweatshops in countries that don't protect their worker's or their environment and have a rock-bottom cost of living compared to the US. There's no way the American worker could ever compete with that without the US also becoming a third-world economy (we're on our way there, it seems).

3. The skyrocketing healthcare costs that were unforseen by most people. Who would have guessed that healthcare insurance could cost a couple over $1000/mo?

4. The crash of the housing market that has eaten into potential retirement equity. (people could plan to move into a smaller house at retirement, and/or to a cheaper area and use the difference for retirement-- but NOT ANYMORE).

5. The crash of the banking system which has, if not eaten up retirement accounts, have at least set them on a trajectory of stagnation for at least the next decade if not longer.

And if you want to point a single finger, I'd say you can point it at the INVISIBLE HAND of GREED that runs this country like an iron fist-- the COMPLETE AND UTTER CORRUPTION of GOVERNMENT by MONEYED INTERESTS.

My RETIREMENT HOME is going to be the TENT CITY forming on the NATIONAL MALL. Does HOOVERVILLE have a BASEBALL TEAM?

Hayek a conservative after all?

2011-10-31T21:57:00.000-07:00

Posted in response to a negative review of Robert H. Frank's "The Darwin Economy." A statement made blaming the creation of the Fed for the worlds economic ills was made, which I thought poorly supported (not that I'm particularly a fan of the Fed, but I'm not convinced it is the Evil Empire some seem to think it is).

You are quick to lay all economic problems at the feet of the Fed's influence. I don't think you've demonstrated that it's simply the existence Fed itself that is inherently faulty simply by pointing out some of its actions that turned out badly, or interpreting them as causal-- you seem to be cognizant of that point. However, I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to eliminating it, but I would need to know what you propose to replace it. An answer of "nothing" only tells me that you have no idea what will replace it. It's a ghost of Hayek, an etherial phantom that does not and cannot exist. Decentralized banking only means that the banks will choose on their own how they will centralize without regard to any democratic process, without any social involvement other than whatever meager influence their customers can exert on them. The fact is, banks exert significant control over our economy, I think we have a right to some say as to how they go about it. No, in fact, I think we have an OBLIGATION.

Society is necessarily a balance between collective interests and individual interests. That's simply a fact of life. The more you try to decentralize by eliminating "coercion", the more opportunity you provide for individuals of similar interests to choose to aggregate and collude against others of differing interests. The problem with an absolute anarchy is that there is nothing that keeps a bunch of people from getting together, forming a collective and exerting control. The tyranny of that control may not be substantially different than that of the despot dictator or maladapted representative government.

The question boils down to, what form(s) of collective(s) are you willing to tolerate? Many are quick to stand up for market collectives. This may very well be due to positive characteristics of such collectives that are quite desirable. But collectives cannot be prohibited simply by eliminating coercion, because coercion will form independently, as we've seen in corporate collectives. In fact, only coercion can eliminate coercion. The free market ideal that many are so fond of praising is not at all possible, because the level of freedom required for its existance is more than enough freedom to allow the elimination of it via collective interests, EVEN if government did not exist at all. There are in fact, TWO roads to serfdom, the path to socialism OR the path to free market capitalism, if you follow either of them far enough. The only difference in the latter is that a few more select individuals may escape via wealth or privilege.

We've certainly seen that a market so free that even government is for sale, is a "proven failure," for a significant number of people. And oh yes, we know that if government was powerless you probably think this wouldn't be a problem. But if government was powerless, that does not eliminate control and coercion, it only hands it over to collectives only beholden to society's interests in a peripheral way at best.

And there is another important fact that's relatively new (post-Hayek). Arguments for humans being incapable of understanding societal and economic dynamics sufficient to exert successful control over them may not be true for much longer. In fact, some may argue that it's not even true as of today. Computer information systems, simulations, evolutionary algorithms, etc., are being used today to model, predict, leverage, and even manipulate markets. How long before society can be modelled sufficiently enough that a lot of that experimentation I mentioned before can be performed at great speed and without impacting society at large, leaving proposed adjustments vetted to a much higher level of confidence than we've ever had or the classic economists ever imagined? What new strategies may be identified? We can only guess, but it is unlikely that there will be none. Will it solve all the worlds social problems, probably not, but I think it has the potential to make things better-- and even if it doesn't, we need to find out for sure anyway, as it is just too important to simply remain complacent that unrestrained free market dynamics is the best we can do, because frankly, it cannot withstand the very liberties it enjoys. And, do we want to leave these new information power tools only to potentially hostile (to society) forces? Or do we want to make sure that we can wield them as well? I suspect that given all of this, that Hayek might have decided that being a conservative was a good idea after all... :-)

The very definition of socialism in "A Road to Serfdom" is now an antiquated one that didn't foresee what individuals can accomplish via collectives on their own, with technology, and at what speed, and how collectives can form now and in the future, and how they can coexist with capitalism. Individuals can be a member of multiple collectives simultaneously, given modern communications. Suppose you had a free market but individuals chose instead to enter into collectives for the advantages they offer? Do they not already? Suppose an ad-hoc collective of individuals chose to form in order to target market or government forces that it sees as hostile to its interests? And of course, corporate collectives are long known to form anticompetitive or otherwise socially abusive pacts, as well as ones that no doubt have positive effects on society. As long as there is more than one person alive in the world, collectivism is here to stay in one form or another, the only question is, what forms will they be. If you just throw up your hands and let it be a total free-for-all, then you're just leaving it all to someone else who will take charge, I guarantee.

Cut, Cap and BS

2011-09-20T07:42:00.000-07:00

Cain said, "Am I my brother's keeper?" It looks as if he and Ayn Rand are the inspiration for the current GOP programs.

Socialism becomes more popular when jobs are scarce-- in socialist countries everyone has a job and noone is homeless, which, if you are homeless or jobless, begins to look better than where you are.

The social programs of the 1930s were an attempt to remedy that particular flaw in the US "markets uber alles" system, which at that time had a decided lean towards Social Darwinism, and left a huge number of people without jobs and homes. The quickest way to accellerate a return to the bad old "buddy can you spare a dime," days, will be to undermine the social safety net-- which will clearly render MORE people homeless and jobless, because without a safety net, more people NEED jobs to keep off the streets. You don't want to encourage people to leech off the system, but SS/Medicare/Medicaid recipients paid their dues into it for years, it's not a "free ride" like some people claim. The big problem with Medicare/Medicaid, is the Pharmaceutical companies are milking every cent they can get out of our health care system. FIX THAT, and you get a big lowering of medical costs which would do us all some good, rich and poor (except big Pharma, my heart bleeds-- must be the Coumadin).

But it takes the ability to stop parroting the knee-jerk cheers of your favorite political "team" and use your brain a little bit-- which unfortunately, it seems a lot of people either aren't capable of or are unwilling to do.

The big question then becomes, how to get more jobs going w/o killing off the safety net. That's where the tough problem is.

You could lower our overhead by pulling our troops back home, but then you'd have a bunch of unemployed GIs-- still, it might be cheaper to put them to work in works projects than keeping them sustained overseas. Then again, it may produce an unstable middle east-- eh, that is, a MORE unstable middle east.

You could raise taxes, which everyone hates for the most part, but I don't see any way around it-- AND I suspect even the GOP will break their word and do it because they have to if they get in next season. We know most previous GOP presidents were not above raising taxes-- though they may figure out some "stealth" taxes, disguise them as something else. Remove subsidies, loopholes, etc., but that may kill off some businesses in the process or raise prices. I think it's gonna happen, no matter who's in charge, red or blue, Teaparty be damned. There's few other options, and we probably need to exercise any and all options we have. The Bush administration charged two wars to the credit card, but lowered taxes and then passed the TARP on the way out. Part of me would like to see what the GOP would do to pay for all this-- no doubt they'd raise taxes and blame the Democrats for making them do it. Right now they're using it all as an excuse to tear down the President, and pander to business interests big time by rolling back everything in sight. None of that is helpful, but if they were in charge they'd actually have a harder time of it because their actions would have consequences that they might not be able to blame on the Democrats.

I don't know what else there is-- there's some waste and bureaucracy in the Fed government, but outside of the Military and the safety net, there's not a lot there, and a lot of it isn't just useless BS.

There's no magic answer. Chants like "cut cap & balance" are pure braindead political posturing-- the problem is too complex for such a simple fix. Don't forget the laws of unintended consequences-- there are BIG TIME side effects to making big changes, tha can easily make the "cure" worse than the "disease." Any politician who thinks he "knows" the "right answer" is as full of it as they get-- we need to proceed with caution and take steps that WON'T break what's currently working for us. Raising taxes is undoubtedly one of those steps.

And you have to ask yourself, who as the ABILITY to pay-- because right now, we don't just need everyone to pay their "fair share," we are going to need MORE than everyone's "fair share" to get out of this mess I suspect. We can't just "cut" our way out of it, because the side effects would be worse if we tried-- the problem is not that we're spending too much, so much as we've SPENT too much, charging wars and bank bailouts to the credit card. The money is SPENT ALREADY, now it's time to pay the bill.

Of course, we could always liquidate some government assets-- maybe Mariott would like to buy the White House and rent it back to the President. What other real estate have we got? Any gold left? The price is high right now, could be a good time to sell-- though it'd drop the price big time for all those gold bugs out there (but it is a bubble, after all)...

Debt Crisis: Time for a FIRE SALE

2011-07-11T00:15:00.000-07:00

Industry has always been at odds with labor. Until fairly recently, much labor was performed by slaves. But eventually the slave-labor gravy train was over. Industry then had to negotiate with labor and provide incentive. When labor was in short supply, industry had to offer competitive incentives.

Before long, industry looked for cost-saving ways to provide incentives. They got the bright idea that offering retirement plans allowed them to take money that would otherwise be paid immediately in wages, and utilize or invest that money and ultimately have to pay less in the process. Then, industry got the idea that encouraging their employees to instead invest in the stock market for their retirement let them off the hook for managing retirement plans, and helped to shore up the stock market and public sentiment towards it, as now everyone had a vested interest in its success. Before that, the markets had an especially bad rap with the general populace, and the significant influx in cash into the markets helped smooth the ups and downs somewhat, and enrich those poised to take advantage.

But eventually the baloons popped, employment and manufacturing was outsourced, and the market could not keep going up forever, and many people took a big hit in their retirement wealth. Now it was jobs that were in short supply, not labor.

Industry then got the bright idea that since jobs are in demand, the "job creators," (i.e., industry itself) should be given even greater tax relief. This might not have been a bad idea, EXCEPT for the fact that the job shortage occured as a direct result of industry excesses in the form of unregulated and unwise banking procedures and an associated bailout of the banks, ill-advised military adventures motivated largely by business interests, and the generalized outsourcing of manufacturing and labor. The massive resultant debt then can only be paid from only three available sources, corporate profits, the middle-class retirement plans, or government owned assets (gold, real-estate, etc.). That's all there is, their ain't no more.

Was the deficit the responsibility of the middle class? Only to the extent that they voted for corrupt and self-serving greedy idiots. Do they deserve to be made to pay? Debatable, but probably not. Can they? Yes. Is it a good idea? No, it will have a direct impact on profits, given the hit everyone will take in their purchasing power. Is it therefore justified? No.

Was the deficit the responsibility of the business class? Partly, in thinking that the "free market" will fix its own problems and is not vulnerable to abuse and therefore regulations are unnecessary. Do they deserve to be made to pay? Partially. Can they? Yes. Is it a good idea? Not particularly, it will impact the availability of jobs. Is it therefore justified? Only to a limited extent, perhaps.

Was the deficit the responsibility of the government (and by extension, all of us?)? Yes. Do they deserve to be made to pay? Yes. Can they? Yes. is it a good idea? Given the alternatives, it's not a bad idea-- they could always buy back assets should it get its act in order sometime in the future. Is it therefore justified? Probably yes.

I think then that the single most important solution to the debt crisis is the one that neither party is discussing-- the liquidation of government assets. Sell enough gold and real-estate or other assets to pay down the debt. It may be painful, but not as painful as either of the other two alternatives.

More Randian Nonsense

2011-06-02T19:44:00.000-07:00

This bit was in response to a comment on my review of Atlas Shrugged on Amazon. The comment ultimately cited a piece of the Galt speech essentially stating that you were either right, wrong or evil-- that those who see the gray areas in choices are the worst of all. The commenter then presumed I must be in my late 20's and "haven't produced anything," then admitting he "could be wrong," but that I should "Let them [readers of Rand] discover reason and self-reliance on their own. It can only do good in their lives and is a step in the right direction."

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No, you are wrong. About many things. I'm in my late 50's and have produced a considerable amount. I've produced many things that are valued by society, and also many things that are not. I have learned that mere production is not enough. I write software, compose music, and create art, among other things. But beyond that, I've been learning how to produce something far more important than any of that, and that's how to contribute to the happiness of others. In fact, all my creations have always been with the idea of contributing to the happiness of society. But of course, Rand has nothing but her utter disdain for "society."

But to distill the world into givers and takers is in fact a simple minded picture of reality. Not only that, Rand must contrive who is who to the extreme, in order to contradict that reality-is Robin Hood a giver or a taker? Obviously, he does both-but what is the net result? When the genius corporate exec produces a new metal from resources strip mined from public lands, destroying acres and acres of forest in the process, and polluting the atmosphere with his foundries, is he a producer, or simply a "user", a "taker", a "looter?" How many successful rich people in this world are of which variety? The problems are in fact very complex, such that probably none of us fully understand. To stick to a simple black and white representation of the world that bears only vague resemblance to reality, is at best "kicking the can down the road," to use a popular phrase, and at worst, outright destructive. I claim at the very least, that it's not *useful* as it leads people to believe that the gray areas do not exist, when they may be the most important factors to consider. A healthy respect for what we do not know does not exist when we've convinced ourselves that the problems and solutions are all simple black and white ones. The false dichotomy takes hold and ignorance rules.

And then we have the Rand and her minions who have convinced themselves that it's okay if all you want to do is to take all you can, justified by what is called "production." But what they have missed is that the true value of "production" is related to the value of the products to society. Am I a worthwhile producer (in the "Randian" sense), if all I produce is great music that no one but me wants to hear? What justification does Rand have if productivity is only for the benefit of the producer? Am I a proper "Randian" producer, if what I produce makes 10 people happy at the expense of making 20 miserable? Would Rand say that as long as I am happy that's all that counts? If so, don't forget that what it takes to make me happy is to surround myself with happy people. Is an individual, even a genius one, who ultimately takes (in the form of profits and the use of common resources) more than he produces properly considered a producer? How do you measure the net-gain vs. net-loss of such a producer, and how would Rand look at the difference?

Successful producers are not just those who have a certain genius. They also have to have a certain amount of luck. For every rich genius you can find, I can show you several others who have as much genius but aren't rich because they lacked the requisite luck. Being born into money, going to school with the right people, having the right teachers, liking the right things at the right times. Genius does not develop and prosper in a vacuum; it requires a proper environment, just like seeds need water and fertile soil to grow. It needs the luck of having landed in the right environment. And that environment includes many of the rest of us.

Like it or not, you share this planet with millions of others, most of which are NOT geniuses. They may struggle far more than you because of it, but even the genius businessman needs them, as that is where customers and employees come from. And the janitor is every bit as important as he is, because without one the trash piles up and the customers and employees hold their nose, avert their eyes, and next time shop or work somewhere else where the neat and clean is valued, and the provider of it given his due.

Another thing that Rand is completely off the mark about is emotions. She thinks herself so completely rational, but clearly she is motivated by emotions-anger without a doubt. She seems to forget that happiness is itself an emotion, and one that in my opinion is pretty ridiculous when achieved in complete isolation. What she misses is the role of emotions in society and where they have value. As it turns out, emotions and irrationality have a specific and important place in successful human relationships, and modern scientific studies, in both psychology and economics, have shown this. Emotions are something that Rand herself can be seen to have no shortage of, but doesn't understand well enough to see it.

Reason and self-reliance are laudable goals. I'm all for them. Ayn Rand's path to them however, is stunningly dysfunctional. Your Galt quote is a prime example-- the "man in the middle" is not saying that no choice exists, he is saying that there are more than two "sides" to evaluate. He is saying "what about strawberry?" when Galt is claiming that the choice is only chocolate and vanilla. Only the simplest of problems can be reduced to a clear dichotomy. Often there are pros and cons to a choice, tradeoffs to be made, unintended consequences to be identified. I don't say don't make a choice, only to make sure you are not choosing from an oversimplified and propagandized pair of ideals that have little or no bearing in reality.

The "No Free Lunch" of Ayn Rand

2011-05-24T21:01:00.000-07:00

This was posted in response to an Atlas Shrugged book review on Amazon.

I had characterized Rand's philosophy as essentially, "genius is really great, we should structure our society to make everything easy and cheap for them, and everybody else stays out of their way so they can do great things." One of the faithful just said that my interpretation was "idiotic." So I asked essentially if that was the best he could do and not be more specific. He then called my original comment a "tortured misinterpretation," and that I should address a specific Rand quote to provide some evidence.

I immediately went to the Galt speech, but before I was able to choose which juicy item I was going to post, someone else responded with a doozy which hit the nail right on the head:

"The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains. Such is the nature of the `competition' between the strong and the weak of the intellect. Such is the pattern of `exploitation' for which you have damned the strong.

We required that you leave us free to function - free to think and to work as we choose - free to take our own risks and to bear our own losses - free to earn our own profits and to make our own fortunes - free to gamble on your rationality, to submit our products to your judgment for the purpose of a voluntary trade, to rely on the objective value of our work and on your mind's ability to see it - free to count on your intelligence and honesty, and to deal with nothing but your mind. Such was the price we asked, which you chose to reject as too high. You decided to call it unfair that we, who had dragged you out of your hovels and provided you with modern apartments, with radios, movies and cars, should own our palaces and yachts - you decided that you had a right to your wages, but we had no right to our profits, that you did not want us to deal with your mind, but to deal, instead, with your gun. Our answer to that, was: `May you be damned!' Our answer came true. You are."
...
"Neither [Rearden] nor the rest of us will return until the road is clear to rebuild this country-until the wreckage of the morality of sacrifice has been wiped out of OUR way [emphasis added]. A country's political system is based on its code of morality. We will rebuild America's system on the moral premise which had been its foundation, but which you treated as a guilty underground, in your frantic evasion of the conflict between that premise and your mystic morality: the premise that man is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others, that man's life, his freedom, his happiness are his by inalienable right." -- Atlas Shrugged

The Rand disciple then asked what I objected to, to which I responded:

What I object to primarily is the implication that these wannabe-gods are operating in a total vacuum. Apparently, no credit at all is afforded the peons ("starving in their hopeless ineptitude") whose actual toil is in fact instrumental in implementing the deity's grand visions. And no responsibility is acknowledged whatsoever to insure that the little guys (or their customers, for that matter) aren't simply taken complete advantage of by these superior beings. And of course, we see repeatedly in reality, that the "superior intellects" are often not above taking full advantage of the inferiors over which they lord their paychecks. To then take full credit for providing apartments, movies and cars while they enjoy mansions and yachts makes me think of the religious con men that drive Rolls Royces paid for by the hard-earned contributions of their congregations.

As if those paragons of industry don't need the rest of us to keep the engines of their successes operating. It's laughable, really that they could go off and do better by themselves-- or would be laughable, if so many out there haven't bought into that particular fantasy.

Frankly, I think the opposite story of Atlas Shrugged would be far more interesting. Let all the "lower class" worker peons leave and leave it all to the ubermensch, and see just how far they get without the armies of paid grunts to pull it all together.

But we all live in society together, with each others consent. Louis XVI forgot that, to his regret. I’d say it’s best to think more like a team player, than to try to figure out how much you can get out of the system for nothing. The tax-evader rich guy at the top is in reality, the equivalent of the welfare mom, just at the other end of the spectrum where the numbers are larger. The only difference is, the guy at the top can get the government to make his tax evasions legal, while the rest of us cannot, and have to make up the difference.

As an example of some of the things overlooked here-- pensions were paid workers in order to attract them to jobs, because the competition in the free labor market required it. Employers could have instead paid higher wages, but providing a pension is a worthy idea-- and in fact, might be more cost effective for the employer—who invests less money than they might otherwise have to pay out in higher wages, given the fact that the pensions won’t be drawn upon right away and the investments will grow over time. Pensions weren’t created to “redistribute wealth,” they were a more cost effective way to competitively provide more benefits in lieu of higher wages. Pensions can be seen as delayed wages, agreed upon as a condition of the employment contract. To renege on it later is bald-faced theft. Did the genius manager at the top screw up in setting up a viable investment plan for the pensions? Maybe so, but that doesn’t make the little guy at the bottom who needs that pension check the one that should suffer for it. And maybe reality means they all have to compromise, but after it’s all over if the little guy is homeless and the guy at the top is still living in a mansion and enjoying his yacht, I’d say the compromise was inequitable.

Social Security and Medicare have similar characteristics, and the government has a vested interest in encouraging people to prepare for their old age so that they don’t end up either street-urchins, dying in the street, or as an extra load on the healthcare system, not being able to pay their way. But people don’t always estimate well in that regard, and when the economy takes an unexpected downturn can find themselves unprepared. Who let who down in that case? You have a vested interest in a society full of people that are healthy and not homeless, even if you don’t recognize that fact. Providing a safety net is in fact an employment benefit, and is one of the benefits of working in the US. Pulling the plug on it is every bit as much a theft as the pension case.

Taxes pay for common services that we all need, no matter how much money you make or how stellar your performance, if you use roads, you need to help pay for them, and everyone uses roads in one way or another, if you eat food chances are it got shipped to your local market over roads. And those common services are getting more expensive for a variety of reasons, some of which are related to major gaffes made by those at the top while they were accumulating all that wealth and creating all those jobs. One of those common services is fighting wars—is not the protection of your mansion and yacht by crack military troops worth more than it is to the guy who has a tiny little shack in the bad part of town?

And there exists a segment of society that needs help, that simply can’t do it on their own. Sure there are some lazy slobs that would take advantage of a system to help them, but perhaps that brilliant intellect can figure out a way to handle those without impacting those who are really in need. Rather than penalize everyone for a few miscreants, why not design a system better able to detect or withstand them?

When people are young they may incur large tuition debts with the idea that they will eventually make enough money so that it makes financial sense. Well, it doesn’t always. I have a friend who’s a specialist MD. She has many of the same debt problems the rest of us may have had at one time or another, though her numbers are proportionally bigger. She makes more money, but got herself into bigger debt. Rent on doctors office space is very high, equipment is expensive, insurance, yada yada… Ok, so it may be poor planning, but that’s not particularly uncommon, no matter how much you make. But when the numbers are bigger it makes sense that the sacrifices must be as well. If the little guy at the bottom is asked to sacrifice a big chunk of his paycheck because the economy is bad or our debt is out of hand, why shouldn’t the wealthy guys at the top be expected to sacrifice a more proportional amount as well? It’s said that the 14+ trillion dollar debt amounts to about 40K or so per person. So we could all pay off the debt by tossing in our 40K. But should the little guy who’s making less than that be expected to pay the same as the guy with the mansion and yacht? I don’t think so

When the economy gets in trouble, you rich guys may just have to move into a smaller mansion and downsize your yacht. It’s part of being a team player in a society that you otherwise would seem to feel no compunction to pillage to your hearts content, as if you have no responsibility to the rest of society at all.

Again, it’s not about redistributing wealth, it’s about PAYING YOUR FAIR SHARE, which is a larger amount if you have reaped larger benefits from taking advantage of what the system and society has to offer. You are not operating in a vacuum, where only you are responsible for all of your success. The system is not just YOU, and the idea that if you all went away it would come crashing down is, in a word, “idiotic.” Your part of a team that includes all of us, whether you like it or not.

When the trillion-dollar debt merry-go-round breaks down...

2011-03-01T18:01:00.000-08:00

Hmm-- US national debt. Right now it seems to be $14+ Trillion:

http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/

Increasing at $4.15B/day, each citizen's share is almost $46K.

I'd say these are the ways that the debt can be addressed:

1. Raise taxes. Will make things worse in a bad economy, and piss everyone off. Republicans will fight it tooth and nail, unless they're in power, where they've been known to raise them on their own. Things to look for: stealth taxes, other reformations which amount to raised taxes by other names.

2. Get it from Social Security. Don't look now, but it's ALREADY been looted, and transitioning to a private system will be more expensive short-term, since they'll have to cash in those bonds even quicker. To do away with it entirely, or to privatize it would redirect the income stream elsewhere anyway, so it's of little use. And never mind that those bonds may be rather illusory, the ritual of keeping them in a binder at the bottom of a file cabinet makes them real enough to create a huge scandal if they're simply voided out of hand. Whether or not you call it an "entitlement" in a derogatory way, they represent insurance premiums paid as a condition of employment by every employable person in the US, that were supposed to be in exchange for something.

3. Raise the SS retirement age. Already doing that. Doesn't produce very much income, mostly just slows the cash-in of those bonds to cover the outflow. Helps a little, but not anywhere near enough.

4. Reduce defense spending. Not gonna happen, as that is really all the PTB want out of the US government, those shiny war toys.

5. Declare bankruptcy. Not gonna happen, is tantamount to #4.

6. Reduce spending. Except for SS, Defense, Medicare & Medicaid, it's digging nickels and dimes out from between couch cushions. Look for: hits to Medicare & Medicaid-- it'd be better to cut costs by eliminating patents on prescription drugs (free market, anyone?) and let the rich subsidize drug R&D instead of the sick, but Pharma won't sit still for that and they get you elected.

7. Print more money. Seems to work short term, but penalizes the middle class who don't have many assetts to protect. Look for: more and more wealthy folks looking for protection from this. Somebody's going to get stuck with the bill via this one. Kinda like that lunch meeting where everybody left one at a time, and you got stuck last with the bill, except the bill is several trillion dollars. Last one holding dollars, loses.

8. Sell off government assets. Might actually work, but will have a hard time getting anyone to go for it (selling the country off to furriners again). A lot of these assets are military as well, though selling old hardware is a good way to get rid of old junk we paid too much for new. The $350B in gold would help a little, but could conflict with #7, because $350B isn't enough to do it all by itself. Radio spectrum, loans, lots of properties. Look for: big gold selloff, once the price has been pumped up enough by dollar drop? Not sure if they have the stomach for that.

So what else? Ain't that about it? #7 looks like a big winner! -- works short term, the rich can avoid the downsides as long as they don't move too fast and get noticed. Probably easier to pull off than any of the others as well....

Demon Boomers

2011-02-11T23:17:00.000-08:00

Posted on slashdot in response to a post by a 20-something who was blaming his grandparent babyboomers for the big mess we're all in. They're all assholes, have all the money and all the power, selfish, entitled, and how they all had decent jobs available when they were his age. Not that a lot of it wasn't true, but he did seem to lump us all together a little more than I thought was warranted. Hence the following response:

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Nice to have someone to blame tho, eh? Frankly, I'd like to see you pissed off. Pissed off enough to do something about it. But I don't really get the sense you're pissed off enough, at least not yet.

Many of the boomers I know are still renting and have recently lost their jobs. Of those who do have houses, none of them are paid for. Even the boomer MDs I know aren't doing all that well-- while they take in a lot of money you'd be amazed at how much it takes to run a doctors office-- office rents, equipment, insurance, staff, services-- and they're getting squeezed on the incoming, mostly by the insurance industry-- the numbers on their tax returns may be larger, but they're also way more in debt than my jobless friends.

Sure, there are plenty of boomers with a lot of capital, opportunist corporate exec hucksters & elected official hustlers, for the most part, who've now pushed all the unskilled jobs overseas because they can circumvent the labor laws (maybe you'd like us to repeal those, so we can get the sweatshops back online-- there's a job fer ya, eh? Oh, but you have an edycation-- you don't want unskilled jobs anyway, do ya?). The thing is, whether boomers or not, historically, older people are more likely to VOTE. But the amount of money that goes into selling them a bill of goods is hard to resist (most of them aren't experts on governance, don't have the aptitude for it and/or are just trying to live their lives as best they can).

I think the real problem is attributable not to excesses of the "previous generation," but to plain old incompetence combined with an overabundance of those hustlers and hucksters, and if you haven't noticed, you're generation has no shortage of all that either. Darned human race, why haven't we all evolved into bleedin' geniuses by now? But those hucksters and hustlers sure know how to survive in a free-market anarchy, boy. Don't they?.

Many of the older generation were simply too ready to trust others to figure out things that were way over their head, and too easily fell for a slick song and dance that sounded good, and then fixated on being a "team player" and just follow their team and its sound-bite dogma right or wrong, because that's as deep as they can understand it. Not as many of them as as edycated as you are, whelp. So they either voted Republican, or voted Democrat, and trusted their team to make things right. If you do what you always do, you get what you always get. Maybe you'll be able to convince your generation to do something different. Many boomers thought so too, once. Years ago, when they were your age.

Maybe you'll just be able to do a better job. You want that job, don't you? I thought you did. Makes me feel better just knowin' that you're out there ready to jump in and fix it for us.

The Emperor's New Semiotics

2011-01-30T23:50:00.000-08:00

Wikipedia defines it as, "the study of cultural sign processes (semiosis), analogy, metaphor, signification and communication, signs and symbols." Umberto Eco claims, "that every cultural phenomenon can be studied as communication." All very well and good. But exactly what does this "study" consist of? What methodologies are used? Where is an example of an insight that can be gained from its application? Methinks the Emperor, looks more than a little naked.

Everyone seems to believe that such insights from semiotic analysis is possible, and perhaps it is, but so far, there doesn't seem to be any evidence that it has ever been achieved.

In addition, many of these people claim to be experts on linguistics. You'd think that a good linguist would be pretty good at communicating their message concisely. So why are the books on "semiology" described as "dense," or "hard to understand," even by their proponents? What's wrong with this picture?

I certainly don't deny that there may be concepts that are ineffable. The question is though, can they somehow be communicated, and if so-- in at least some cases, shouldn't there be some way to tell? A single example of this would provide a huge amount of credibility to post-structuralist "thought." And if you can't tell, then what use are such "ineffable" concepts, being essentally indistinguishable from nothing at all? Oh yes, there is one use-- as a scapegoat. The same one the medum uses to explain why she can't contact your aunt Margaret, when the skeptic is sitting at the table. An apologetic for the inability to produce, and most convenient. Linguistic obscurantism offered as proof that there are some ideas that are beyond linguistics.

My linguistic analysis of "semiotics" is-- "elusive," "evasive," "devoid," and "voodoo."

Then and now, now and then...

2010-08-16T22:24:00.000-07:00

Virtually all of my relatives are (or were, as most of them are gone, now) Christian. All of them. I can't think of a single one who wasn't, though there may have been (it wasn't like any of them wore their religion on their sleeve or like a chip on their shoulder). Family get-togethers just didn't include having your Christian credentials verified. Many of my family were inclined to be pretty conservative, though I didn't notice that until I (and they) got older.

My mother and father were both Christians too, though my father was Catholic, and my mother Protestant. They never quite saw eye-to-eye on a religious upbringing for me. At one point after some period of indecision, perhaps when I was about 4 or 5, they compromised and we all started going to an Episcopalian church, and I was baptized. But I don't think their heart was in that church, and I was a typical precocious kid who would rather be out playing than sitting in a Sunday school class where they nagged me with a bunch of strange and vaguely threatening ideas. And once I found the truth out about Santa Claus, it all seemed to make about the same sort of sense to me, inventions designed to make kids behave. Before long, my parents tired of it and we didn't go to church anymore.

So ultimately, I'm not, and pretty much never have been, religious. I feel that belief is not something you just decide. It would be like saying, "today, I think I'll believe the moon is made of green cheese." I think you either find something to be believeable, or you don't. And I think by now, I've heard all the arguments.

It never occurred to me that any of my relatives would hold it against me or think any less of me because of it. And none of them ever did, that I know of. Perhaps that was because they were somewhat soft spoken about their beliefs, I don't know. Perhaps, it was because I was family and they HAD to accept me, but it never seemed like that was the case. I was never even made to feel that I was in the minority, though I guess in actuality, I certainly was.

My grandparents on my mother's side were extraordinarily generous, forgiving, loving, and accepting people, which always struck me as a model for what Christians are or should be. When we were at their house we always said grace at the table, and there were pictures of Jesus and embroidered Bible verses on the walls. But there never were any discussions about religion that I can remember-- they simply lived their lives that way, and felt no compulsion to argue it.

I think that was it-- that was what I took away from all of that, they were simply, nice people. I guess I was lucky. And what I ultimately got out of that, is that it doesn't really matter to me what someone believes, as long as they're nice people. You can believe that the moon is made of green cheese if you want, and I'm fine with that, as long as you treat others with respect and care. And I try to do the same, as best I can, though I'm sure I don't always succeed. There are Christians, and Buddhists, and Muslims, and Pagans, and Agnostics, and Atheists, and any of them can be either jerks or nice people. I prefer to hang out with the nice ones, and have no particular interest in narrowing my scope any further than that.

Since my youth, I have encountered a lot of Christians that I'm not related to, who like my family members, tended also to be pretty conservative. Many of those individuals seemed to be compelled to argue with me, if they discovered I was nonreligious. I did get the feeling that they were holding the fact that I wasn't a believer against me. At first, I tended to find them offensive, or at the very least, condescending. And based on my family experience, rather non-Christian Christians, but I've since mellowed quite a bit I think, and am much more inclined to ignore such treatment now and remember my grandparents and just try to set a better example. But now and then, on all too rare occasion unfortunately, I've met Christians I'm not related to who remind me of what my family was like. So there out there, or at least a few of them are. It seems strange to me now though, that there was so many of them then, but there seem to be so few, now.

2010-03-21T06:03:00.000-07:00

This was posted to the "Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder Support Group" in response to an OCPDer wondering how other people think about the future and their decisionmaking processes.

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What Paul seems to be doing when he hears that inner voice saying "he listens to meditation tapes every day," is he's "trying on for size" what other people's perception of him will be if and when they find out this particular fact about him. His concern with how he is perceived by others is paramount, so it's part of his evaluation of any activity. The difference I think, is in the level of importance of that evaluation in decisionmaking.

In my case, not OCPD, it may matter little to me what other people might think-- or at least, what people think of me does not enjoy the level of concern in me that it does in someone with OCPD. I may think about it, but it probably just doesn't carry the same weight as it does with Paul.

The essense of flexibility is the ability to make decisions quickly. Those who get stuck even on relatively simple decisions, just aren't going to be very flexible. Fava is correct in observing how important emotions are to decisionmaking-- there's an old saying from Engineering (or perhaps it is from Marketing), that "at some point, you have to fire the engineer and go into production." And that point may end up being driven by emotions-- the inability to wait any longer for perfection from the engineer, for fear that the market opportunity will expire.

One big stumbling block that the OCPDer seems to have, is the inability to either recognize, or come to terms with, things over which they have no control. Or to be able to make a choice, and be willing to accept the consequences of that choice. Once a choice is made, in some cases you have left behind the control that you had in making the choice-- you have given up some control, because at that point, you have relinquished the option you had of doing something different. As we have seen, relinquishing control is not something that an OCPDer likes to do. And the retrograde energy that goes into rumination about whether a choice was a "mistake" because it may not have been the "perfect" choice, is not at all productive once a choice has been made.

In my case, once I make a choice, the "future" is reevaluated in terms of that choice, rather than punish myself for making a wrong choice. If a choice turns out to be less than optimal, I work on identifying what choices are now available to me under the new circumstances. Some "wrong" choices are reversible, or there are things you can do to "put things back as they were," to an extent at least, and while that may be seen as a waste of time to have to do so, it may pale in comparison to the time wasted NOT making a decision because the ruminations over it won't allow one.

You can stall over making the decision whether to order the chocolate dessert or the strawberry one, but the decision may get made for you if they run out of chocolate while you are thinking about it-- you'll get strawberry or nothing simply because you failed to act in a timely fashion. You cannot place the world in suspended animation while you think about things. There's a saying in computer science about the definition of a 'real time' system-- "a real time system is one where if an answer comes in late, it's wrong." Life is a real-time system.

Trusting your emotions, your "gut" as it were, can assist in making decisions quickly. Some of them are going to be wrong ones. But if you can accept that and move on to the next in the new context, your ability to adapt and improvise under pressure can often bail the situation out. But you have to have confidence in your ability to improvise-- again, something that requires the ability to make decisions quickly. And, something that CAN get better with practice. You can practice improvising, musicians do it all the time, but you have to ignore your fears of failure, something that also gets better with practice.

Thomas Watson Jr., the well known one-time president of IBM once said in essense, "if you want to increase your rate of success, you will have to increase your rate of failure." The true entrepreneur will fail more often than succeed, but by trying often, will succeed often as well, despite the failures. But you have to have the will to move on past the failures, and not get all that embarrassed by them. You have to give yourself permission to be human, that is, less-than-perfect.

If you're spending very much time "trying on" what other people will think, that's taking time away from getting the decisions made and moving on with them. Getting those decisions made quickly is far more important to flexibility than is making sure they're perfect. Many decisions are 'real time' problems, how soon you get the answer is not irrelevant. How soon you get the answer may be more relevant, than how correct it is.

As an aside-- I approach life this way even when I'm typing. I'm a real fast typist, though I make a lot of typing errors. But since I can recognize and correct errors quickly, my level of productivity in typing is pretty darn high. So what's more important-- getting the completed results in a timely fashion, or making sure you made absolutely no mistakes every step along the way? That sometimes really is an either/or choice.

OCPDers seem to be inclined to quash emotionality because they think it is nonproductive, but if that's what they think, they are wrong about that. Emotions are not particularly a weakness, they are often a strength. There are some great "logical" arguments that support my opinion about emotionality here in the book "Passions Within Reason," by Robert H. Frank. Frank shows just how important emotions can be in a variety of decisionmaking situations. I would think that OCPDers might benefit from some of his observations-- at least it might make them feel a little better about it if they allow emotions to make their way into their decisionmaking processes. A great book full of thought provoking insights into the value of emotion.

2010-02-07T16:48:00.000-08:00

Posted to the Amazon community, "Objectivism," in response to someone else's post that included a set of loaded questions addressed to "Liberals/Democrats" starting with, "What makes you think it's my responsibility to pay for your healthcare?"

Why did I even read this community-- Randians are knee-jerk utopian cultists, for the most part? I guess it's only because a bunch of them seem to be running the banking system and their egotistical stupidity has launched us into a significant financial (and undoubtedly social) crisis.

At the very least, my response is probably a bit vitriolic (flamebait)...

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I'm neither a Democrat nor a Republican. But I think there are reasons the government should get involved in healthcare that have nothing to do with "fairness."

From a practical point of view, I don't want to live in a world full of sick people. It's in my best interest not to, and yours too.

I happen to think that the government does have a role in forcing people to do things that are in their best interest, when 1) they are too stupid to figure it out on their own, and 2) if they don't, it adversely affects the population as a whole. Do individuals have a right to be stupid? Only when it doesn't negatively affect others.

Maybe you don't mind living through the next global epidemic in a country without a well developed social healthcare system. Maybe you think Typhoid Mary had a right to her freedom and it was inappropriate for the government to try to contain her. But I suspect if she were to move nextdoor to you and your kids started dying off you might be inclined to rethink your position.

Do I think the Dems have a good design for their system? Absolutely not. I think for one thing, that we should stop subsidising the pharmaceutical companies R&D in the form of patent protection-- as far as patents are concerned, your ideas should be yours and yours alone as long as you keep them to yourself. If someone else figures them out too, then that's too bad, the cat is out of the bag. The argument that the pharmaceutical companies need the welfare of patent protection to make their R&D expenses worthwhile is a bogus one, and even if true, we simply can't afford to subsidise their R&D. Plus, there are plenty of rich people who don't want to die who want new drugs developed, and they will naturally be inclined to contribute to such R&D. Far more I'd say, than those who would naturally be inclined to contribute to a collective healthcare system for the poor, as you yourself seem to illustrate.

You'd also no doubt not want to extend healthcare to illegal immigrants. Or perhaps you would, based on your own self interest as I described above, but feel it is a good argument to "rid" this country of them. But given the number of Libertarian or Free Market businessmen who seem to think they have a right to hire them in order to reduce their costs and offer you cheaper products, and given the fact that I'm not a utopian idealist who thinks we are at all able to keep them out (and I'm not even convinced we should), I think we should make sure that the healthcare system can handle them too.

Am I spending your money? Perhaps. But I'd say that's the cost of doing business, the cost of living in a healthy country, costs that you apparently are to dim to recognize. In my opinion, the alternative would be far worse, sooner or later.

Graphical User Input on Crack

2009-03-13T19:25:00.001-07:00

This was posted to Slashdot in response to an article about Mozilla possibly losing some of its financial support from Google now that Google has chosen to get behind Chrome. It ultimately hit upon one of my pet peeves of Windowing interfaces, and that is interrupting the user while he's typing with new windows and input focus changes. The curmudgeon in me is out in force in this one.

"BZ" wrote:

Popups on typing is an interesting issue. Right now, popups are only allowed during the handling of certain user events, and the ones relevant here would be: * keypress of a return key * keyup of a space key (needed for handling space being used to trigger buttons) * input I'm not sure why input is on the list; that should probably be revisited. Is there a bug filed on this, or were you expecting people to fix your #1 beef without knowing anything about it?

It would appear, given the number of applications that have this problem, that it's not actually seen as a "bug" but simply a characteristic of general computer interfaces that users have grown to put up with. I suppose then, it is actually a feature request, though that presumably gets entered into bug reports as well. If I were to file it as a bug report I'd have to do it in dozens if not hundreds of programs that could be enhanced to address. Frankly, it should be a characteristic of the underlying windowing system, but none actually implement it that I'm aware of. Loss of focus while typing is a problem that is system-wide and not specific to browsers, though a browser feature that attempts to do it within the browser might raise awareness of the fact that as users we shouldn't have to put up with it.

It's also true that there are potentially complex implications in solutions for the problem. A windowing system could certainly connect a timer to key input and place popups in a queue until sufficient time has elapsed with no keystrokes. Then you also have to ask, what about mouse input? And what about a popup queue that begins to get rather large? The user experience would be that when you pause in typing, you may get a series of popups appear all of a sudden-- hopefully less disruptive than when you're actually typing. Perhaps a better way to handle it is to queue the popups until the user takes a specific action that would change window focus, on the presumption that changing focus at that point is acceptable.

Presumably, applications that use popups know that the user may be asleep and/or choose not to acknowledge it immediately, so I think we could safely assume that blocking the app for a time via its popup should be workable.

As an example, back in the old days with printing terminals, it was often that an equivalent to a popup was used-- such as in broadcast messages. If you were in the middle of editing a line of text on the printing terminal, it was seen as inappropriate to simply blast a broadcast message out and mess up what the user was doing. I think this was a perfectly reasonable idea, and the solution was usually to queue up the message until the next CR was entered by the user. This worked pretty well-- but that concern for the user experience went "out the window" with the advent of windowing interfaces. Of course, it happened slowly, as running dozens of programs simultaneously along with automated background tasks that check for update availability, didn't exist when windows were new-- but now we're at the point where you end up typing your input into the wrong windows and losing keystrokes all over the place when popups mechanisms assume that the users actions are less important, less critical, than the computers-- which is plainly incorrect (or should be).

Another possible solution for popups is to reserve a spot on the screen where popups are relegated to appear, and make it so they do NOT redirect input focus (something that frankly, I think only the USER should ever be allowed to do!). A status line that popups must use, where they can use color and perhaps even sound to signal an important event, but where they will NOT interfere with what the user is doing. In fact, if I had the time to dig into it, I'd find out if it's possible to intercept the Windows API for programmatic focus change generally, and simply disable it? Perhaps a utility could be made that would help raise the bar in user experience. There's still the problem with new windows, but at least it might address part of the problem. I ask, just who is in control of the computer here? Not the user, at the moment.

So given the point made by "BZ" above, it ought to be on the bug list for Microsoft Windows, and probably rather than for X, for the individual window managers such as KDE & Gnome, which is where I think the "bug" exists, if it can be said to be a bug, or at least where the feature request should go. In the meantime though, individual apps could improve things and set a good example by at least making sure their own popups a little more courteous.

But instead of thinking about groundbreaking new features, or simply making sure the product is the most secure and most stable ever, we have the addition of unnecessary browser tabs, which in every modern windowing system I've ever seen they are simply redundant-- the operating system supports multi-window selection already, in the task bar or status bar , or dock, or whatever. And does it cross application. Let the OS decide if you want to aggregate your tabs by application. But instead, that ability is removed from the OS by the application because the OS is now unable to organize the tabs embedded in one application with those in another. And in Firefox anyway, last I looked (I've stopped using it, frankly), tabs that you can't completely turn off and insist on taking up real estate. Did someone actually ask for those stupid things? I'd like to see the original feature request in the bug reporting system for THAT particular annoyance. It's made Firefox the Oprah Winfrey/Phil Donohugh of browsers, "I'm just giving people what they want," as if dealing crack cocaine is somehow virtuous simply because there's a demand.

But then, I'm just a curmudgeon, so you can safely ignore me (and undoubtedly will).

The Pathology of Perfection...

2008-06-07T11:27:00.000-07:00

In my youth, I was inclined to be a perfectionist.

But eventually, I realized something important about it. To be happy, you must be satisfied. And a perfectionist is never satisfied.

And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that perfection is fraught with misconceptions. It became clear to me that perfection is vastly overrated. In fact, it is a significant distraction away from characteristics that have actual value.

There's a distinct tendency to confuse perfection with beauty. An erroneous presumption that perfection is somehow more objective (less subjective) than beauty. Or to myopically conclude that, "there is beauty in perfection," and thereby characterize things in irrelevant ways. But in fact, "perfection" is not only not objective, it is also discriminatory and therefore divisive, whereas beauty is generally not. While some may consider it heresy to claim this, the Universe is not perfect-- but it is beautiful. That observation however, should by no means be construed as a criticism of the state of the Universe, quite the contrary.

Perfection is contingent on a purpose-- things are perfect "for some purpose." But beauty is not-- things can be beautiful for no purpose at all. Perfection's "purpose" gives it the apparent status of being more utilitarian, and thereby more objective, but that is an illusion.

By focusing on perfection, and thereby its "purpose," might we be concentrating on the tool, rather than the goal? To see everything as a nail, from the perspective of the hammer, rather than considering the perspective of the fastening task at hand? Perhaps there is another, preferred solution, but a solution we cannot see, clouded as our perspective might be, being so enamored with the "perfection" of hammers? On the other hand, a hammer may be beautiful, but is rendered no less beautiful by the presentation of a problem which appropriate solution might turn out to be glue.

By implication, something "completely" perfect would have to be perfect in all ways, for all purposes. But that is ridiculous, as there are contradictory purposes-- a perfect sphere cannot also be a perfect cube. One has to apply the subjective process of evaluating the value of it's purpose in order to qualify and quantify something as "perfect." Is the perfect "weapon of mass destruction," to be considered somehow better than the perfect "glue" without applying subjective criteria?

Some perfectionists even get to the point that they are compelled to suppress their emotions. Perhaps they feel that the way we handle our emotions is what separates us from animals. Well, that may be true, but I'd say it's also true that the way we handle our emotions is what separates us from machines. And to suppress one's emotions will necessarily make one unhappy. Why? It's quite simple, because happiness is itself an emotion. One who is ruled by logic has thereby ruled out happiness.

Perfectionists have difficulty making decisions. In some cases, extraordinarily so. This is partly because it is near impossible to completely analyze all the information that might contribute to a decision. But it is also because there is inherently a significant amount of subjectivity involved in making a choice. Whether you decide to eat the chocolate dessert today rather than the strawberry one, is not a supremely logical decision but a completely subjective one, potentially subject to change at a moment's whim. That's not to say that all caution should be thrown to the wind or that decisions should be made with a roll of the dice, but there is no point in belaboring a decision in the hopes of arriving at the perfect result.

And perfectionists really hate making mistakes. Odd though, because that itself is a serious mistake. For it really is true, that you learn from your mistakes. Science itself, for example, makes far more progress when a scientist makes a mistake and it is discovered, than when one thinks he's got the answer perfect. As Issac Asimov once said, "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny ...'"

Upon those realizations, I chose to give up perfectionism. I see it as the epitome of the banal, the bland, the rigid. I see it as lacking in character. The concern of the overconscientious milquetoast.

And subsequently, growing past it-- I chose to instead embrace that which makes one unique. To look for beauty instead of perfection, and not confuse or conflate the two.

I've since realized that it is important to not just overlook imperfections, but to take time to actively appreciate them. Humans are not perfect, but their imperfections are not tantamount to flaws-- one's imperfections are what gives one character, what makes one who they are, and what makes one beautiful.

It's rather ironic really, because for a perfectionist to achieve, at least conceptually, the greater perfection they desire, one of the things they would have to do is actually relinquish their perfectionism. For it is a significant flaw-- the inability to recognize sufficient value in imperfection. To even waste time, looking at things in terms of perfections and imperfections, seems folly. To evaluate things in such terms, in the confused belief that they are somehow being more objective. To focus on the unimportant pedantic details and miss the beauty.

It is our humanity that makes us who we are, not our perfection, and it is in that humanity that we should find value.

Our concern should only be for imperfections that are harmful, which certainly exist, but many imperfections are harmless or even beneficial. To see them as weeds to be eliminated, is to remove that which makes us human and unique.

Perfectionism seeks to homogenize the true value out of the human race-- to turn everyone into identitiless clones, intolerant of individual personality, worth, and beauty. It is an astonishingly outstanding flaw, one that makes people insufferably authoritarian, judgmental and condescending.

And that is why nobody likes a perfectionist. Not even the perfectionist thyself.

--

Sync

Programming: The anachronism that is APL

2007-12-17T18:08:00.000-08:00

Originally posted to Slashdot as a response to a comment about the programming language APL as of possible interest for parallel programming on the emerging multicore processor machines.

The programming language APL was totally brilliant for its time. APL is probably the only serious pictographic programming language ever devised, a fascinating characteristic that unfortunately even Kenneth Iverson (the originator of APL) himself gave up on in resorting to ASCII digraphs with his later language J. I often complain about the fact that programming on our current keyboard, originally adapted from existing non-computing devices as it was, relegated us to resort to the symbols * and / for multiply and divide because proper symbols were not available-- we're still using essentially that 50 or more year old keyboard standard completely for reasons of ancient practicality, not modern elegance. The original APL included a valiant but failed attempt to change that.

One big problem with APL as a pictographic language is that extending it implies a need for new pictograms over time, and a typewriter keyboard, even redesigned for the language, is a poor candidate for such expansion. The earliest forms of APL kept that problem somewhat in check via the use of overstrikes, so that you didn't have to provide a separate key for each symbol but instead could learn a relatively manageable set of symbols that could be reused in combination to produce the entire symbol set. However, the use of overstrikes seemed to be out of place on video terminals, and so the innovation of overstrikes gave way to video terminal keyboards with a vast array of stick-on symbols that one would have to learn in order to write programs.

APL is also about the most terse programming language ever devised, a crucially important characteristic at a time when dial-up baud rates were often 110-300, and memory systems were large in size but small in capacity. When it takes that long for characters to transmit, one-liner programs of a hundred or so pictographic symbols work pretty darn good.

And despite APL's inherent array operations, automatically parallelizing APL is a relatively crude means of taking advantage of multi-core processor systems, as the setup and teardown overhead would require additional logic to determine if the size of the arrays and/or complexity of the operation would warrant it. Logic that would have to be done even when determining that parallelism is not appropriate for the operation. While programmer guided parallelism would be more sensible and certainly feasible, even that would be insufficient to resurrect the language from its current status as largely an anachronism of the past confused by some to be ahead of its time. I'm afraid the peak of its "time" though, was the late 1960s and early 1970s, roughly coincident with the IBM System/360 and System/370 mainframes. Once terminal output went to glass, APL began its divisions and its decline.

APL's real failure has been in the immense difficulty of standardization-- no two people (let alone APL vendors) ever thought about it alike, the various extensions and workspace formats differ significantly, and implementing a full APL is a complex undertaking as language implementations go. In fact, the APL community still seems to have a hard time deciding whether or not to maintain the pictographic character set or to resort to ASCII in the mistaken belief that it will make it more "acceptable." In a world where "write once run anywhere" is an important goal, APL fares rather poorly in the transportability department.

While I'm sure there are some APL die-hards that are just waiting for the advent of many-core desktops as the chance for APL to "shine again," I on the other hand, fully expect it to disappear as anything more than a historical curiosity, and fairly soon now as the original die-hards have been entering retirement age already for some time now. And many of those not quite ready to retire, like Iverson have chosen to move to the J language or some other ASCII based array language, giving up one of the most important things that I think made APL special, if not uniquely valuable-- its pictographic character.

For me, APL will always have a soft spot in my heart, being the first computer language I was ever exposed to and on which I learned to program (on an IBM 2741 selectric terminal). Long ago I wrote my own APL interpreter and have recently given it somewhat of a facelift for Windows (mine still supports overstrikes, as I don't need the stickers-- I still remember where all the original symbols are). I use it as a super-Calculator and little else (it remains really good for that). While I sometimes get wistful about its now misplaced potential, and periodically try to think of ways it might possibly mutate into something important in the modern world, I harbor no real illusions of a resurgence...

The joke that is DRM...

2007-08-15T18:17:00.001-07:00

There've been a lot of complaints about the BBC utilizing a proprietary streaming media system that only works on Windows. It's all about the DRM contained therein.

The funny thing is, with some of these DRM systems, even if you have the platform that it is supposed to work on, many people still can't make it work. I downloaded a legal FREE download of a TV program from AOL and found that it just wouldn't run on my Windows XP box due to some DRM issue with the computer (now, this is a FREE download, mind you). I'd like the program bad enough to actually PAY for a DVD of it if one were available. Whoever the content provider is can actually get MONEY out of me for this if what they provide isn't defective, but given they haven't I'm spending this weeks media budget on someone else's content. Doesn't matter if it's FREE, it's useless if it's defective. Ya gotta laugh at the arrogant and clueless minds that conceived of this stuff.

In my book, it's not about free stuff. I'm perfectly happy to pay for content. But, it must have these characteristics for that to happen:

1. Not just downloadable. I want something physical for my money-- a disk in the mail, primarily. Frankly, if I'm paying, one of the things I'm paying for is something that preserves the value of my purchase-- my purchase must be resaleable, and that legitimate disk is that resaleable entity. Etherial datastreams have little percieved value, and the media corporations insistence on it in the face of new distribution and replication technologies is IMHO the reason for the drop in their sales.

2. No time limit. It can't "stop working" after awhile, either based on elapsed time since purchase or the number of times it's been watched or listened to.

3. In an OPEN format. A format that can be made to play on future devices that don't even exist yet, possibly on a different media, that can be converted and that can be backed up.

4. Reasonable cost. DVDs <$20, CDs < $10 (don't ask me about HD, I'm in no particular hurry to go there and it doesn't yet meet #3). Note that most of these criteria are about preserving value. I rarely go to the movie theater because the experience does not justify the cost for me. I will go to a live concert or live theater performance, and there the cost is justified-- I can't see paying $8 or whatever movies cost these days to sit in a too-small theater and have to pay inflated prices for unhealthy snacks when I can buy the DVD and watch in the comfort of my own home and pause it when someone has to take a leak or refill their snack dish. Even at home though, I'm not willing to pay $5-$20 for media that I can only watch for a limited time, won't work with the next generation of playback systems, that I can't let friends borrow or can't resell. Just like I won't buy a book whos pages will fade to white after a couple of months, I won't buy crippled or short-term media.

Can such a combination be abused? Undoubtedly, but that's the age we live in-- even without P2P music trading, college students can still convert their CDs to MP3 and trade them en-masse to their local circle of friends, which can significantly propagate the content. Welcome to the information age, guys. GET USED TO IT. The RIAA isn't gonna fix it, and their pathetic attempts are *really* bad PR. And DRM doesn't stop the abuse, it just pisses off those who try to legitmately access the content and motivates them to look for alternatives that actually work.

That's my criteria for spending $$$ on content. I buy quite a bit of media that fits all the above criteria (though DVDs only do because of deCSS, and not all DVDs because many are overpriced). But I don't buy ANY media that does not, and waste no more time on supposedly FREE media that's simply, broken.

Want my money you big media corporations? It's simple-- all you have to do is EARN it.

Dead Snake Oil Salesmen Walking...

2006-11-10T10:21:00.000-08:00

Symantec and McAfee have been whining in EU courts and more than a few other places about Microsoft Vista's security protections making it hard for them to produce their anti-virus software. Poor saps, their chickens are coming home to roost...

The concept of antivirus software is inherently flawed. Antivirus software can never keep up with the latest virus. There are far better ways of protecting a system than detecting known virus signatures.

Execution protection, user permission controls and good firewalling are far more effective methods of defending against such attacks. All of these things are built into Vista, and in fact are most of what is new that is in Vista-- showing Microsoft "gets it" at least regarding this sort of security. Even on Windows 2000 or Windows XP, all of these things are available (though not built-in) except useful user permission controls.

Even before this latest Vista whine-song, Symantec and McAfee have been going into FUD PR mode in order to try to save their market-- their latest conflict of interest due to the fact that they are mostly out of business if the above facts about effective virus protection gets out. They're dead men walking, having painted themselves into a corner and now they're whining about it. Simply pathetic.

Bees in the Bonnets

2006-01-10T19:46:00.000-08:00

This post was a response to a Slashdot thread regarding some new discoveries about how bees fly. Ultimately, the subject of ID (Intelligent Design) came up, along with a lot of posts that indicated few were aware of the illustrious history of science and bee flight. I actually came up with the biologist/physicist story below from memory, and was corrected by someone who was a little more familiar with the actual details. In fact it was an aeronautical engineer who calculated bumble bee aerodynamics using the current (1930s) understanding of the subject, and then uncovered discrepancies with wind tunnel tests on small models. The story has been passed around apocryphally and in various forms has been utilized as an example of how science isn't perfect and "doesn't know it all either," as flimsy apologetic for some voodoo belief system.

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Reportedly, years ago a biologist and a physicist met over dinner or something, and the subject came up about the physics of bee flight. Some back of the paper napkin calculations by the physicist didn't work, and they were overheard by someone who reported to the press that "science proves bees can't fly." Of course, everyone knows that bees can fly, so it was seen as a "har har, those silly scientists, they don't know anything." Science gets it wrong, so science is just a bunch of stuffed-shirt eggheads in labs that have convinced themselves they know something when they really don't know anything.

However, it neatly ignored the fact that not too long after that discovery, the question raised actually led to further investigation of the subject and much was learned about insect flight. This story shows much is still being learned from that event.

What really happened in this case, is someone detected an error. Science has a long history of individuals who found errors in our understanding of the universe. In fact, virtually all the famous names of science are famous because they uncovered an error in our understanding. It is simply by the detection of errors that science advances. Science is a philosophy that learns from its mistakes, and in fact, without the discovery of mistakes it really isn't learning much. It's in trying to determine what's going on with a discovered mistake that science moves forward. As Isaac Asimov said, "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny ...'"

Consequently, every time I hear someone claim something to the effect of "oh look, here's where science got it wrong," I point to it and say, "oh look, here's where science learned something. Here's where science made progress."

To the extent that ID is looking for mistakes in science, it will actually improve our understanding of the universe, which includes evolution. Where ID differs from science, is that not only is no one in ID even looking for mistakes in ID, ID isn't even capable of making mistakes, because their explanations would explain any phenomena-- and an explanation that explains everything really doesn't explain anything. Drop an apple and it falls down? It's ID. Drop an apple and it falls up? It's ID. There's no knowledge content to such an explanation.

Any philosophy that is not capable of discovering its mistakes, must be either perfect or error-prone. And, since no human endeavor or understanding can be said to be perfect, I'd say it's pretty clear which it is. Science too, is not perfect, but it has one thing the other philosophies do not, and that is at least some ability to detect its errors. Given the choice between a philosophy that can detect at least some of its errors, and one that pretends it can't make any errors, I think the choice should be pretty easy to make.

Some suggest that scientists are in some kind of conspiracy or cover up. Such a suggestion is completely ignorant of how science and scientists operate. While an individual scientist may find it difficult to uncover errors in their own work, scientists are fully aware that careers are made by uncovering an interesting mistake in another scientists work, and would trumpet such a discovery to the high hills instantly. Conspiracy, indeed.

ID proponents only succeed because they are not the only ones ignorant of these basic realities. Unfortunately, science education and interest is so weak that a large piece of the populace is similarly ignorant.

Even those who aren't anti-evolution or particularly religious may believe in things like astrology, for example. But when was the last time anyone was recognized for finding an error in our "understanding" of astrology? Astronomy has a long list of names of those who've uncovered errors in our understanding: Aristotle, Copernicus, Newton, Einstein, etc.., for example, and there are many many more. Where's the list of names that have improved the quality of astrological knowledge by uncovering its errors over time? Of course, there aren't any, just a few people who've written books that made untestable claims, or claims that can explain any result-- it's complete hogwash that could only be completely error prone, even if it were a clear fact that celestial bodies can significantly affect human events. Astrology is just one more monument constructed by the gullible.

Except for science, the remaining philosophies rely on a single method of supporting their credibility, and that's apologetics. And why do you think they call it apologetics?

Sync

The Walk-in going the way of the Drive-in?

2005-08-25T14:20:00.000-07:00

What's wrong with the Walk-in movie theater? Besides the obvious-- sticky floors, cell phones, crying babies, running kids, talking idiots... LOTS.

Number one on my list, is they have not kept up with the increase in the DIVERSITY of TASTE of the viewing public. They target a couple of relatively narrow categories, those which they appear to believe cover significant market segments (and probably do, but there's a lot more of them now than there used to be), to the exclusion of all others.

I look up what's playing in my neighborhood, and find at lest 150 screens to go sit in front of within a reasonable distance, but find that all 150 screens are showing the same 12 movies, virtually none of which I'm interested in seeing. So while in fact I do have 150 screens to choose from, I only have 12 movies to choose from. It wouldn't matter to me if I see "Skeleton Key" in theater A or theater B or theater C or theater D, all within close distance, if I wanted to see "Skeleton Key" at all! But they're trying to amortize their ad budgets, preferring "blockbusters" to diversity. Get a clue guys, the "blockbuster" concept is a complete anachronism in an extremely diverse marketplace. The music industry could stand to figure that out as well and get over the "good old days" of the supergroup.

Frankly, I prefer OLD movies, and actually WOULD like to see them on a big screen. There's one theater near me that will do that, a neat REALLY OLD classic theater but that has one of the worst sound systems I've ever heard-- the reverberations in the theater make the experience awful. Plus, whoever picks their selection of old movies needs their head examined-- they really suck. It needs someone who knows the old films well enough to actually seek out those known to be particularly enhanced by the large screen projection and be able to get them! Unfortunately, it's probably getting harder and harder if not impossible to get good prints of old films on demand, they have to find some restoration society or something because they aren't likely to get much help with that from the studios...

Last time I saw an ad on TV for a movie I actually wanted to see, I looked for it in my neighborhood. Come to find out it was only playing one place anywhere in a radius of about 150 miles, and that was 50 miles away-- yet they spent big bucks advertising the movie to get me there. I'm sorry, those big ad bucks weren't enough to get me to drive 50 miles to see it, despite the fact that I was willing to go somewhat out of my way for that particular movie-- they just made it TOO HARD (the movie was Howl's Moving Castle, BTW), and I live in a major Los Angeles suburb, about 10 miles from downtown (don't ask, I'm trying to GET OUT). Consequently, it's obvious that the movie index sites are only useful for people who want to go to the theater to see ANY movie, not to see a particular movie. They have to face it, there's just fewer and fewer people willing to do that. And if they can't find a way to fix it, film theaters may just go the way of the drive-ins. At least in drive-ins you had SOME privacy, and wouldn't have to listen to cell phones and the like if drive-ins still exited. The big problem with drive-ins was they couldn't keep you from bringing in your own snacks (oh, that's not a problem for ME, it's only a problem for THEM. That's customer-centric for you).

--

Sync

Machinations of Intelligent Design

2005-01-05T13:33:00.000-08:00

Posted in response to an Intelligent Design (I-D) comment on Slashdot in the thread "What do you believe but cannot prove?"

Evolution and guidance are mutually exclusive terms. Development based on guidance is not evolution, as evolutionary development is by definition a process that does not involve guidance.

No, as a matter of fact, evolutionary natural selection is guidance. The core difference between I-D and Evolution is that I-D proposes that the guidance is self-aware though they don't usually single out that aspect of it, for that is not what any of the data they use in argument for I-D actually shows, even where I-D proponents interpretation of it is accurate.

The term intelligent does not have to include self-aware, as natural selection can itself be seen as an intelligent and a design process. One definition of "intelligent" is "the ability to aquire and apply information," which is an accurate description of a mechanistic DNA-selected-by-natural-selection process. And virtually none of the ID arguments are inconsistent with a purely mechanistic definition of intelligence or design, NONE of their arguments, even if accurate interpretations of data (which many are not), actually require the intelligence to be self-aware. But they neglect to mention that particular detail as it undermines the religious case they are trying to make. In doing so, they reveal the religious, unscientific nature of their motivations.

Soon, this will force I-D proponents into the corner of claiming that since the mechanical intelligence of "artificial intelligence" was constructed by self-aware programmers, that the mere existence of a mechanistic design process in nature would require some form of self-aware designer, the same old unsupportable "watchmaker" argument (which is indeed all the ID argument is), in a slightly different form. But it is ludicrous to say that because someone designed a simulation means they designed the system being simulated-- that is like saying that the designer of a wind tunnel should be credited with the design of the physics that produces lift. By insistently ignoring the fact that randomness filtered by virtually any selection processes will produce a reduction in randomness and thereby produce structure, the colossal ignorance of such a position becomes truly mind-boggling. But they must ignore this inconvenient fact, as it alone lets the hot air out of the ID argument-- if self-awareness is not a requirement of the "intelligence" or "design" of the ID theory, most if its proponents will lose interest in it.

It's truly a pity that their God's omnipotence falls short of the ability to create an automated universe. And particularly, since that is the kind of universe in which we live.

Religion as Spiritual Welfare

2004-07-19T13:53:00.000-07:00

This one was in response to a comment by someone attempting to argue the validity of Pascal's Wager on slashdot:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Misanthropic Principle in action:

If it [an afterlife] doesn't exist, then the believer and the non-believer net out the same, with cessation of existence.

That's only true for those who have concluded that what they do while they are here can only be meaningless unless it serves to placate God.

If there is no "afterlife", then what you do while you are here is all that has any meaning. To simply say "why should I care, I'll be dead" is completely sociopathic, and it is that characteristic of religion (the claim that without God, one can only be that sort of sociopath) that I primarily object to. The implication is that if it weren't for the rewards or punishments meted out by God, one would have no reason to behave oneself at all and would see no reason not to murder and pillage.

Such a corrupt attitude towards existance and society is a common legacy of fear/reward based "worship", and in my opinion is actually anti-spiritual. Spirituality cannot justifiably be derived from the baser instincts.

Personally, I have no interest in placating a God. If one exists, it must be as bound to external moral principles as we are, or it can only be considered amoral and therefore without any moral authority. While a Supreme Being may be powerful enough to dole out rewards or mete out punishments, Might Makes Right IMHO does not confer the moral authority to forgive nor the morality for us to accept such spiritual welfare. The Nuremberg Defense is not automatically more valid simply because you believe God is your superior. It is still up to you to determine what is right and what is wrong. One must accept that which apparently is so feared: responsibility. To say, "I'm not responsible for what happens if I follow the rules that I live by, as I didn't make up the rules," is not in my opinion, a morally justifiable system of ethics at all.

As Shakespeare put it: "Thou shalt be both the plaintiff and the judge of thine own cause."

Certainly, if God exists, he's nothing if not unbelievable. For if God is not so utterly fantastic as to be unbelievable, then what is?

--

Sync

I'm sorry, you're not allowed to marry ANYONE...

2004-05-21T09:45:00.000-07:00

This was a response to a slashdot post on the subject of same-sex marriage, where the poster was claiming that the term "marriage" already has a well known definition "The legal union of a man and woman as husband and wife" (from the dictionary?) and I gather because the term "legal" was used that makes it a common-knowledge "legal" definition. Further the poster claimed that attempts to redefine the definition "smacked of politically correct whims and predjudices." As this poster's comment was a reply to a previous comment, I think the term "whims amd prejudices" was pulled out of an earlier pro-same-sex-marriage posting.

Original post on Feb 25, 2004. I resurrected it here because it's an ongoing news subject...

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The point is not whether or not there is an existing definition of marriage, but that the existing definition is prejudicial in that it doesn't apply equally to everyone.

In fact, the above definition of marriage is inherently prejudicially exclusive in that it presumes that every human individual is either a "man" or a "woman." The prejudice is in the erroneous assumption that gender is a binary state which is clearly false. The definitions that are sorely in need of reexamination are far more rudimentary than "marriage"-- that of "man" and "woman."

How then, does the term "marriage" apply to an individual who is completely hermaphroditic, such as in a dyzygotic chimera [mindfully.org]? How about an individual who is only partially intersexed, such as an genetic XXY individual, pseudohermaphrodite or someone with an endocrine or hormonal disorder? What about someone who is transgendered via a medical procedure? And what if such a procedure wasn't voluntary, such as in cases where newborn males with small penises were thought to be females, surgically "corrected" and grew up believing they are females only to find out later (perhaps at puberty, or even later) they are otherwise male? Who gets to decide what gender these people are and on what basis?

Does marriage simply not apply to some of these individuals? What do you do if one of these persons ends up inadvertently married to the "same" gender but who had honestly believed they were different genders when they got married and found out later that perhaps they are not? How "male" does one have to be to be considered "male" enough to marry as a male? 51%?... 80%?.... 95%?.... What does it mean to have such a fundamental social institution that simply doesn't apply to certain people?

Can we simply ignore the issue because it's only a minority population of individuals with indeterminate or intermediate gender? How large would such a population have to be to be taken into consideration regarding "marriage?" How do you determine if someone is a member of such a population-- what means are to be used for determining intermediacy and how intermediate do you have to be to be considered one of such a group? What if the only "intermediacy" you have is that you find yourself attracted to the same sex? Apparently, even that is too much intermediacy for "marriage" to apply, at least in some quarters-- suggesting that the percentages of "maleness" or "femaleness" required on each side for marriage to be allowed are quite high.

And finally, does love have anything at all to do with marriage given the kind of constraints some people would apparently apply?

IMHO-- How better could we undermine the institution of marriage then to withhold it from certain classes of persons? How could we make it more irrelevant to society at large than to pass a constitutional amendment proclaiming it an exclusive club? Watch what you wish for...

Those who yearn for a black and white world can try to ignore these difficult issues, but even the passing of a constitutional amendment isn't going to make them disappear...

--

Sync