Wednesday, May 2, 2012

So I was down at the Drug Store getting more of the pills to inhibit my neurotransmitter reuptake, and there on the bottom shelf of the cabinet near where you drop off prescriptions there were some Home Pregnancy Tests, and some Home Cholesterol Tests, and next to those there were some Home Drug Tests (Marijuana).

And while I realize there are all sorts of Important Social and Cultural and Moral Things to say about these, what I’m really thinking is what a great routine George Carlin could have done on these.

Just imagine, someone sees one of these in the store when he’s a little wasted, and he’s like “whoa, cool, I’ll take some o’ those, man”, and he takes them home and opens one up and figures out how to use it, and then he yells “SHIT!” and his roommate says “what’s wrong, man?”, and he says “Man, I’ve got WEED!!”.

Something like that, anyway.

I was going to write down other things, too, but I can’t remember what…

Oh yeah! So we forgive Jen Rhee for whatever role she is playing in the mystery infographic spam thing, because one of the things that she links to on her Digg page is 5 Questions We Desperately Need a Buckaroo Banzai Sequel to Answer, and Buckaroo Banzai references are worth alot.

(Although we also dimly suspect that the things on her Digg page are carefully selected to contain at least one thing that is worth alot to each of seventeen carefully-selected Internet Demographic Groups, about which she also has infographics. But probably we are just paranoid.)

Passive media invades the Internet!

In the sense that I heard something on NPR or somewhere about how all various people with lots of money, like Google and I guess Yahoo and all various other people are apparently spending lots of money to put together “channels” which would carry “programs” that people would then be expected to “watch” like they do (or used to do) with “television programs”.

Which strikes me as bizarre!

I personally have very little patience with non-interactive media these days, and the only things I really consume that you can’t click on, so to speak, are (a) background music, (b) WNYC while doing other things, and (c) occasional old Buffy episodes on Netflix. My impression of YouTube “channels” is that they are, like, places where you can go to find some mildly amusing “JibJab” thing with animated talking pictures of politicians or something, except now they have advertisements which if you have to watch more than like six seconds of invariably causes me to go do something else instead.

But apparently I may not be entirely typical (shocking thought), or at least some people with lots of money are willing to bet that I’m not. So there are whole “channels” on YouTube and YahooTube or whatever and maybe like Hulu and things, where people make “episodes” of “programs” with High Production Values, and advertisers, and all like that there, so you can have the whole stultifyingly dull and ad-saturated television experience right there on your computer, oh joy oh rapture.

Here is one they talked about on whatever NPR story or whatever it was that I heard: Barely Political. If you click on that you will go to a YouTube page where some video will probably play even without you asking it to. The one it showed me was incredibly stupid, but maybe you will be luckier.

(It occurs to me that when I watched several in a row “episodes” of (what was that? oh, yeah) Dragon Age: Redemption, I was probably consuming one of these very “web program” things, but it was just to moon over Felicia Day, and obviously that doesn’t count, right?)

This interests me somewhat, in that I like to think of the Internet as extremely liberating and empowering and tending to inspire and facilitate creativity and collaboration and participation and all, which is pretty much the opposite of the “sitting on the couch staring at ads interspersed with brief stretches of plot” paradigm that TV and this stuff represent.

Passive consumption has, I tell myself at some level, been so successful on TV just because the technology doesn’t offer the superior alternatives, and now that the ‘net so definitely does offer those alternatives, we’re basically done with that whole TV thing.

But maybe not!

Time will tell…

oh P.S.: This is probably the NPR story that I heard.

The internet really is changing the world!

So it’s very hard to estimate, objectively, how much the world is actually changing. Except in the oddest of times, after all, the perceiver is changing at least as much as the world. Stairs get steeper, burdens heavier, music louder, children younger and their jargon less comprehensible (ikr?), the people who run the world more obviously incompetent, because of the shift of viewpoint, regardless of any other sort of change.

You can’t go down to the same river twice, that is to say, even if the river is the same.

Having said all that, though, the world sure has changed! :)

I went to The Mall today, to get my both pairs of glasses repaired (the world’s gotten blurrier, too, as it happens). My reading glasses have been held together with a little twist of wire for months, and yesterday I figured out that my driving glasses have been bothering my nose because although the lefthand nose-piece was still there, it was subtly torn enough that the metal bit was sticking through whenever I actually put them on.

There being no convenient way to get them repaired at home (or maybe just by force of habit, really; come to think of it I didn’t even look online for home glasses-repair kits), I went to The Mall. The Sterling Optical was having, or was involved in, some peculiar event involving a local radio station, balloons, a popcorn machine, and other arcana, but someone asked if they could help me, and when I said I needed some repairs they summoned The Guy Who Does The Repairs from the back room, and he came out and took my glasses and said it would be just a couple of minutes.

So I stood there reading news and books on my ‘Pad until he (or actually someone else, which was slightly confusing) returned with my glasses all fixed up, and then I was all done.

I strolled around The Mall a little, got a coffee, wandered through the Video Game Store, didn’t go into the book store (or even, come to think of it, notice if there is still a book store there), went upstairs and got some lunch from Asian Chao, thought I noticed a “Rounders” to open soon where the Burger King used to be, but then decided that it was actually a “Rounders” that had opened and closed again where the Burger King used to be, since the last time I was there.

There were Akoo screens on some of the columns in the Food Court, and cardboard ads for the Akoo app (which in some sense lets you control what Currently Popular Videos appear on the Akoo screens) sitting on the tables. I looked briefly at the Akoo app on my ‘Pad, but it looked kind of dumb so I didn’t get it. After I ate I bought some (really rather awful) chocolate from the all-candy-same-price candy stand, and wandered through F.Y.E. and didn’t buy anything there either.

The Mall is really a pretty impoverished environment in which to buy things. The F.Y.E. has some little devices that you can run the barcode of a CD under and possibly listen to the tracks and read about the artists on a little display; last time I was there a few of them mostly worked. This time I didn’t even bother trying; I was going to be home pretty soon anyway after all. The book store that I didn’t even go into has some random selection of books that someone (I would guess the Home Office of the bookstore chain) has decided to stock, but there’s no metadata, no reader reviews, no easy way to find other books by the same author or “readers who looked at this also looked at” lists.

Part of me says that it’s nice to be able to browse through the physical objects and decide what to buy one-to-one with the thing like that. But how much sense does that actually make? It means that I’m deciding whether to buy based on how compelling the cover design and the blurbs are, and the things I’m deciding between are limited to whatever someone (else) has decided to stock. How are those advantages?

So one thing that The Mall has is Sterling Optical where they will fix your glasses (and for free!). It also has a somewhat wider variety of coffees and ice-creams than home does, and Asian Chao and Desert Moon and fast-food chains like that. But that doesn’t seem like enough to support a whole Mall really, does it?

And then it has the persons. Quite many persons, each one interesting and lovely in a different way, with eyes and limbs and clothing of different colors and designs, and hair in various styles and lengths. Persons with voices and stories, and laughs and quiet whispers and sidelong looks.

I do like persons. :) And you don’t get to admire them when you buy books on Amazon or music on iTunes or furnace filters on Furnace Filters 4 You Now Dot Com.

But you do when, for instance, you go out to hear live music in Peekskill. (And to an interesting extent that we won’t consider further here right now you also do when you go out to hear live music while staying home.)

So the Internet gets us lots of great metadata from other persons while we shop, but keeps us from encountering the actual persons themselves, and their voices and hair and limbs.

Does this deprive us of the company of other persons, or does it just mean that we have more time to encounter other persons in non-consumer contexts? Both, of course. :) But which more, and which when, and which to whom? Them are the questions (some of them)…

More economics shit

So I don’t understand the huge fucking deal about the weakness of the goddamned Euro. I mean, so who the fuck cares if their currency is “weak” compared to some other fucking currency? Sure, it like sounds wimpy an’ shit, like “haha dude you are Weeeeeak!”, but it’s not like really so fucking awful and like waaaaa my currency is weak and oh noooo my poor poooor balance of payments!

Some Euros or some kinda shit like that

So say you’re some Euro dude and you want to buy some foreign shit, and you go to buy it and the fucker is like “you want to buy it with what?” and like “those Euros aren’t worth jack-shit, so if you want to buy my crap you gotta give me like ten billionof ‘em”. And that’s a drag ’cause you can’t buy the foreign shit, but really you can just go to some other Euro fucker who makes the same kinda shit, and buy it from him, and he’s a Euro dude too so he’ll take just a couple Euros for it, and so you didn’t get the foreign shit that you originally wanted, but you got some similar shit, and really shit is shit, y’know?

And if you’re a Euro bastard who wants to like sell stuff to foreigners (or y’know people that Euro dudes think are foreigners, which includes like Americans who aren’t actually foreign, but you know what I mean), you are in Hog Heaven, ’cause you can be all like “my shit is one million Euros!”, and they can just go down to the bank and buy a million Euros for like nine ninety-five, and they’re like “here’s your million Euros, sucker!”, and you’re like “yes!!”, and everybody’s happy.

An’ really once enough fuckers who have real money start buying all that Euro shit ’cause Euros are so cheap, Euro stuff’ll get all like fashionable an’ shit, and everyone’ll want to buy it because it’s cheap and like Lady Fucking Ga-Ga is wearing it or anyway it’s cheap, and so people will want to buy like billions an’ billions o’ Euros to buy it with, and when some assholes want to buy tons o’ some shit the price of the shit always goes up, and so Euros’ll start to be worth more again.

So it’s, like, self-correcting an’ shit. I’n't? I mean, fuck!

Yay, I saved Europe(an bankers)!

Scene: a big fancy room in a big fancy building.

European Banker: You must help us! No one wants to trade in Euros, or borrow them at interest, or anything, because the economies that back them are all messed up!

Capitalist: This is a valuable market signal! The weak demand for, and vanishingly small interest rates on, your currency means that you are doing things wrong. You should reassess how your economies are structured and see if, for instance, they are run primarily for the benefit of politically-connected individuals and institutions who steal billions on a whim, but produce nothing of value.

European Banker: Who let him in here? GUARDS!

Shouts and scuffling, gradually receding into the distance.

European Banker: Apologies, my friends, most embarrassing.

U.S. Federal Reserve Banker: No problem, mon ami, these things happen.

European Banker: But back to our problems! If there is no demand for Euros, economic activity will slow, people will have financial difficulties, perhaps even come to think that our economies are run primarily for the benefit of politically-connected individuals and institutions who steal billions on a whim, but produce nothing of value. They could demand change! We might lose power! And we really, really, really like power.

U.S. Federal Reserve Banker: I understand completely, mon cher, mon coeur. It is not a problem! We will buy your Euros with our dollars, and we will pay as much for them as if they were actually valuable, and your economies healthy! We will make dollars cheap, cheap, cheap, and give you vast truckloads of them for your pretty colored Euros!

European Banker: Che bello, tesoro! That is wonderful! But what if the Euro does in fact tank? You will have huge piles of worthless colored paper!

U.S. Federal Reserve Banker: Όλα θα πάνε καλά, Αγαπούλα μου! Do not worry your head! In that case, the American people will as always make up the shortfall!

European Banker: ¡hala! That is extremely generous of them!

U.S. Federal Reserve Banker: Yes! Or it would be, if they had any choice in the matter! Ha ha ha!

European Bankers: Ha ha ha! xaxa! Ja ja ja ja! mdr mdr mdr!

Exeunt omnes.

The Political Side

Okay, so now I will write down some things about the political aspects of my visit to Zuccotti Park, Occupy Wall Street, the Occupy folks in general, and stuff in general.

One very common complaint about the Occupy movement is that it doesn’t have a clear program, and isn’t about anything in particular. This, of course, is Just What The Bad Guys Want You To Believe, as amusingly depicted here:

Well, okay, one might respond, but just what is “economic injustice”?

I think most folks would respond that it’s the thing that underlies this:

There’s actually evidence that most folks (and not just most Occupying folks) consider that sort of thing to be economic injustice, and don’t realize just how bad it currently is; see for instance:

So there’s a good candidate for “what’s it actually about?”.

Another question, and this came up in the comments to our last entry, is okay if that’s the issue, what’s the plan? What’s the platform?

I have a couple of thoughts about this:

• The Occupy movement is very much nonhierarchical and led-by-everyone (somewhere on Friday I read something along the lines of “don’t mistake us for a leaderless movement; we are all leaders”, and I like that). So there isn’t going to be a Single Official Platform Approved By Everyone. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing; organized groups don’t necessarily do any better (waves at the Libertarian Party over there across the way). On the other hand, the movement does have some documents and statements that represent a consensus of certain people at a certain time; see for instance the Declaration of Occupation.
• Even if the plan is just “loudly express our concerns”, I personally think that that is a great plan. If nothing else, the Occupy movement has taken the focus away from the Tea Party’s astroturf platform of “give less money to the poor, and deregulate the powerful”, and moved it to something more like “punish criminal behavior by the powerful”. Which I consider to be a Much Better Message. If elected representatives start to see that message and others like it, and decide that there might be votes involved, we may see changes in behavior (I believe that we already have, in fact; I hope this isn’t the last, or the best, change that we see, and I doubt it will be).

There were various single-issue folks at Zuccotti when I was there; a few complaining that “The 1% Wear Fur”, the lady complaining that the college had lost all records of her daughter’s attending, the person with the very long detailed small-print sign about how the government had implanted radios in his teeth so on. There were a couple of cute young people with a sign that just said “Revolution”, getting their picture taken together. But that’s all okay! This is New York City, after all, and a political movement. That happens. While in fact anyone who comes into the Park with an opinion thereby makes that an opinion of the Occupation, I’m pretty sure that there are some opinions held by a more significant fraction of the folks than others.

The other week we listed some possible goals for Occupiers. I’ll reiterate them here, and add a few more.

• Tax income from capital gains just like any other income. For: why favor rich people (who get lots of capital gains income), after all? Con: if we don’t favor rich people, they might take their ball and go home.
• Let the Bush tax cuts expire like they were written to. Gets rid of most of the projected federal deficit with one blow.
• Regulate the shadow banking system about like we regulate the normal banking system. ’cause now we know that otherwise they go crazy.
• Bring back Glass-Steagall since on the whole it appears to have been a good idea after all.
• Announce that the U. S. Government will no longer be bailing out failed financial institutions beyond what’s in the FDIC and so on. “Moral hazard” ain’t just a theory anymore, eh?
• Stop lopsidedly favoring investment over savings in Federal economic policies. Savers are people, too.
• Regulate corporations. I know, kind of general. But as the very interesting The Conservative Nanny State points out (free pdf available), being able to create this fictional construct to shield yourself from liabilities is a huge benefit; government has a perfect right to require a certain amount of good behavior in exchange.
• More specifically, end corporate personhood, at least anything beyond the strictly legal and financial bits of it. In particular, there is no need whatsoever for these fictional entities to have a First Amendment right to freedom of speech, any more than they should have a right to vote. The officers and owners of the corporation can express themselves as they like, using their own resources and money; but the money belonging to the government-created entity should be used only for the legitimate business purposes of the entity, not to (for instance) lobby the government to increase their profits.
• Aggressively prosecute and convict (and get some of the billions back from) the people who ruined the world economy to enrich themselves. Seems like a no-brainer, but apparently not everyone is on board, even with prosecuting the most blatant and obvious parts of it, like fraudulent mortgage foreclosures.
• Remove those administration officials with the most obvious conflicts of interest. The argument that only these people have the skills to clean up the mess is unconvincing; the only skills we know they have are to make the mess in the first place, and to enrich themselves and their friends and firms. Get rid of ‘em.
• Abolish private prisons because it leads to stuff like this, which is just pure evil. (How do these people even look at themselves in the mirror?)
• Apply insider-trading rules to Congress just because duh.

The “end corporate personhood” and “abolish private prisons” and “apply insider-trading rules to Congress” ones are the new ones.

I’d be surprised if any significant fraction of Occupy folks would object to any of these, or even call them unimportant side-issues. So to the extent that this category of agenda-item starts to be seen as something that voters actually care about and vote based on, they may tend to get done. And to the extent that the Occupy folks loudly expressing their opinions helps them to be seen that way, they are advancing that agenda.

What else was I going to say?

Oh, yeah!

I don’t actually have anything directly against the wealthiest 1% of the American people (or any other group). If I wear a 99% button, I’m not primarily saying that I’m one of the 99% of people who make less than a certain amount of money. Mostly I mean that I’m one of the 99+% who didn’t fucking steal billions of dollars through financial fraud and then escape prosecution because I own the fucking government, and who don’t fucking pressure and/or bribe the government to put more people in jail, because I run a fucking private jail and get paid per inmate.

Or that sort of (fucking) thing.

You know?

Monday, October 17, 2011

I wear the chains I forged in life, mon!

Ha ha ha ha ha! We just came up with that in the office here. Maybe a little obscure, but it pleases me…

Secure yourself to heaven.
Hold on tight, the night has come.
Fasten up your earthly burdens,
You have just begun.
– Indigo Girls

That pleases me also, because I have no idea what it means, but it sounds neat.

I like to be able to think of the world as a deep and complex place, with lots of secrets and interesting things I haven’t seen yet, where the lit-up parts that I understand and inhabit are a nice small-and-secure corner from which one could venture out.

Songs sung in unknown tongues…

Be kind to me or treat me mean
I’ll make the most of it
I’m an extraordinary machine

Heard that on the radio yesterday (yesterday?), and liked it. Seems to be an original Fiona Apple; my main mental impression of Fiona Apple is that she is too thin. Maybe I should listen to some of her music! I wonder who else has covered this ditty.

What Do They Want?

Here is a This Modern World on the subject. (Apologies for any Daily Kos popovers or anything.)

My sympathies are to a large degree with the Occupy Wall Street (and Things In General) protestors (protesters?). As are even some folks at Fox, which gives me a warm feeling. I think.

So what is economic justice, in this context? I can think of a few examples that one might work for. I’m not sure whether or not I favor them all / each of them in any particular sense.

• Tax income from capital gains just like any other income. For: why favor rich people (who get lots of capital gains income), after all? Con: if we don’t favor rich people, they might take their ball and go home.
• Let the Bush tax cuts expire like they were written to. Gets rid of most of the projected federal deficit with one blow.
• Regulate the shadow banking system about like we regulate the normal banking system. ’cause now we know that otherwise they go crazy.
• Bring back Glass-Steagall since on the whole it appears to have been a good idea after all.
• Announce that the U. S. Government will no longer be bailing out failed financial institutions beyond what’s in the FDIC and so on. “Moral hazard” ain’t just a theory anymore, eh?
• Stop lopsidedly favoring investment over savings in Federal economic policies. Savers are people, too.
• Regulate corporations. I know, kind of general. But as the very interesting The Conservative Nanny State points out (free pdf available), being able to create this fictional construct to shield yourself from liabilities is a huge benefit; government has a perfect right to require a certain amount of good behavior in exchange.
• Aggressively prosecute and convict (and get some of the billions back from) the people who ruined the world economy to enrich themselves. Seems like a no-brainer, but apparently not everyone is on board, even with prosecuting the most blatant and obvious parts of it, like fraudulent mortgage foreclosures.
• Remove those administration officials with the most obvious conflicts of interest. The argument that only these people have the skills to clean up the mess is unconvincing; the only skills we know they have are to make the mess in the first place, and to enrich themselves and their friends and firms. Get rid of ‘em.

Seems like a nice start. Hello, White House and Congress and all? You there?

Let’s see, what else we got?

Two postings on how the “SCADA” systems that control things like air traffic and the electrical grid are really not all that mega-secure after all, and in fact are probably not any more secure than one might expect. Which is a little worrying.

High-Performance Computing at the National Security Agency, not a book title one would necessarily have expected to find on the open Web. :)

The Best Thread in the History of the Internet; and I think they have a plausible case to make for the title.

Fleepgrid, a fun example of someone’s personal desktop virtual world that they’ve made available to everyone, just because why not?

I’ve been playing Glitch, which is kind of fun in a silly and amusing and relaxing way. I think I have like three invitations; tell me if you want one! I’m Orbst.

(Glitch has gotten some very positive press lately, which is notable. I have no idea how long I’ll keep playing in it; I think (sort of like WoW and utterly unlike Second Life) it will have alot to do with what the developers do to move the story that we’re all living in along in interesting ways.)

And I’ve been playing lots of Second Life, including a real clothing-acquiring spree in the last few days for some reason. (Evidence here and here and here and so on.) Perhaps decompressing after releasing my second major Serendipitous Exploration product in SL, which was great fun. (Sales are light so far, but I’m sure it will bring me worldwide fame and wealth soon!)

Otherwise, things are good in general. Missing Dad (and Mom for that matter) in wistful but nontraumatic ways, hoping that they are doing interesting things in whatever one does after one is done doing this. Loving the coming of Autumn, vaguely regretting that I can’t smell it (but not enough to go back to ENTs and talk about nose operations and stuff). Wondering about how one chooses an evaluation function (the answer being that ultimately one doesn’t, more or less inevitably, but then what?).

And writing in my weblog! Woot! :)

Griftopia

So I said the other day that my libertarianness was slipping because of undesirable things that can happen even in a libertarian system with everyone obeying the (comparatively few) laws.

And that may still be true (something for another post), but at the moment I’ve decided that it isn’t relevant to what’s currently going on. I’m reading Matt Taibbi’s Griftopia, and he’s convinced me that what’s currently happening is mostly people getting vast sums of money through blatantly illegal actions, and then using a small fraction of those vast sums to avoid any sort of punishment for their crimes.

(And then using the less savvy parts of the Republican voter base, rebranded as the Tea Party, to create a huge noisy distraction around the premise that our problems are caused by giving poor people food stamps.)

There’s also an element of “getting vast sums of money from the government that you in no way deserve”, where a libertarian can say that, well, the government shouldn’t be structured in such a way that it can give anyone that much money, and that’s probably right.

But the general observation that if you steal enough money, quickly enough, you can then use some of it to deploy resources to avoid punishment (and even avoid capture, prosecution, indictment, discovery), probably applies to any society with anything like money in it.

How do we prevent this kind of crap? I think the need to prevent it (or at least minimize it) is one argument against the sort of libertarian minimal state. If the state is that minimal and simple, it’s not going to be able to defend itself against a really well-heeled miscreant, who can employ his stolen resources to baffle and evade the comparatively small and simple state.

Or as Taibbbi says in the book, talking specifically about Ayn Rand’s libertarianism:

Obviously it’s true that a Randian self-made millionaire can spend money on private guards to protect his mansion from B-and-E artists. But exactly where do the rest of us look in the Yellow Pages to hire private protection against insider trading? Against price-fixing in the corn and gasoline markets? Is each individual family supposed to hire Pinkertons to keep the local factory from dumping dioxin in the county reservoir?

We can tell lots of stories here about voluntary associations of private people getting together to hire some really good Pinkertons, but it’s not at all clear, given that even a non-libertarian nation-sized government has a hard time marshaling enough resources to do this sort of thing, that these voluntary associations could actually have enough clout to prevail against, or even sufficiently deter, people with the amount of money that this sort of crime can produce.

In some sense “criminals who make so much money that they can use it to escape detection and identification and prosecution” are an edge-case. But edge-cases can be ignored only if you’re sitting in your armchair opining about how much better a minimal government would be. In the real world, if there’s some edge-case that someone can use to get rich, it’s got to be at the center of our attention, however peripheral it is seen from the armchair.

Anyone else read Griftopia? Any nice comforting debunkings of it you can point us at?