Week 32

Fox News

[About the Cincinnati cop shooting and killing an unarmed black man] Cops wouldn't make "bad decisions" if "the perp didn't run away" [..] Just comply.

Hah

The problem is even if a brother doesn't (cannot) run, he might get choked to death (i.e. Eric Garner death in New York). So stay, get choked to death, run, get shot. The "perp" in Cincinnati must have thought he is better off running. You can't fault a black man trying to maximize his chances for survival.

Question

Jeremy Rifkin, The Zero-Marginal Cost Society

Between 2008 and 2012, while the Great Recession was bleeding workers, industry was piling on new software and innovations to boost productivity and keep profitable with smaller payrolls. The effect of these efforts is striking. Mark J. Perry, a University of Michigan economics professor and visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C., ran the numbers. By the end of 2012, according to Perry, the U.S. economy had made a complete recovery from the 2007–2009 recession, with a gross domestic output of 13.6 trillion (in 2005 dollars). That was 2.2 percent higher, or 290 billion dollars more real output, than in 2007, just before the recession, when the GDP was at $13.32 trillion. Perry observes that, while real output was 2.2 percent above the recession level in 2007, industry churned out the increase in goods and services with only 142.4 million workers in 2012—or 3.84 million fewer workers than in 2007. Perry’s conclusion: “The Great Recession stimulated huge productivity and efficiency gains as companies shed marginal workers and learned how to do ‘more with less (fewer workers).

So productivity has been increasing

Otherwise employers would not be able to do more with less. Another proof: Employee participation (the opposite of unemployment) is on the down trend, at the same time, there is annual GDP growth (quick note: 2% growth year-by-year means exponential growth, 2% of a big pie is much bigger than 2% of a smaller pie). More can be done. Outsourcing to China has slowed down to switch to automation. I favor full-automation, hoping employers create conditions where they are shedding jobs en masse causing wide-spread joblessness. This is a good thing.

Question

Why are you against industrial production?

I am not

There was agricultural production during 2nd Wave, and there is / will be industrial production during the 3r Wave. But industrialization will lose its ability to dictate how people live / work / get educated / get healthcare, etc, because most will not be participating in smokestack production. We are not assembly line workers anymore, even though the system thinks that we are.

Everyone is talking about debt, citing huge nominal figures that strongly affect public-policy debates worldwide. But all debt is not created equal.

For starters, when it comes to public debt, there is a big difference between the gross and net figures. While Japan’s gross public debt, for example, is a massive 246% of GDP, the net figure, accounting for intra-government debts, is 127% of GDP.

Moreover, what should really matter about a country’s public-debt burden is the expected annual cost of servicing it. As Daniel Gros recently pointed out, debt that can be rolled over indefinitely at zero interest rates is no debt at all. This is an extreme example; but the closer a fixed interest rate gets to zero, and the longer the maturity becomes, the lower the burden of the stock of debt.

Although Greece’s public debt amounts to about 175% of GDP, low interest rates – which are fixed for a large proportion of it – and long maturities mean that it may be more manageable than it seems. Greece’s ratio of public-debt service to GDP is similar to that of Portugal, or even Italy. Indeed, that is why the latest deal with Greece, which entails even more bailout funds, could work [..]

Good

Question

Alvin Toffler talks about social innovation here. What are some other examples?

Here is one

There is a bar here in Berlin called Jager Bar; every other Sunday they organize a Jam Night for amateur musicians. They have all instruments for a band ready on a stage, and they prepare a list of songs, usually famous ones that a lot of people know how to play. Anyone can go to this list put their name for the instrument of that song if they know how to play it, i.e. I write mine for the drum part of YYZ by Rush someone else might go for the guitar part of Black Velvet, whatever. Once a song completes its "instrument list" the ppl who signed up for that song go on stage and play it.

This is a social innovation. The bar makes money by selling drinks to musicians while they are waiting, watching others, etc.  Usually their friends come in too, so it is a packed night (not bad for a Sunday). And this social innovation requires nothing more than a bloody pen and paper.

Bunch of Articles 

[Paraphrasing] Malaysia's Malay policy is failing [..] Lebanon's government is dysfuctional [..] Aung San Suu Kyi is authoritarian [..] Syria is f**ked.

Absence of a Dictator or Presence of Elections Does Not Equal Large W

All of the problems above could be fixed with the two-party-system-with-quotas approach we mentioned before. In Burma instead of a lightning-rod activist like Suu Kyi to have "another" party, you create two (without Suu Kyi in either one, less flash the better) - so the existing regime is not pit against the rest. 

In Lebanon the heartland of "sectarianism": each of the two parties would be forced to have, by law, 50% men, 50 women% of which 40% are Christian 60% Muslim members of which 30% must be Sunni and 30% Shite. Boom, as they say. The "distribution rule" can be implemented at various levels, but the end-result must be that each party, after the election, ends up with members in parliament exactly reflecting the allocation listed above.  Then, party A with that distribution gets elected, stays in there a while.. then time goes on, popularity starts to wane because the electorate is similar all around the world in that sense, they get tired of the party in power, then maybe there is an economic crisis (there is always a crisis), so they get the fuck out. Great! In their place, party B comes in with exactly same allocation.  No minority or majority "loses power", but power changes hands, more competition means better service.

Malaysia; the majority, Malays, will have the majority in both parties. However minorities can play the deciding factor in an election because they are inside each party who are otherwise very similar to eachother, so the minority's vote will be courted. Whichever minority favors one party in one election would reap the benefits after the election, perhaps at regional level first; "Chinese from Kuala Lumpur voted for us, let's give them little somethin somethin". 

Syria? The ultimate secterian hell hole? Obviously Sunnis will come to power, or be the major portion of either of the two parties, just like Shites are in Iraq - and the Russian rulers will have to swallow that whopper no matter what the consequences. But within two-party system minorities cannot be opressed anyway because they everyone has a say in one form or another. 

This system is a starting point obviously - as time goes on, some or all restrictions could be lifted. It is the best that is possible within the confines of a mass-election system. 

It is critical the system is based on party / parliament level, and the role of a President is minimal. President, as a single person, can become the single-point-of-failure (parliaments can influence their prime minister more efficiently), plus the campaigning around these people have a way of turning into these spinning-monkey shows where candidates are spewing inane vomit left and right talking bunch of non-sense (sorta like the Republican primary right now). The ultimate goal of our proposed system is to distribute the risk, rewards, be functional in any country with any ethnic / religious make-up and the volume gets TURNED DOWN.

HuffPost

The Chinese talk of Pakistan as an "all-weather friend," reflecting exactly how Pakistanis see them as well. The Chinese in private will go through the list of other close allies and point to their flaws: the North Koreans are seen as erratic, the "crazy younger brother," a scholar at a dinner remarked; Burma or Myanmar has let them down and they can never fully rely on Iran, according to another scholar, as it appears "too keen to be seduced by the U.S.That leaves Pakistan -- and Pakistan alone, in spite of its alliances with Western nations, has stood by China through thick and thin. China has reciprocated with a mixture of emotion and real politik -- it has just signed its biggest defense deal ever according to analysts, which gives Pakistan eight first-class submarines. It is a strange and unlikely love affair.

Interesting

Did not know the relationship was that cozy. Pakis would need a big ally against their arch-rival India, and China would fit that description, for the simple reason them being not India, but the relationship having been that far developed.. It's nice actually. Everyone needs allies - the more the marrier.

News

After four Marines and a sailor were killed by a lone gunman last week, armed civilians have volunteered to stand guard at military recruiting stations around the country — but troops are being warned to keep their distance and alert law enforcement of their presence.

Dude, go home

And don't show up dressed as Batman either.

Jeez.

Comment

American fire-fighters [are] almost eight times more likely to die on the job than other first world firemen.

Not surprising

This Hero Complex issue is related to this post - US culture is based on the necessities arising from a small population inhabiting a large amount space. Even US cultural tug-of-war between prohibition / freedom (letting it happen, letting go) has to do with this - during the containment phase you are holding your ground, building in one place, but there is this huge other space that needs to be populated, then you need to "let it rip" to "make that jump". Heroes, as a concept, are required for the second phase, for hero is the dude who dives right in. The society needs -or needed-, them especially when the country was small. But now, as US becomes more urban, everyone is living in (relatively) close quarters in cities, does the society need some nut dressed as Batman running around trying to save people? Admittedly some good things did come out of the US's early inception dynamic (cultures aren't entirely stupid, like a broken clock, they can show the right time twice a day), such as the pragmatic approach to and even fascination with technology (Einstein noticed this relationship as well, he talks about it in The World As I See It.) - that's good. But some the other stuff needs to go. Pronto.

Question

How do you get your news?

RSS

This quaint little tech from the 90s.. is still around, and is used for feeds. Anyway - at first I used Google News, along with its app, but the app does not give details offline (offline is the new online duuude). Then I started using an RSS reader app called ... RSS Reader, and subscribed to theguardian, google news, bbc, reuters, huffpost, washingtonpost etc.

Related:

The Culture Code

Stuff White People Like

WikiLeaks has crowdsourced a bounty of €100,000 to be paid out to anyone who can get them a copy of the secret Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. I'm not sure which is craziest here: That a modern western democracy could negotiate a trade deal in secret and keep it classified; that a news organization could offer a bounty for its contents; or that the bounty could be crowdsourced [..]

It is all crazy

News

[Chinese] users rattle off a list of symptoms, such as achy joints, red eyes and a cough, and the Chinese search giant sends an immediate diagnostic suggestion (flu, 75% odds). Then, it links users to a nearby medical specialist.  A majority of Chinese online turn to the Web first for health information, and voice search is far less cumbersome than text, Wei said.

“From a patient’s point of view, you’d rather have something like natural language — something you can talk to, [so] you can describe multiple symptoms at the same time,” he told Re/code. “Our long term goal is to build a medical robot.”

Awesome

Commenter

Single payer healthcare system will slow-down the innovation in pharmaceutical drugs

Bollocks

Drug research can be funded like any other branch of science, through government, or through start-ups with interesting & marketable ideas. As it stands current system is doing its best to destroy medical research through legislative abominations such as Bayh-Dole.

FT

[For Mason] Wikipedia epitomises a potentially brave new postcapitalist world.[..] Some readers may scoff at this. [..] But even if you love the current capitalist system, it would be a mistake to ignore the book. For Mason weaves together varied intellectual threads to produce a fascinating set of ideas. At times, the text is unnervingly dense; Mason has done extensive research. But the thesis about “postcapitalism” deserves a wide readership among right and left alike.

His starting point is an assertion that the current technological revolution has at least three big implications for modern economies. First, “information technology has reduced the need for work” — or, more accurately, for all humans to be workers. For automation is now replacing jobs at a startling speed; indeed, a 2013 report by the Oxford Martin school estimated that half the jobs in the US are at high risk of vanishing within a decade or two.

The second key point about the IT revolution, Mason argues, is that “information goods are corroding the market’s ability to form prices correctly”. For the key point about cyber-information is that it can be replicated endlessly, for free; there is no constraint on how many times we can copy and paste a Wikipedia page. “Until we had shareable information goods, the basic law of economics was that everything is scarce. Supply and demand assumes scarcity. Now certain goods are not scarce, they are abundant.”

But third, “goods, services and organisations are appearing that no longer respond to the dictates of the market and the managerial hierarchy”. More specifically, people are collaborating in a manner that does not always make sense to traditional economists, who are used to assuming that humans act in self-interest and price things according to supply and demand. “The biggest information product in the world — Wikipedia — is made by 27,000 volunteers, for free,” he observes. “If it were run as a commercial site, Wikipedia’s revenue could be $2.8bn a year. Yet Wikipedia makes no profit. And in doing so it makes it almost impossible for anybody else to make a profit in the same space.” [..]

Instead, Mason thinks that it is time to recognise that technology has turned us all into individualists — but connected us by networks in unusually powerful ways. And he wants to use the power of millions of individuals to build a more equal and just world that is no longer dominated by a “neoliberalism [that] is the doctrine of uncontrolled markets”. More specifically, Mason thinks — or hopes — that a postcapitalist world is a place where only part of the population will work for cash, on a quasi-voluntary basis; the rest will be pursuing non-monetary goals. He wants governments to provide a guaranteed income for the entire population and free (or low-cost) basic services and public infrastructure. He also wants companies to automate as many processes as they can (rather than relying on cheap labour) and central bankers to conduct financial repression to reduce national debt.

Mason’s vision for the future, in other words, is a world where the government provides the framework to enable individuals to flourish but state functions are handed over to citizens. It is a place where people are secure — and equal — enough to use the efficiencies unleashed by automation to pursue worthy goals, such as volunteering to write Wikipedia pages. [..]

[But Mason does not] address the issue that tends to preoccupy many unions and leftwing groups today, namely the fact that technology is currently turning many workers into the equivalent of insecure digital sharecroppers, rather than collaborative creative spirits. Just look at the current fights around Uber, and the lack of security for workers there.

You missed the point entirely

If you have guaranteed income, you would not be an "insecure digital sharecropper" - you would work on things that are important to you, and once in a while one of those passions can make good money, making you rich.

In terms of terminology - I prefer calling the new system postindustrial free market system.

As the U.S. flag was raised at America's embassy in Havana for the first time in 54 years, John Kerry called for a "genuine democracy" in Cuba and his comments were broadcast across the country in full, translated accurately into Spanish so everyone could understand.

Cubans should be free to choose their own leaders, Kerry said, telling the government to respect international norms of human rights.

Cuba's government hit back by criticizing the United States' own record on rights, but it did let its people hear Kerry.

Cool

Reestablishing relations with Cuba: great.

Are there any other pariah states left? How about North Korea? Can't the Chinese take care of these f--kers?

News

Google is to delay the trial of its modular smartphone until next year at the earliest as its development proved more complicated than had been expected.

Project Ara aims to build a mobile device with numerous removable components, which would allow users to change multiple parts including the screen, battery and memory.

Darn

Cannot wait to see what these guys will produce.

Sooo is Ara under Alphabet? How about Cloud services?

News

Alphabet likely won't absorb Google Cloud Platform, Compute Engine

Aha

So IT'ish stuff remain under the big G.

Last night's debate sent Fox News'  ratings through the roof

They managed the debate surprisingly well

They asked some hard questions, it was well managed overall. Someone I know wanted to create a drinking game around the debates - here's an idea: you drink when u hear the 'R' word: Ronald Reagan.

The candidates.. they all suck. There is only one guy even worthy of mention, but I won't name any names. A hint? It's not the paisan, it's not Trump, and it sure as f**k ain't Bush. Which means any of those three would be great for Hillary. Those three guys: I support you. I'm behind you 110 percent. Go for it.

But in a 3W world, power-law looms large, temporary monopoly is the norm. Then why bother two-party-with-quotas approach?

Parties do not live in the 3W

Mass-election systems are by definition second-wave artifacts, so they need to be regulated like canned beans. Just like the 1982 break-up of AT&T was necessary because it was hindering competition, party system needs to be structured in the developing world so there is more competition. Noone gives a shit about Skype having the lead today, but there was a time when the monopoly of AT&T mattered. It was part of that world. Sure the new and improved system (whatever it may be) might not need any of this, but developing democracies, or countries without any sane representation need something working, today.

Even Westerners themselves do not completely understand this - or what makes their own system tick. After all, The Logic of Political Survival came out on 2003 (the year of Iraq invasion, oddly enough) that clearly tries to explain how the system works and why. "Have bunch of parties, have elections" is the usual advice but as we all know this doesn't work everywhere, all the time . Parties and elections are only one part of the system.

In the developed world The Integrators do their job well-enough. The system is tuned constantly so the public's mood gets reflected better in governance. Who are "they", these Integrators you ask.. They are the people who prefer "grand coalition" in Germany for example, and guess what, they get their grand coalition. That's how it's done. Or it's that guy who whispers into Gordon Brown's ear that after the election he lost even though he could arithmetically, attempt to form a coalition, "it will result in political crisis if you try". Guess what? Brown gives up the idea. It is that guy / those people who decide a black US President could be a idea after Dubya.

In the absence of these people, stability needs to be forced by law. The developing world does not have the time to go through insane ups and downs that even the West went through at times, such chaos will not bode well for anyone, it will cause refugee crisis' for starters as we witness right now, effecting everyone negatively.

Musicians, writers, and other creative folk are still scratching their heads over the cover story in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine: “The New Making It” — packaged online as “The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t” — looked at how the Internet economy, instead of destroying creative careers, had redrawn them in “complicated and unexpected ways.”[..]

Some of the statistical stuff is wonky and hard to explain succinctly. But one of the key objections comes from Johnson’s claim that more people are making their livings as musicians. But since the statistical categories were changed midstream to accommodate school teachers, the early numbers and the later numbers become an apples-to-oranges comparison: the numbers of working musicians, it appears, is not going up but down.

All Models Are Wrong, Some Suck

Bruce B. de Mesquita

If Hillary Clinton was nominated by the Democrat Party for 2008, she would have been elected as President.

True

The Abramovitz model agrees: Republicans were going to lose 2008 no matter what. That means Democrats could have nominated a tree trunk for 2008, and that would have been the next President of the United States. No offense to Hillary, she would have been great prez, but that's what happened.  

Comment

Democracy is a luxury, can only work in rich societies, it is not a necessity.

Most likely untrue

In The Logic of Political Survival BBM makes the opposite case where he uses the winning coalition W as a measure of better governance. According to this research increases in W effect GDP growth positively. Here is the causation part - the book calculates increase in W based as difference between W of two years ago and calculates its relation between the current year's growth.

I was able to replicate his results (see the notebook from the previous link). [geek] the only part I am not too crazy about is R^2 being too low, but the model overall is significant [/geek]. Change in W's coefficient is at 1.8, this means going from lowest to highest W adds over 1% to GDP growth. Blimey. The effect does not necessarily go the other way; that avenue is explored in the book as well.

Question

Why is the situation described here by Fukuyama not cool? He said "[Nigeria is] divided into more than 250 ethnic and religious communities that do not want to work with one another. Their ties are instead vertical, to clientelistic networks controlled by the elites, who dole out just enough patronage and subsidies to mobilize support at the next election".

Vertical divisions decrease W

Let's imagine country Z has 9 ethnic minorities with near equal members. Each has its own party, blacks, whites, Asians, Hispanics, so forth.. Every black votes for the Black Party, Hispanics for the Hispanic Party, etc and after the election, 5 out of 9 parties form a coalition. Sadly in this case the winning coalition can only revolve around whoever is deciding the leaders of the parties - because people, by sticking to their own party, are not making a choice here, really. Then, we have low W, low W means low growth.

A brief seque here: I'd like to expound on the previous two-party idea we mentioned before. Let's say the Chinese wanted to go multi-party. Their leaders are tired of this dictator bullshit, they don't want to party like it's 1899. Here's how to do it.. In 6 easy steps! Call now! Kidding. But here are are the steps: shut down the Communist Party (it had a really effin  stupid name anyway given that China today is anything but Communist), create two new parties, distribute the old geezers among both. Have quotas for each minority in each party exactly mirroring their percentages in the greater population. Then maybe have a symbolic president who has some amount of power, whatever.. Then have an election with these two parties. Boom. Then watch the money flowin'

♩ ♪ ♫ Of Gucci and Prada I gotta lotta  ♬

♫ Got a Mac 10 and some Pina Colada ♫

♩ ♪ Drinkin, countin the green, chillin with my man Benjamin ♩ ♪

♩ ♪ Drivin by lookin chill, this brother's all fly ♩ ♪

I even wrote the song for it. C'mon

In June, a father of six was shot dead on a Monday afternoon in Evanston, Ill., a suburb 10 miles north of Chicago. [..] With a killer on the loose and few leads at their disposal, investigators in Cook County, which includes Evanston, were encouraged when they found two smartphones alongside the body of the deceased: an iPhone 6 running on Apple’s iOS 8 operating system, and a Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge running on Google’s Android operating system. Both devices were passcode protected.

An Illinois state judge issued a warrant ordering Apple and Google to unlock the phones and share with authorities any data therein that could potentially solve the murder. Apple and Google replied, in essence, that they could not — because they did not know the user’s passcode.

The homicide remains unsolved. The killer remains at large.  Until very recently, this situation would not have occurred.  Last September, Apple and Google, whose operating systems are used in 96 percent of smartphones worldwide, announced that they had re-engineered their software with “full-disk” encryption, and could no longer unlock their own products as a result.

We cannot peek into people's minds either

.. or make cows fly. There will be limits to anything we do, and we must err on the side of privacy.  If Snowden revelations proved anything, it is the necessity for wide-spread protection against a rogue state, and I don't just mean North Korea. We also need to accept tech as part of us / appendages which should not be subject to the whims of bureucrats. "I want your see inside your head, gimme your head". What are you - ISIS? Buzz off. 

I believe lefties are getting lost in the wilderness here, replacing their nanny-state love with an imagined nanny-big-company who they think will take care of their every need - indirectly. Tech companies are in the business of making money (thank god) and out-of-control branches of gov messing shit up worldwide is causing loss of credibility for them. Instead of pointing the finger to this rampant decaying cold-war infrastructure, it seems big tech companies are put on the spot as an easy target. 

Question 

Why is Putin still in power?

Supposedly he tried to hand over the reins

As a High Horse I'd like to think he would have at least tried to empower others; according to this article he tried, with Medvvvvedev, he failed - siloviki, civiliki, all that. But as things stands now, his legitimacy being called into question, there is this huge apparatus around him which is there only to intimidate others, keep them out of power and themselves in; Kasparov said he could not even rent office space in Moscow, everyone was too scared to be involved with him, in any kind of opposition.

I said "an HH would have tried", bcz another HH I looked closely, Kemal A. of Turkland for example, did try. It is widely known near his death he was somewhat sad that he'd probably go down history as a two-bit dictator, he was very concious of this part of his legacy. He and people around him gave democracy a try, Kemal asked one of his friends to start a second party but the interest in this other party was so intense the newly minted Integrators got scared. "The friend" wasn't even had to be asked to give up his party, he shut it down himself. 

Now, knowing what we know through the Time for Change model, it is clear these people's view of democracy was extremely naive. The whole point of the democratic exercise is, through a few rough measurements, that parties regularly get the fuck out. No one stays too long / can stay too long which is a good thing. GDP growth down, stayed in office too long, popularity waning, you are outa there. The leader could be Churchill, who won a frickin World War, the electorate does not care. Bye bye. What Kemal should have done was to actually shut down his own party, create two parties out of it,  distribute all "the friends" equally among them, and go to the election (and still stay as the president, with limited powers). That way there is no stampede to any one party, and after a while people can start to go back and forth between these two parties. At first placing a hard-limit on the # of parties to two can be a wise choice. As long as "the winning coalition" is as large as possible, people vote, and their votes count, things are a-ok.

Until there is a true 3W way of governance that is.

Hillary Clinton

The Arctic is a unique treasure. Given what we know, it's not worth the risk of drilling.

Exactly

IMHO drilling in the arctic is government-sponsored terrorism. 

Question

Adam and Eve story in religious texts is such bull. How can everyone be descended from two people?

Scientists would disagree with you

Jeremy Rifkin's excellent video on the subject is here. 

https://youtu.be/l7AWnfFRc7g?t=524