FX VA

Photo-Voyeurism

2011-05-06T00:35:00.006-04:00

I did not feel compelled to comment upon the demise of Osama Bin Ladin. What is worthy of comment, in some small way, is the "conversation" over the alleged images of the body. I say "alleged," simply because there appear to be some who believe that these images do not exist, because "the US just made it up."

Some claim we need proof, for some sort of catharsis. What I sense is that most of these people just want to see dead people. Killed dead people. Like small boys at play they taunt; "if you really have a frog/gun/girlie magazine, you have to show it to us." Mr. Obama, arms crossed, says "Not gonna." Wise man.

I understand what these photo-voyeurs want. Every time there is an accident on the road I am travelling, I see it. The news folks call them "rubber-neckers." The road is clear in all lanes, but they stay at 15mph, hoping to see a splat of blood, dismembered limbs, a Body.

What is strange is their fascination AND the probability that they will be disappointed. Over the years, we've seen plenty of pictures of "real" dead people, and plenty of Hollywood corpses on NCIS and the various "CSI:YourTown." Fact is, real dead people look fake, while Hollywood dead people "Look so Dead, They Could Be Live!" Talk about a jaded populace. Life imitates Art.

For those who think the US just made up the story, I am therefore quite confident that the technology exists to give us a wide selection of photos of a "dead" Mr. Bin Ladin, with or without bullet holes. With the body gone and nothing left but stains on the floor, someone is going to have to work hard to prove who was the "victim" of the raid in Abbottabad.

Enter the Green (r)Evolution, Phase Two

2011-04-27T09:42:00.003-04:00

I think of Douglas Adams' "subsistence" theory of mankind's evolution. The first, caveman phase is "When will we (next) eat?" The second phase is characterized by "What shall we eat?" And the final phase is "Where shall we have lunch?"

We are going through a similar phase in our Green (r)Evolution. We have moved beyond totally ignoring the problem (maybe I should have used the Death progression here? Denial, anger acceptance?) and have moved into action. LCD video, windmills and solar generators, hybrid cars and flourescent/LED lighting.

We may have moved into the next phase; Mrs. FX and I actually had a mild dustup over when to run the dishwasher. We had a little disagreement over whether or not to run the dishwasher. We had used up all of the plate-and-bowl space, but only used about 50% of the top rack. I determined that it was time to run it, but not without doing a walk-thru of The Abode, seeking stranded glassware and snack plates...having done All That I Could, I got out the soap & began to prep. Mrs. FX chided me for running a not-full dishwasher, and, for a moment, I agreed with her. We have evolved to the point of doing our meal-planning around the remaining available space in the dishwasher. None of this "let's eat Vegan tonight!" for us, just "What can we make that utilizes three soupbowls and a cookie tray?"

I decided that I was not going to live vicariously through my appliances, and, by Heaven, I was going to wash, even if I had to do extra chores to get back into Grace. I'm still doing extra chores...

iPads aren't as new as you think, when you think about it

2011-04-16T16:00:00.005-04:00

The iPad revolutionizes the whole notion of techno gadgetry! Yet, when I think about it, this is another case of people catching up with technology. Touch-screen technology has been around for more than a decade, with only a few applications gaining any measureable traction. The fact of the matter is, only a few could mentally bridge the user interface. I posit that a generation of young people growing up with handheld games provided an "experienced" population that could kickstart the trend to the micro-user interface. Next, the advent of the cell phone and texting broadened the base and gave rise to innovation in trying to address those shortcomings.

One shortcoming is everyone who simply has to have a qwerty keyboard. RIM has made a niche market of those who cannot make the texty shift to 10 keys, but the market analysts show that the need for this crutch is falling off fairly rapidly. I say "good." In 20 years, we might finally be rid of the only known technological innovation specifically designed to cripple the user (the qwerty keyboard was designed to slow typists down in the days of mechanical typewriters). On the other hand, I found the onscreen keyboard too alien for blogging or any activity with a lot of input, so I bought the bluetooth keyboard, too.

Insofar as the other required technologies giving rise to the iPad; I have seen it blogged that the current generation of small, low-power devices are a direct result of the efforts put into the Open Source OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project. Lighter, cheaper battery technology, low power consumption (doesn't the OLPC have a wind-up mechanism?) and a return to not-bloated software, if that's a real phrase.

Have you noticed that the iPad is sort of the domain of the young and the old? At the office, the big users are mostly past 50, with a few younger users. If younger women have them, they're not telling, but the young men all have Droids or iPhones. Middlin' young folks from 13 to 30 are doing very well with their touch screen phones, thank you. After a fashion, they have leapfrogged the touchpad revolution and are already in the middle of The Next Big Thing. the iPad is just there so that the rest of us can catch up. I know that I am having fun with mine!

Tilting at Windmills

2011-03-06T16:09:00.005-05:00

How many laptops can dance on the head of a pin, I ask you? Back at the ranch in FX land, we have had whole tribes of young bucks thrashing the daylights out of a simple home network that has ample security laid on, with few glitches and plenty of bandwidth. A trip out to the local bookstore (a Big Name one that is not closing stores), and the bandwidth is abysmal. The network blocks streaming and most other forms of serious utilization, so I wander by the 7 people that are online to see who is downloading the entire 50GB+ Microsoft patch library, and all are just doing the email thing. Another half-dozen are chatting like mad on the iPhone, but that's texting, and no great demand.

There has to be a reason for this, but the economics of crappy public wireless are beyond me. I come to the bookstore to browse the books, Have a $4 cup of coffee, and connect to the internet, in an environment that has people to stimulate the intellect, and generally hang out. I need to write a letter, I suppose. "Dear Sir/Madam; what is the compelling reason behind offering internet connectivity at your store that is so slow, the obligatory bookstore page takes 5 minutes to load?"

OK, they are booksellers, not techno-pundits. Nevertheless, they are a mere step below librarians, who, as all who read more than traffic signs and menus are aware, know where to find anything. This means that they should know how to adopt technologies which at a minimum, provide instant access to the bookstore website.

It is possible that they were early adopters, back when most folks were connected by modem, and they entered into a zillion-year contract with AT&T for a 56kb link. So, they are stuck with this, and cannot think about the possibility that, for $80 per month, massive additional service is available from the local telcos & cable providers. As long as I am making excuses for them, it is also possible that they are "stuck" via the landlord. My favorite do-it-yourself computer store (now deceased) had to share a 56K circuit with 10-15 other stores and could not, apparently, negotiate with the telcos & cable folks for a better deal. However, one would think that a national bookseller chain would have slightly more influence than a simple shopkeeper.

Health Care Needs Some Reform

2010-05-15T00:19:00.007-04:00

Here's a joke. Maybe Woody Allen wrote it... I got it from Thos. Cathcart & Dan Klein's "Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar..."

A painter goes to the gallery where his work is showing. He asks the curator how business is for his paintings...
Curator: "Well, I have Good news and bad news. A man came in and asked me if you were a painter whose work would become more valuable after your death, and I told him I thought so. He bought everything of yours in the gallery."
Painter: "That's terrific! What's the bad news?"
Curator: "He was your doctor."

Funny "ha-ha," or funny "hmmm...?" The comedian, whoever it was, knew the real score. The health care industry makes money off of the sick, not the healthy. I'm not saying it's anybody's fault, it's just how it is. Like the Green Movement, Health Care Reform’s success may depend upon how we change our point of view, and what we reward.

On March 23, the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act," or, P-PACA, became law. Rolling behind us like a giant ball in a tomb raider movie, will we escape or be smooshed? We all would like to know what our options are going to be.

The Economics of Health Care is weird. It's tangled up like spaghetti, and there are exceptions to everything, which is probably why Congress got involved in the first place.

We look at Health in a weird way. We call it "Health Care," but it's really "Sick Care." At the core of the problem may be the fact that we don’t measure health, we measure sickness. Let’s look at three strange features of Sick Care in America:

It’s insurance!
The healthcare industry makes no money on "health"
There is no profit in CURES

It's Insurance!
Actually two things are going on here. One is how they measure risk, the other is how they pay on claims. Insurance actuaries are mathematicians who measure the probability that the insurance company will have to pay. They work from morbidity and mortality data, like "deaths per 1000 pop." They do not have “healthy” facts, so insurance measures sickness rather than health. Therefore, they pay for sickness rather than health. Clear as mud?

Now, insurance works sort of like a lottery, when you think about it. Everybody puts their money in. The Lottery Commission and the lottery operator take their profit, and a lucky few get what's left. Sort of. (The weird thing about health insurance is that most folks don't really want to get their money's worth out of it. ) Because we all eventually need medical care as we get older, it needs to function as a kind of savings plan, where you pile up money for that day when it rains on your parade. If we were all Vikings, and folks were dying right and left without the opportunity to "use" their portion of health care, insurance might be an appropriate vehicle to fund this. But, market forces seem to befuddle this plan.

So, what's the problem? IMHO, “Excess cash." The problem starts because you have all that money lying around. Folks start looking for ways to get some of it.

[Imagine 2000 words of boring economic fact and fiction have been deleted right here.]

Health care practitioners (some of them are doctors) make claims to insurance companies for whatever they have done for (to) their customers (some of them are patients). Insurance companies have people who review their reports/requests and find reasons why they should not get all they are asking for. Things like "telling Mrs. Smith to take two aspirin and call you in the morning are not reflective of eight years of college and five years of Residency, Dr. Brown. You did not actually treat her. You may have $23.50 instead of the $82.99 you are requesting."

Basically, money and effort flows to things that are allowed to be called Sick Care and tap into those piles of cash. Market forces figure out quickly what pays and what does not. Doctors submit claims for payment, and certain items, like prescriptions and lab tests, are nearly automatic “proof” that the doctor did something and will get paid the largest covered amount.

Lab Tests are covered, and they “support” claims. So, we have incentives for more and fancier tests. Studies claim that half are not needed. Which ones? YOUR half, not MY half! The doctor has a covered appointment with you to discuss the results. Prescriptions medicines have similar forces. You can make up the details, I've got you paranoid enough, haven't I?

Certain procedures get money, and others don't. C-sections are said to be "an epidemic." One 80-year old man can't get continuing treatment for Lyme disease, but another gets an all-expenses paid open heart surgery. And how about those ads on TV for the motorised chairs? I won't even have to do the paperwork to get one!

There is no money in "health."
This fact is so obvious we miss it. Healthy folks don't need Sick Care. There actually IS money in health, just not for the Sick Care industry. Doctors don't get a bonus if they have healthy customers. Those of you from the American Ethos, think "Maytag Repairman" here. We talk about paying teachers for student success, but we won’t pay doctors for healthy patients, or for cures. We pay them for sick patients and “treatment.”

There is no money in CURES … and not much fame, either.

For all the money the drug companies spend on research, most goes into stuff to ameliorate symptoms, NOT into cures. At least, I don't see them bragging about any cures in all their ads on TV...

Picture this: the scientist says "For $30 million, I can (a) develop the cure or; (b) develop a medicine to keep the disease from killing them for 20 years." The business analyst, ever representing the interests of the stockholders, sits down and says "we can sell 20 pills of this medicine to a patient, and (s)he never buys another. If we sell them at $20 per pill, it will be bad press, and will still only be $400. If we sell these other pills at $1 each, and they take one a day for the rest of their lives, we make $7300 over 20 years. This makes perfect sense to me. No, tell you what, make them smaller and they'll take three pills a day ..."

Folks blame racism, homophobia and religious fanatics for not curing HIV in 30 years. But it’s pure economics. We have medicines to keep HIV patients alive for 20 years at what, $20K or more per year? And they could make fifty bucks off of a cure?

We learned our lesson from Jonas Salk and the polio vaccine, you know. He displaced a massive industry with this vaccine of his. IF you use a computer, chances are slim that you are old enough to remember much of polio, it has been cured so long. But most of you have seen the photos of 100s of iron lungs. A five-dollar vaccine replaced a ten-thousand dollar machine. Workers built all of those things, people had to operate and repair them, and nurses went about doing nurse things. Somehow the pictures of all of them empty looked sadder than the pictures of all of them full.

MY pet peeve is ulcers. Caused by simple bacteria (H. pylori), cured by standard antibiotics, it persisted until well into the 1980's, largely because there was a HUGE industry of antacids, psychiatry, and surgery around it, in spite of the fact that nobody actually knew what caused it. Doctors and pill manufacturers were raking it in. In classic Old Testament style, if you had ulcers, it was your own fault. In 1978, a Tagamet prescription cost $10 a day, and you could take it for life. The cure cost a TOTAL of $10 at that time. What is amazing is that it took until 1982 before researchers looked for bacteria! You "grassy knoll" sorts who are interested in class action lawsuits might suspect someone actually knew before this time.

We remember Jonas Salk, but he did not get a Nobel prize. His vaccine was not the cheapest version, the oral vaccine was. Do you recall who invented that? (Albert Sabin). He didn't get the Nobel prize either. Did you know who Marshall & Warren were, or that they got the Nobel prize for medicine in 2005? They found the ulcer bacterium. Twenty-seven years later... the list of doubtless valuable but unconvincing awards in the intervening years is mind-bogglingly dull.

Today, the funding for CURES comes from walkathons, bikeathons and road races. I am sure funding comes from other charitable giving, but I do like the HEALTH industry getting involved in generating research funding. The important point is that funding for cures comes from charitable giving, not from profit-seeking. Any "sane" profit seeking organization will not spend a dime on the cure. And that is crazy!

In short, Health Care will continue to be weird as long as the incentives are weird. For REAL "Health Care" today, you have to pay the whole bill yourself, and you are swimming in a largely unregulated shark pond of charlatans selling supplements, exercise machines and books all promising to make us more beautiful and fit without any effort. In the middle of all this are honest brokers of health, nutrition and fitness who get lumped in with all of the wackos and carnival barkers.

EPILOGUE: Perhaps keenly aware of the fact that “health” was, in fact, missing from the contents of Health Care Reform, our elected officials dedicated a very small portion of P-PACA to squarely address this by pushing the problem onto someone else. They created a committee to study the obvious and deliver a report during the next few years. Their (the commitee's) greatest challenge may be in finding ways to counterbalance the weirdness and generate some real spending towards health care instead of sick care.

We shall underwhelm in Haiti

2010-01-15T07:02:00.006-05:00

When disaster strikes, there is pain and human suffering. There are a thousand and one stories of pain, loss, miracles, rejoicing and redemption. There are a lot of people doing what they can, and even more wondering what they can do.

Then, there are those whose livelihood depends upon all of this human drama. Those who, in a nutshell, profit from disasters.

I do apologize for my cynicism. The straw that broke it loose was a single statement, probably on CNN, but just as easily in some news e-Bite on the web, that announced "we don't need a bunch of well-meaning volunteers, we need money." I read a web security report yesterday about thousands of "scam" donation sites popping up all over, within hours of the disaster. These are the easily identified 'criminals,' who must be controlled so that funds can go via 'legitimate' channels. Whatever those may be.

The massive flow of funds that will be assembled and pushed blindly in the general direction of Haiti will be "controlled" and "managed" by what will no doubt turn out to be a relatively small group of NGOs and "aid" groups. The managers and organizers will all have their teaspoons out, skimming off a portion of that flood into their own salaries, hotel expenses, cameras, and general costs of doing what they do, including building up a nest egg to tide them over to the next disaster.

The aforementioned CNN seem to have chartered their own airline to the country in order to give us 1000 minutes a day of Brave Correspondents Right On the Spot, building up a huge audience for their advertisers, who occupy the other 440 minutes. This makes us ask the eternal question "What would be on the news if Haiti were not?"

The poorest nation in the western hemisphere, lots of in-place aid projects are getting publicity previously denied them (the poor will always be with you...) simply because it was not news. Is throwing this money about going to improve the overall lot of the nation? It certainly does provide a unique business opportunity for those in a position to profit from it. I hear Mr. Clinton talking about using the money for education. Education is nice, schools will have to be rebuilt, but it might be a slightly lower priority than medical personnel, medical supplies, food and the means to distribute these goods and services. Without sufficient infrastructure, how much of this "aid" can the disaster legitimately absorb?

Hey, it is a massive undertaking; few organizations other than Boy Scouts of America and our military have real skills in providing basic resources in an unimproved infrastructure. There are countless stories from New Orleans, New York City and other modern disasters, of the bottlenecks in providing services, even of identifying services, and the staggering sums of money sitting in accounts "waiting to be spent." It is within this environment that profiteers, both intended and unintended, live on the fringes of natural disasters. I am sort of thankful that CNN remain somewhat aware of this unique connundrum, even as they rake it in from their exploitational (izzat a word?) journalism.

Me & Julie & Julia and Friends

2009-11-15T21:24:00.005-05:00

SO.... Here in FX land, we go to the college cinema and get the cheap seats, so we are well-cinema-ed for the most part, just several months late. Last week, we were quite taken by the inimitable Ms. Streep and the film "Julie and Julia." As a fellow blogger wishing to make it 'big' as a writer, I shall repeat the effort with the Second Volume...

Just kidding. However, it did stimulate the taste buds and the culinary arts in FX land, and we decided that we would have a go at some cooking with Julia.

The film must have been a boon to Alfred A. Knopf's sales (and it should, in my opinion, as they have provided me with so many hours of pleasant reading...), but Ms. Julia, in two volumes, from the 24th printing, (1973) was already in the FXVA personal library.

Our choice must have come from the movie... Le Marquis, chocolate spongecake. I remember the orange-zest from the film.

Several observations may be made from this experience, but only two really stick with me.

The svelte couple in that movie could not possibly have consumed these 542 recipies in the space of a year. I suspect that, in real life, they clocked in at 230 and 280 lbs each;
she may have been a government secretary, but they must be paying a bundle for secretaries up in NYC, because the darned cake must have cost $25 in materials alone.

In my youth, Dean & DeLuca were on the marching list, and they were not in the habit of giving away the comestibles, as Julia might have said. We attended state schools, and, in FX land & environs, the masses are expected to do their own typing.

Insofar as the cake goes. Some of the cooking staff complained about annoying makeshift double boilers and a lot of by-hand what-have-you, ad "what's wrong with the microwave?" I pointed out that this was 50's technology, we put a man on the MOON, thank your lucky stars for a ROOF over your HEAD ...

Nevertheless, a very delightful result was had. Well, I liked it, but it tasted foreign to all of the munchkins in FX Land ("Honey, can you show me where France is on the map? East of Long Island?"), and it was decided that French desserts require a full meeting of the Board prior to blowing $30 on a recipe that mixes orange with chocolate.

I utilized the endorphins from the half pound of chocolate and the associated blood sugar mania to write a blog. Now, I am going into induced insulin shock, and blogtime is over.

[Edit note:] the excess sugar may have stimulated creativity, but did little for clarity. Hopefully it is a little better now.

Are you ready for a totally new type of Gaming?

2009-11-12T20:04:00.004-05:00

Shameless promotion of commercial products time. Last spring, a tiny little company showed up at some international game software thing. Folks like Blizzard and Microsoft have erected small buildings; it's a massive show. Way off in the economic Siberia of the hall, there is this little company (according to the journalists) that has something that looks like an old Sinclair and a half-dismantled pc on a stack of old fruit crates... they have built a Better Mousetrap, and everyone is going to see this game.

The guys at the "trash heap" are showing what could be the coolest bit of technology of the Decade, designed for the Nintendo DS. The game is called ScribbleNauts. To spare the impatient with the rest of my diatribe, I have only 3 words for you:

GO
BUY
IT.

Don't own a DS? Buy one of those, too. (There. Now you don't have to read on. )

Recalling that it was going to be released in November, I popped on by my local $$$-mart and found it before the Holiday rush got rid of it. I brought it home, promised my son extra allowance to use his DS, and cut loose.

While the journalists who reviewed it were ebullient and lavish with their praise, they undersold the game, which employs quite possibly the best overall implementation of semantic web technology ever seen. Not only does the computer know about 10,000 words and objects, it actually knows what to do with them.

Game object. The game presents you with "puzzles" that you have to solve in order to win "stars," not entirely unlike Mario stars. My daughter got a cat down from the roof of a house with:

a ladder
a fireman (who went into the house, out the window, and saved the cat)
shooting water at it with a hose
she created a Roc and flew up to get it, but the Roc ATE THE KITTEN
she tried to lure it down with steak, but the lady who owned it ate the steak
she knocked it off of the roof with a football

Are you beginning to get the picture? For you tech types, it has the objects, it knows what the objects can do (you can hold a hammer, but you drive a convertible; you can ride a Roc, but you cannot ride a robin or a wren), and it lets you do whatever you can do with them, but they never wrote the story around any of the "puzzles." When you play the game, you write the stories.

For the Sci-Fi literati among you, it is the first iteration of the learning computer game that Ender Wiggins played at the Battle School.

Ages 10 - 60. For edutainment, it passes the Mom test here in FX land. Kid has to know and spell the words when she wants to 'wish' for an object to solve the problem. She needs to know that a shovel will dig dirt but it won't cut down a tree. Neither will scissors.

Are you still here? Just go and get the doggoned thing.

Less is more

2009-08-27T00:10:00.004-04:00

Through some complex course of events, I found myself flying first-class to Hawaii, and I got the sense that I wasn't really flying first class.

I'm not being too pessimistic (I hope, therefore I am), but the sense that I have to re-adjust my expectations for First Class lurks just at the edge of my vision, kind of like a mild retinal detachment problem. It doesn't hold your focus, so you can't quite define what it is...but you know something is wrong with your worldview.

I wanted to upgrade from basic sardine class to Enough Room class, but I could not find a way to Do the Deed without parting with seventy bucks. Therefore, I requested an upgrade and found myself in "First Class."

When I was younger, I simply had to fly in business or first (an affectation I eventually got over), so I can claim to know somethhing of the experience. I am pretty sure this was not the First Class (with caps) of yesteryear, merely "first class," because there were no seats further forward in the plane. I could not get up from my window seat to visit the loo without making my seatmate get up. The footrest was removed from the seat (NOT the button that purported to control it, though!), and the recline was amazingly like economy - it leaned back just short of actually being "restful." I was reminded of Douglas Adams' Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser while mentally performing an ad hoc Customer Satisfaction Survey.

This reasonably new 777 would have made the Boeing designers and employees weep, with seats that strangely resembled business class from the early 1980s, both in design and wear-and-tear. At least they weren't those blue leather seats from an early Texas (say, 1975?) casualty that I continue to see through the years. Some of those were on the previous flight.

With all of the "features" unbundled and our previous high-flying expectations dashed to the floor, perhaps we can expect airlines to begin (soon) to compete as they did back in the 60's and 70's. First, bags will be "free." Then meals will be "complementary," and first class passengers won't be crawling over each other like the riff-raff in the cattle section. Maybe then, we can start calling it First Class again.

The American Problem: When is free trade not "free?"

2009-02-01T22:28:00.009-05:00

The USA has been, for umpty zillion years, the single greatest proponent of Free Trade. Yet, under the New World Order that has been evolving, we have discovered that we are bigger losers under Free Trade than gainers. Yet, nobody wants to fiddle with this particular Nail in the cross of Capitalism. So, what happened?

Now the notion of "free" trade sort of implies that "freedom" exists on both sides of the trade fence, doesn't it? Just like "free markets" mean that everyone is free to make their own decisions about rice or wheat, wool or cotton, luxury sports cars or 6,000 square feet of housing on 5 acres.

What if one of the parties to a free trade agreement had workers with no real choice, as in southern 18th century America? People forced to make a living for subsistence wages only. People who, perhaps, did not have the right to own currency; who could not purchase and had no conceivable use for the refrigerators, barbecues, and automobile radios they built? People who had extraordinarily limited "free" choices about what they could purchase? What if they also had little say in the quality of the air they could breathe, or their water, or food, and it was systematically being poisoned all in the name of lower costs of production?

Is it right that they should suffer so that others can get cheap shirts and toasters? There's a moral question here. The theory of "Free" trade is that they will become more affluent, and everybody's wage will rise to some balance, isn't it? But perhaps, if they are not "free" in an economic sense, they cannot express their market decisions for higher income or more-and-better stuff.

Moral questions aside, what does that do to the rest of the world economy? Next, what if they produced enough stuff for the rest of the entire world to use? What sort of distortion of the economies of the other parts of the world would occur?

Well, for one thing, that sure puts a hurt on your minimum wage, doesn't it? Those workers are effectively priced out of any kind of market for their labor. Not everyone is able to get the education required to move out of that bracket - and even so, who are all of those college-educated managers going to manage, if nearly everything is made somewhere else? Is the "service" industry that big? Didn't we pretty much get rid of "servants" with our automatic dishwashers, snow blowers and whatnot?

Now, take a quick glance at the capital markets in those countries that are hopelessly undersold. What industrial investments (that employ workers) can be made? What business could be started, that would not immediately be undersold by lower cost imported knockoffs almost as soon as they found a foothold in the market? First, investments (capital) will flood to investments perceived as the next great thing, creating "bubbles." Think dot-com, here. Then, folks will start looking for investments of the mattress-stuffing variety, such as collecting valuables. The affluent will start buying more real-estate than they really need or can use, like 5 acre plots and 6,000 square foot cottages for two. As the money rushes into these markets, more bubbles form.

Pretty soon, the whole thing is just frothy with bubbles. A little more like beer than champagne, I should think.

An Economic Conundrum?

2008-12-09T22:22:00.012-05:00

Well, we might be on the brink of a depression, and, then again, we might not. What depresses me is how people are talking about some "New Economics" as if things had really changed in how numbers add up, overnight. This little bit of blather is not here to propose any radical new calisthenics, only "thinking out loud," to try and put my finger on the problem.

Perhaps everyone has that nagging sense that things aren't quite right with the current model. I saw Michael Kinsley (pushing his new book, Creative Capitalism: A Conversation with, etc.) talking about our policy being a paradoxical "spend, then save, then spend" on Charlie Rose the other night. I haven't read the book yet, so I don't have any criticism in my mind, but the economics in this book is, Michael Kinsley will be able to make some scratch when other journalists are out of work, or merely blogging for nothing (ahem...).

I don't think that Economics, in and of itself, can be "re-invented." Simply stated, economics is the flow of goods and services throughout the population/world/universe. We can measure it; we can (and do) make some rules about how goods and services can flow, and who gets what, whether bridges or hospitals or monuments to Great Statesmen are built; but these are not economics - they are politics, and power. The "economic model" that we call Capitalism is, in fact, a set of political rules on how the flow is managed. Who gets what, and when.

Most folks like to call ours a "market economy." What is a market economy? Well, it depends on what channel you are tuned to, but it appears to be one where people are free to make choices about the things they need and want. I can live in a dump and buy a BMW, or live in a mini-palace and walk. Folks (consumers) get "votes" and go out and "vote" for the stuff that they want. People who have what they want (suppliers) get "votes" for the stuff they provide. All this voting stuff is done with money.

Now, what is an example of non-market economics? You have been seeing and complaining about several good examples - war (pick one); the bank/mortgage bailout; the Big 3 automotive bailout. What characterizes these economic decisions is that they are (usually) made by a few people, with a lot of "votes" in the bank. Mostly, these are decided with tax dollars. There are more subtle non-market decisions to be made, like health care, welfare, transportation, parks, libraries, zoning regulations, environment. If Mr. Gates makes a decision to try and beat AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa and to ignore water projects in North Africa, this, too, is a non-market decision. I am not here to argue for or against them as a group, I'm just describing them.

What is actually wrong today? What is hidden, and what is visible? Where, in fact, is the problem? We seem to have enough things, enough food. There are hungry children, according to charities that help them, but we have food enough to give; no breadlines. The shelves are not empty. We are not in Dickens' England. In fact, we have plenty, and at pretty good prices. Most middle-class households might take a good look at their closets & storage bins and decide that they had too much. I definitely could lay back on the clothes buying for a few years, and the holiday accoutrements in FX-ville are crowding out of their alloted space under the stairs. If I got any new toys, I would have to stop playing with the perfectly good ones that I haven't broken. I don't have enough leisure time to own more stuff. My neighbor has rebuilt his kitchen three times over the past 10 years.

In spite of all of this, the little tickets we use to measure the market economy (money) are finding themselves, like salmon, swimming upstream against a powerful current, to get where they need to be. There is something wrong, but we are having a heck of a time figuring out precisely what it is. The government wants us to spend like mad on the one hand, but then we have to save like misers on the other. Like Michael Kinsley hinted, we seem to be being forced to have our cake and eat it, too, and we just can't do the math.

Carpooling, 1, 2, 3 ...

2008-12-05T00:46:00.004-05:00

Here in FX Land, we have been making the extra effort to be as green as green little men (and women) from Mars can be. We sent the second car off to a far-away city with #2 son, who needed it to support his hip lifestyle at school. I decided to use this as an opportunity to test the waters, so to speak, of carpooling.

Not a full-fledged thing, mind you, but a pretty good one. I carpool with a colleague three days a week. He happens to drive by my house on the way, so it's a bit one sided (remember, my car is far, far away), in that I don't really hold up my end in the driving detail, but all offers of money have been rejected. On the other two days, I drive my wife to work and continue on to my own work, and she walks home, about a mile and a half, when the weather is fine. She is getting up her nerve to walk when the weather is not so fine, but she (a) works a little longer, or shops and (b) calls me to let me know to get out early and come by and get her. We get by.

OK, the first thing about carpooling is dependence. The myriad of details of my friend's life that affect his commute - getting the kids to school, getting his wife where she needs to be, the tires and oil and brakes, the visiting relatives, the illnesses all become an addition to life. There is some waiting. There are some hurry-home early issues. Neither of us has to do this. I don't think we are making any kind of a statement (all are sinners here), but we are getting something done. Sometimes I get to working at home, and he is waiting out there in the drive. Once, I had my cell on silent, and was purty well absorbed by my work, and he had to ring the bell and then wait while I took care of chores that I had neglected (like getting dressed, shaving) before we could leave. Believe me, a well-planned morning at the office can get shot all to heck in short order.

The second thing about carpooling is, for lack of a better word, community. You end up talking to this person about all manner of things (I am interested in the dynamics of three-person carpooling, or four; purely as a social experiment). We actually have known each other for a long time, so we can put up with a lot, but I imagine some rules might be in order if we are going to get out there on Commuter-Connections-dot-com or whatever is working in your neighborhood and carpool with total strangers. The economy, the media, the election, raising kids, birth, death, sex and religion, this kind of stuff just comes up. We haven't had any days of strained silence, but it was close once or twice. This stuff is not unlike an online dating service. The mind boggles with the potential weirdness, but the fact that I think it might be weird is a sign of the times; a bad upbringing, so to speak. Umpty-years ago, folks were placed in close proximity to one another for extended periods of time and were able to be civilized about it, all the time!

Anyway, the saga is not over yet. The car, lent out only for a semester, became a buffer between a car with good brakes and a car with not-so-good brakes, and the insurance folks tell me they won't fix it. Now, this is an opportunity to make a statement isn't it?

Do we have them on the run?

2008-11-08T11:06:00.003-05:00

OK, does anyone want to hazard a guess as to why the price of fuel has been going down? Gas is now under $2 per gallon in some places, from a high above $3.60. OK, Americans, let us assume that the natural factors of us driving less is pushing the price down. If this is the case, now is NOT the time to let off and retern to "normal."

Now is the time to try and take it a notch further. Are you planning your daily trips carefully, cutting out one or two per week? Have you managed to carpool to work one day per week?

I suppose the average car mileage is about 12,000 per year in America. If you start watching the ol' odometer, and aim at 900 miles per month instead of 1000, you can begin to add up the difference.

If everybody aimed at one day per week of carpool, not specifically to save money, but to "save some gas for later," it will put even more pressure on the oil supply chain, as stockpiles grow and leftover inventories build. The suppliers are eager to buy oil when they know it can be sold, but oil is an amazingly expensive thing to keep around if you can't sell it, and frugal driving can help to push it down even further.

Now that you are saving some cash for Christmas, now is no time to blow it all on a road trip to the relatives. Look into train and bus travel on the eastern seabord and in other regions - they are supposed to use less fuel per person-mile. Who knows? Without driving, you might have a holiday that feels more like a holiday..

There is Media and then, there is Media...

2008-09-07T12:28:00.008-04:00

Someone invited me into some business networking thing, and someone else invited me into some kind of social networking wannabe, and some ol' collaboration group/mailing list popped up that would not allow me to see whatever critical info (I forget what it was) someone else needed me to have unless I signed up. All of these insisted I have a Yahoo! account.

Under the onslaught of 'requirements,' and caving in to Peer Pressure, I got a Yahoo! account. Occasionally, I have to log in, in order to deal with these...(ahem)...yahoos.

Yahoo! are just scrumming along, trying to play with the Big Kids. Who, of course, are Google and Microsoft. I have accounts at all of them. Microsoft for business reasons, Google because I use them, and Yahoo because I have friends and aquaintances who, like addicts, just can't bring themselves to drop it.

Google and Microsoft are discreet, non-invasive in their advertising. Google only talks to Microsoft, and Microsoft talks only to God (reference Boston Brahmin - in the sense that they seem to only advertise themselves).

Of course, the Google search engine is generally relevant to current action on the page - advert headers pop up with the supplier's ID and a contextual reason why I might want to click.

With Yahoo, the SPAM filters in the mail are irrelevant. OK, they seem to draw the line at Viagra and Meds, but "Loans! Credit Rating! Diet! Singles! Lots Of Singles! Click Here To Win BIG! Horny Singles in your ZipCode!" with flashing banner graphics, large-busted girls dripping with e-Hormones.

If my Yahoo searches were all 'naked adolescent females,' 'sure-fire way to win the lottery,' 'need to get out of debt,' or similar things, I could understand it. But they are not. These guys can't measure what I actually want/do/am talking about/searching for, and they can't give me relevant advertising. Weren't they the first? They don't seem to get the Internet medium yet.

Yahoo! is the "free" supermarket tabloid of the internet. They made some compromises early, and they can't seem to get out of the shallow end of the gene pool. They would like to have some class, but they live in one of those Rust Belt neighborhoods where 5th generation Europeans still don't speak English, and complain about the Hispanics. They allowed their advertisers to dictate to them, and they cannot TAKE BACK control of their business. Yahoo! advertisers, wearing cheap suits and cheap cologne, want big flashing graphics, secret pop-up windows and ads that pop up when an unsuspecting rube mouses-over on his way to the "dismiss this dismal window" button.

It could be worse, I bet. I could be using Verizon services, or be an AOL "member," both of which provide you with an already-compromised browser just to use the services that you actually pay for. Now, in my economic model, I pay for access that does not have advertising, so this is pretty alien to my thinking. Go figure.

Hey - anything for a buck, you gotta pay the bills, if we don't do it, someone else will, it's a free country.

Creeping Economics

2008-06-17T15:09:00.004-04:00

Congratulations, Americans! The best bit of news today was the notice that Americans drove 1.4 billion miles less in April 2008 than in April 2007. See the CNN Article.

The sad news is that we actually drove HOW MANY MILES!? Let me do the hidden math for you...the news article says this is a one-point-eight percent (1.8%) drop. Going back to Algebra 1, this means that - oh, forget algebra, just say 2% = approx. 1.5 billion, so 100%= 75 billion miles. At a generous 30mpg, that comes out to ... 2.5 billion gallons of gas, at 30 days, that's 2.5 billion miles per day. Roughly 382 round-trips to the Sun (where it all came from) per month, just from little ol' us. (Take that, NASA!)

Back to the subject of Creeping Economics ...

I went back over a lot of my science fiction library recently, and I noticed that the one real bit of fiction that seems to hold throughout is the concept of limitless energy. Spaceships that move light-years in minutes or days, floating cities, flying cars, instant food-o-matics, whatever. Even the sword-and-goblet fantasies tend to ignore energy, calling upon vast supernatural sources that tear mountains asunder. Kung-fu masters who fly and dance in the very bamboo. The "hard" science fiction community needs to shed itself of one more fiction if they are going to give us all a realistic glimpse of the future. What is kind of interesting about the increased cost of energy is the fact that you don't really have to look 'forward' in order to get some idea of where the renewable-energy thing is going. You only have to look backward, and only about 100 years, when only the very rich had motor cars, most farming was done with horses, and all breweries served the eight square miles around them. More than less, that is what the future holds. Are you ready? At 2.5 billion gallons a month, it will happen in your lifetime. My, we do live in interesting times...

It's going to take a few months-to-years for it to percolate through the entire economy (national and global), but now is as good as any time for starting to count calories. And by that, I mean the calories of energy required to create products, and to move them to market. Let this guide your investment, too.

A Nation of Mad Scientists

2008-05-14T18:07:00.000-04:00

"I'm not a Mad Scientist, I'm an Angry Scientist!" (Young Frankenstein, I think) According to the Wikipedia article on "Mad Scientist," these guys "often work with fictional technology..." Hence the title here.

Just this week, I got a data call from a friend who needed a geek to tell him what was up with Brown's Gas, burning water and stuff to make a 10 Mpg pickup truck do 22 Mpg. OK, I looked it up, I reviewed it. There was even some heavyweight research done on it. But, in the end, it reminded me of "the secret carburetor," the "gas-enhancing packet," and X-Ray Vision glasses that every red-blooded pre-teen prayed would let him see his homeroom angel naked.

Wake up!!! For heaven's sake, people, why does it always come down to another episode of The Rain Maker? Only now, some clown in a plaid jacket comes to town and claims his secret invention will eliminate your reliance on the $4-a-gallon pump. Now, everyone is believing in perpetual motion machines and water-powered cars, every sort of nonsense that we were supposed to have outgrown oh, back in 1945???

So much for the Founding Fathers' dream of universal education making a strong Republic. It would seem that fact, scientific fact, may be conveniently ignored in the vain hope that the fuel we so wantonly wasted over the past 50 years may be returned to us (at 25 cents a gallon while you are at it, please, God?).

Wishing you can have unlimited sources of energy will not make it so. While Volkswagen may indeed have created a 70Mpg bio-diesel roller skate, your Ford 450 Megaton Pickup is not going to get 35 mpg without driving it off of the proverbial cliff.

There are certain laws of physics that dominate this game. Way back when the only conveyances were horses and sailboats, the "laws of physics" were discovered by homo sapiens and various simple experiments have proven them out year after year in high schools and even elementary schools throughout the nation. In much the same way as 2 + 2 is always equal to 4 (even for very large values of 2), the energy you can get from a system is always equal to or less than what you put in.

Yet, once again, in a manner similar to what occurred in the gas crisis of 1972, magic additives and pills abound. Engines that run on compressed air, engines that run on water, cars that run on gravity. Like drowning swimmers, we grasp every pointless bit of flotsam around us in hopes that it will somehow float both itself and us.

True energy efficiency comes from not wasting energy. I'm no Kung Fu master, but isn't this what the old guy says to "Writtow Gwasshoppah" every time The True Knowledge is being imparted to the young pip on the Path of Enlightenment? Apparently, we treat this knowledge as a fiction only for books and movies. We don't really buy it, do we?

Way back in 1962, Arthur C. Clarke postulated that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." It seems there is an opposite (contrapositive?) effect at work here. Dave Lebling states that "Any sufficiently arcane magic is indistinguishable from technology." Strangely enough, this seems to be the more oft-repeated version. This must be why these scams never seem to go away.

Join the Neo-Amish Movement

2008-05-03T15:32:00.000-04:00

No disrespect at all intended. The idea "Neo-Amish" came to me when I was thinking about what our ultimate goal(s) must be if we are to work towards a sufficient "renewable energy technology" in the future. I fully understand that there is a critical spiritual element of Amish & Mennonite faiths. "Neo-Amish" is intended only to refer to the essential "green" aspect of the lifestyle which (according to the Wikipedia entry) has been a direct result of their avoidance of "worldly" things.

On the surface, it appears that Amish morality shuns extensive use of energy as a form of vanity. If this is so, our Western energy-consuming lifestyle could really use an overhaul. If we called it "sin," we would all find ourselves contemplating suicide as the best way to reduce the burden on the planet. I cannot make a move without acknowledging overuse of energy! Our predicament reminds me of Nikos Kazantzakis' St. Francis. In the story, St. Francis "saves" an entire village of people, who all renounce the world and wish to follow a contemplative life. However, there is no one to do any of the daily tasks that make the village go, so he has to tell everyone a new angle on salvation. As I recall, they all get mad at him and drive him out of town.

We cannot let this wall of habit keep us from making some changes as soon as possible, and at least trying some more things.

We have so many conveniences (not the least of which is the computer I am typing on and the one you are reading from) which are "convenient" at a fairly significant energy cost. A few weeks ago, I was reading an article about computer time donations to "Folding@home," a major grid supercomputing effort, that talked about having ~1 million PS3s donating 8 hours per day at about 220 watts. Something like 1.6 billion watt-hours per day are required to make inroads against protein-folding related diseases! Perhaps, for my daily work, I can use the One-Laptop Per Child unit, which runs at a LOT lower energy cost, and is hand-cranked. I think that organization has a new, valid market for the OLPC that should not be overlooked.

As I look at every aspect of my own lifestyle, I realize what a long way I have to go. I need to put up a clothesline, begin to wash dishes by hand in lukewarm water, do a MAJOR planning effort into how & when we use the family autos, make sure all lights in the house are LED or fluorescent, cook less, bathe less, turn more things off, walk more, turn up the thermostat in summer (and turn it down in the winter), watch less TV/video DVD, break out the old Monopoly and jigsaw puzzles, learn how to play cards with real cards again, the list goes ON and On and on.

I bet the Amish don't play cards. But, they drive horse & buggy for local transport and usually don't use phones (the heart clutches in fear at the thought). We are not going to get 300 million Americans back to a farm/subsistence lifestyle. We can turn off a few million streetlights, go to a four-day work week, and try to get to know our neighbors better.

Some technology ought to save energy. I think cell phones are essential, and the internet must be cheaper than driving, is it not? I gotta re-think those 1.6 BILLION watt-hours per day on a single project, though, don't I?

Of Sense and Responsibility

2008-03-14T18:32:00.000-04:00

I recently received a well-intentioned-but-completely-misguided approach to the current gasoline "crisis." Quoting a powerful but unnamed "executive from Coca-Cola," this email virus ("send this to 30 people!") seemed to say two things; first, that WE, the masses, could not stop buying gas; and second, that this whole thing could be solved, not by a boycott, but by a boycott of ExxonMobile filling stations, who, faced with losing money, would force the rest of the world to reduce the price of fuel.

"Not this time, Virginia; there is no Santa Claus." we have to do this ourselves, by Not Buying Gas.

Lookit, Kid, by imagining Exxon/Mobile as the boogey man, you are just pushing your peas around on the plate; you still have to eat them. The ONLY way to reduce the price is to reduce the demand.

Each of us has to start by reducing their own demand. This is like a good exercise program. Go ahead and start small, and then work from there. It requires imagination. Not the "save the world now" kind, but the everyday kind, the little ideas that used to make their way into "Hints from Heloise" in the paper. How many ways can we think of? Chances are that Nobody can figure out huge reductions right away, but, if we are all thinking about conservation, every little bit saved will help. Here are some that I have heard of;

1) MEASURE how much fuel you are/have been using. POST the numbers on the kitchen wall, where you can see them, each week.
2) Attempt to Reduce that by 20%
a. Plan shopping, only go twice a week
b. Work at home 1 day (and don’t drive anywhere)
c. “Carpool” with neighbors to shopping
d. Attempt to carpool or use mass transit one day per week
e. Aggressively measure your fuel bills and keep the results where you can see them every day.
3) House/Office temp: 65 winter, 75 summer
4) Buy on internet, delivered by Postal Service (at home: unlike UPS/FedEx, they drive the route daily, regardless)
5) Find non-travel ways to amuse ourselves
a. Bridge clubs, book clubs, garden clubs
b. Get to know your neighbors & try to 'carpool' to events
c. Think back to those old community organizations and traditions that were probably hold-overs from when transportation was scarce.

Communities need to try to become community-oriented again. In our attempts to become more diverse, embracing all traditions and cultures, the places in which we live have become equally strange to all. Everybody drives away to meet friends and to Do Stuff. Cheap transportation means we don't actually have to live with the neighbors. That requires effort.

You have to respect them

2008-03-03T07:30:00.000-05:00

There is a lot of information Out There. So much, that the business of searching and sorting it has given rise to Google (our host) and many rivals. So, I suppose it should come as no surprise to me that I am somewhere around the 65 millionth downloader of the VLC Media Player.

As there is only one of me, and I spend a lot of time in the conventional Open Source arena, looking at business solutions. I am trying to get folks interested in more mundane scabbed-edge technology, and beg to be excused for not being up on streaming audio and video and everything related to it. When urged to get the VLC (http://www.videolan.org) by my son-at-college, I went right out and did so. In the media arena, this thing is the slicer-dicer-food processor of the video/audio world, offering us formats and data that will take weeks just to learn to spell the acronyms. But, enough shameless promotion. As an Open Source Zealot, I also tried to get an idea of who they are and what they are about.

The core team are French developers. Unlike a lot of French Open Source folks, they have an English language website; I have yet to find anything in French. I found an Impress presentation that they gave at FOSDEM several years ago that gave a great overview of the product and what VLC are about. Near the end of the presentation, while they were outlining where they wanted the product to go and what they were thinking (and asking for Laborers in the Harvest), there was a single bullet:

World Domination

Hey, you have to respect this. A lofty goal, as their product is not autoloaded with the operating system, and folks have to look for it. Respect them, we should. As the 65 millionth-or-so user of their product, I don't think I have any other choice.

Rushing to Join the Crowd

2008-03-02T00:39:00.000-05:00

Rushing to join the crowd, I too have a blog. We'll see if it turns out to be anything, or if it becomes yet another stain of bit-rot on the digital landscape.

I used to be young and sentimental. I even wrote poetry. My friends all toughened me up by making fun of me, and I must have gotten the message. I stopped writing poetry first, and then I slowly stopped writing anything that did not directly affect my income. No personal letters (just Reach Out and Touch Someone), no diaries,I learned to write simply and directly, with simple, easy-to-read words. Faux-German. Rather than use a 5-syllable word, just link a lot of simple words together with hyphens (I tried without hyphens, and it looked like German!).

The digital age and the internet came upon us recently, and we have collectively been growing along with it, I suppose. We have all of these ways to communicate, but we find that we have not got a lot to say. I get 4 or 5 times forwarded emails with some joke or sentimental message, like a greeting card (Happy divorce-anniversary to the nicest loser I ever met...) that says it all and requires only the X to mark the spot where we used to sign our names.

However, maybe something has changed (other than the fact that we have all grown older). I seem to be getting more letters & emails from people trying to explain themselves. People who I thought all left for another planet seem to be popping out of the woodwork, explaining stuff and having feelings that they have to express in emails and blogs... I am not sure I am ready for them all to return from whence they came. My youth was not tragic, but, once they toughened me up, it was easy to leave behind, like the poetry. Recently, a friend of mine who had gone on a long sabbatical from Life came up with a blog to explain the past, and, in the process of reading his, I got the invite to start my own.

Poetry looks out of place in a blog. I won't do that just yet.