tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-85370456848206745312024-02-22T02:26:58.561-08:00Consider The SourceThe plural of anecdote is marzidote...er, dozidote...mikeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13057701313718589322noreply@blogger.comBlogger491125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8537045684820674531.post-68931767980903093392020-05-24T12:55:00.000-07:002020-05-24T12:55:58.540-07:00Trumped<span style="color: white;">...</span><br />
I don't really know what to do. The world used to be an amazing, wildly diverse place where there were so many wonderful and fascinating things to do and see, to think and talk about. There used to be fun, laughter, poetry and word-play, international events and economic debates, baseball and basketball, naked celebrity meltdowns and the occasional shockingly violent criminal act. We talked about music, about food, about movies and events and places, things we saw and things we only heard about. There were concerts, film festivals, burning man and Mardi Gras, parties and horse races and restaurants and bars.<br />
<br />Today, locked in place to avoid a deadly virus, and there is only him that should not be named. Our corrupt, lying, stunningly stupid criminal-in-chief, Trump. The orange one. He has come into our lives in the dead of night and stolen the universe, the sunshine and the very oxygen. It is him, only him, on the news, on the twitter machine, on the blogs. We read and watch and listen with a certain numbed disgust at what he does today, while tomorrow all our friends will be revisiting those same outrages even as he commits new ones. His political 'strategy', to the extent one can be discerned, has been described as 'flooding the zone with shit' - and whether it's an actual strategy or not, that's what he's doing.<br /><br />He has all the characteristics of a classic authoritarian strongman dictator, but with a weird set of mental and emotional failings, a grotesque narcissistic streak and absolutely no filter of the kind that should be automatic for someone in such an elevated position in society. And we remain shocked and stunned that so much of our population, so many of our fellow citizens continue, even now, to cheer him on and to be driven to greater acts of societal irresponsibility by his unhinged rants and endless, outright lies. They bring military weapons to protests, they refuse to care for themselves and their community in time of plague, they constantly act against any and all self-interest because there is now such a deep ideological gap between the two tribes of America that at this point represent nothing so much as an avowed hatred for each other.<br /><br />Which brings me back to...me.<br /><br />I realized that he's broken me. I can't get away from him, I can't get him out of my mind, I can't avoid his hourly offenses - relishing the ones I believe will 'cost' him and chafing over the ones where he seems to gain...something. I used to love to spend time reading and thinking about international relations, but he's broken them too. Whether it's Israel, China, the Persian Gulf, Europe and NATO, Africa, Russia - there is always Trump's horrible orange visage hanging over every conversation, breaking the bonds that had value while creating new bonds that only threaten the future in so many ways. I used to love to study economics, but under the Trump regime economics makes no sense. There was a vast economic expansion and virtually full employment, and yet workers wages stayed flat even as corporate profits surged and surged again. Nothing works correctly, and the only thing one needs to succeed in this bizarre dystopian global economy is access to capital. I used to love to follow science, but - and while I can't pin it on Trump directly - physics is broken, with no experimental research ongoing and new discoveries out of reach.<br /><br />I want to get away from it - HIM - take a break, immerse myself in something rewarding and worthwhile, but I can't. When I try, he drags me back - whether on a blog or on the twitter machine, the new outrages and the outraged responses along with the bizarre unhinged defenses seep in and before I know it there's another two hours down the Trump rabbit hole. I often wonder how we will adjust when he's gone? Not in the near term, when he loses the election in November and still has almost three months in power to throw tantrums, discredit the election and break institutions. Not after that, when he's out of power and nihilistically urging his most deranged supporters to take up arms against the government. But later, when we can get on with the business of recovering from his presidency, the pandemic and the associated economic collapse.<br />
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What will fill the void? What will our brain, used to massive daily doses of Trump, demand in replacement? How will we adjust to post-Trump 'normal', something we knew just a few years ago and yet is impossible to imagine today? Will the media struggle to return to a time when there are five or ten ongoing stories every day, not one single overarching catastrophe to be breathlessly covered, debated and covered again?<br /><br />I just know I hate that man with a kind of hatred I've never really known before. I hate him for what he's done to my country, to my friends, and - yes - to me. I hate that he has become so central to my existence, a five year ongoing train wreck that I've lost the ability to look away from...<br />
<span style="color: white;">...</span>mikeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13057701313718589322noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8537045684820674531.post-60087079333156906502019-08-04T13:15:00.000-07:002019-08-04T13:15:09.170-07:00Hopeless<span style="color: white;">...</span><br />
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There isn't always going to be a bright new day. There is no guarantee that at some point things will get better. At some point, some systems just suffer cascading failures and simply collapse.<br />
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Look around. Our society is deteriorating into racial, class and sectarian violence. We are awash in guns, and those guns are increasingly being used to commit grotesque mass murders. Our system - a breakthrough in democratic self-governance in the late 18th Century - is now an obsolete, crippled debacle, exploited by every illiberal, authoritarian and greedy impulse that humans carry. It's too late to mitigate Climate Change, but at least it is our children that will pay that bill when we are gone. Nuclear weapons are proliferating, and yet we are walking away from treaties that protected us from them for decades.<br /><br />Will it get better? That's hard to see. We can vote out Trump, but the Republicans will just shift back into obstruction mode and nothing will be done. Meanwhile, the worst authoritarian misogynist dominionist bigots have been appointed to key judicial seats across the nation, serving to prevent even the most limited rollback of the Trumpist project under Democratic leadership.<br /><br />Are you hopeful? I've spent the last 32 months thinking that if we could just weather the storm we could all make it out the other side and start to repair the damage. But after this week, well, I can't find a way to see it that way. In my personal life, in our nation, in the world the situation is in deep decline. The fear I feel is real and immediate, and where I used to find hope in my soul I now see nothing but darkness.<br />
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There's no path out of this forest, and the creatures are all ravenous....<br />
<span style="color: white;">...</span>mikeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13057701313718589322noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8537045684820674531.post-10461596992736077732019-02-24T10:24:00.000-08:002019-02-24T10:24:42.159-08:00The Green New Deal is a Hoax<span style="color: white;">...</span><br />
I have some very bad news for you. For all the talk about a 'Green New Deal', the entire discussion up to this point has been utterly pointless, and worse, even worthless. Why? The conversation has been about some vague, generalized aspirational goals. Net zero emissions. Millions of green jobs. Electrification of the transport infrastructure. Conversion to renewable energy generation. Etc.<br />
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These are great. Nothing wrong with them at all. But they are goals, not policies. They don't matter if you don't have a plan to accomplish them. Imagine you're a football coach. When asked about your game plan, you can't say 'we plan to win the game by having more points than they do at the end of the game'. That's not a plan, that's a goal. You need to figure out HOW to get more points, and therein lies the challenge.<br />
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The first problem is that climate change is a global problem. The US and Europe have actually significantly reduced their CO2 emissions over the last 20 years. The developing world? Not so much. Their emissions have increased, and increased, and increased again. This is reasonable as they build out an electrical grid and drive more automobiles. So it is absolutely true that the US could accomplish all the goals in the GND and still suffer the consequences of climate change.<br />
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The second problem is more political than practical - how much individual sacrifice are you going to demand? People love the GND in the abstract, but if you ask them to pay six or eight dollars a gallon for gas they're going to throw you out of office. And any policies that actually accomplish anything like the goals set out in the Green New Deal are going to be huge, with massive budgets and bureaucracies, and that means raising a whole bunch of new revenue. Taxing the rich is popular, but once you've gone to that well you're going to have to tax everyone else when you need more revenue.<br />
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Also, while Climate Change is a real crisis, it's only one of many. In the US, we need to address health care, education and infrastructure today, and all that competes for funding sources with the GND. These are all emergencies, and they are going to have to be prioritized and managed. And it may not be politically feasible to pass and fund them all.<br />
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But, at this point, we HAVE to do something. We'll know we're making progress on that front when somebody steps up to lay out a set of concrete proposals and estimated budgets. And considering the firestorm Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sustained just by laying out a set of aspirational goals, that somebody is going to take a political beating. The fact that nobody is willing to do so is a grim reminder of just how heavy a political lift these policies are going to be.<br />
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At the end of the day, reducing GHG emissions requires very large changes in behavior, and the way you drive changes in behavior is by changing the incentives. When energy costs more, we'll use less - but despite the obvious reality underlying those kinds of policy changes, most people will balk when you force them to make those kinds of sacrifices. We're going to have to elevate this to a genuine, considered conversation that includes the 'bad news' before we can even find out how much we can get passed, and so far we're still at the starting line.<br />
<span style="color: white;">...</span>mikeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13057701313718589322noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8537045684820674531.post-80264571693087688242018-08-23T10:52:00.000-07:002018-08-23T10:52:34.510-07:00Information Please<span style="color: white;">...</span><br />
As campaign season 2018 heats up, we can see the outlines of the party messaging forming. On the Democratic side, tying candidates to Trump, family separation policy and the tax cut that blew up the budget in order to increase corporate profits should be big. Plus, now, with the Mannafort and Cohen convictions, corruption will resonate with many. On the Republican side it's a little hard to know what they can run on. They'll still have immigration and government regulation, along with their old standbys racial animus and tribal fear and hatred, but it's hard to see how well that will play after two full years of Trump. It gets them into the 30% range, but it's not going to push them over the top like it did in 2018, when people could still think hopeful thoughts about a Trump White House with unfettered congressional power.<br />
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But in the real world - and assuming the economy doesn't collapse in the next 80 days, much of the discussion will center on health care. And after the implementation of the ACA and the angry tantrum on the right that resulted as they were forced to make it clear that they just didn't think poor people should be able to go to the doctor. This 'survival of the richest' Darwinian social experiment has played out, and people have now seen what even limited government intervention in the health care marketplace can do. The American electorate, to a large degree, is ready to have a conversation about shifting the health care system to a more modern, effective, subsidized system like all other industrialized economies have implemented.<br />
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But here we find ourselves at a crossroads. What will it be? Medicare for All, a Medicare buy-in option, a full-blown public option to compete with private insurers? What will public funds be used for, and how much public money will be necessary? We got a taste of where this is leading during the Bernie Sanders campaign. He dangled a concept - single payer - in front of people without being upfront about what that meant to him, how it might be passed, what it would cost and how those funds would be raised. Many of us accepted his good faith at his word and asked questions. These questions were immediately shouted down as the desperate cries of neoliberal shills out to protect the status quo. Huh?<br />
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Look. There's hundreds of ways to implement some kind of publicly funded universal coverage system. If I ask you questions, it's not because I'm trying to prevent your preferred program from becoming law, but rather because I'm going to work my ass off to prevent a BAD program from becoming law. If I have questions, it means we're engaging with each other to try to solve this problem once and for all. And if you can't tell me how much your program would cost, we can't even begin to have a conversation about it, because THAT'S the issue we have to address. The gigantic, bloated American military is the largest in the world by far, the most expensive in history, and it costs about 4% of GDP. Here we're talking about somewhere between 10 and 20% of GDP. The Republican tax bill cost $2 trillion over ten years. Here we're talking about more than $2 trillion dollars in year one alone!<br />
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So yeah, if I ask you how your health care program would be funded, you can't just shrug and say 'tax the rich'. If you can't say how much money you need, you don't know if that's a viable solution or not. Is your program means tested? Why - or why not? How does your program control costs? Since you're using public money you can't just pay whatever the doctor or hospital puts on the invoice. Are you using Medicare reimbursement rates? What will you do if not enough health care delivery organizations agree to take patients at those rates? What about employer-funded health care? How do you transfer those private costs to the public sector, and can you require employers relieved of those costs to raise wages or benefits?<br />
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See, there's really only one point here. If you say you want universal or single payer health care in the US, you should never react negatively to people who ask questions. You NEED to be able to answer the questions, because you can't actually get what you want until you take a nebulous concept and flesh it out with some real information. You also should realize that if you support a badly designed or stupid program, many of us will point this out. Not necessarily because we don't want a better universal health care system in the US, but because we don't want one that will fail. It seems fairly clear that we're beyond the point of arguing about human rights vs. Socialism, and we can begin to have a serious conversation about caring for all American citizens. So we need to get used to talking in some detail as opposed to shouting bumper stickers at each other.<br />
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This is a GOOD thing.<br />
<span style="color: white;">...</span>mikeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13057701313718589322noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8537045684820674531.post-44339209771520641272018-08-20T10:40:00.000-07:002018-08-20T10:40:01.361-07:00Whither the White Working Class?<span style="color: white;">...</span><br />
Man, there's a whole lot of stupid coming out of Democratic politics as the campaigns for the November mid-terms begin to heat up. Which is not to say that there's not even more stupid in the Republican campaign messaging - it's just that they decended into incoherent hooting and feces-flinging long ago, to the point where there's just nothing interesting to say about them. But on the Democratic side we have a full-blown, totally unnecessary argument about 'socialism' that isn't socialism - it's just basic FDR New Deal liberal economics. We have Democrats who should know better adopting the feel-good joys of old-fashioned authoritarianism, working to silence voices they don't like. But the one that really takes the cake for me is this argument about whether/how Democrats should attempt to win the votes of a demographic group we have chosen to call the 'White Working Class'.<br />
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If we were to be honest, the white working class shouldn't even be a thing. The working class has very serious issues - education, health care, addiction, flat wages and job losses. But none of these issues are problems for white members of the working class alone. They are serious problems for every American who works for an hourly wage. And yet, we know with certainty that the working class voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton in 2016, while the subset of that same demographic group with white skin voted overwhelmingly for Trump. So one has no choice to ask, if they all face the same problems - hunger, addiction, substandard housing, lack of health insurance and a dark future for their children - why did people of color vote for the party whose very existence is predicated on solving these specific types of problems while the white members in precisely the same set of circumstances turned out to elect a millionaire liar heading a party that has done everything in its power to destroy their lives and families for decades?<br />
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The answer is we KNOW the answer. Those white people, less educated working poor, may have the same needs as their African American and Latino peers. But for decades the Republicans have used their racial animus, their hatreds and their fears, their superstitions and their willful ignorance to convince them to vote against their best interests. And they have, turning out reliably in droves to support a party that goes to work every day hell bent on making them poorer, sicker and ever more miserable. Even today, when thousands of them die every month from opioid overdoses, when their wages are lower than they were twenty years ago, when their children can't go to college and have zero hope of a better life, the Republicans know they can count on them to do everything they can to perpetuate their own immiseration.<br />
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So now, if you tell me that just turning out the Democratic base isn't enough, that in order to win enough congressional seats in November to make a difference we have to change the minds of the 'White Working Class' I'll tell you you are deluded, and desperately wrong. All we can do is the same thing we've ever done - keep telling them their lives and their families would be much better off under a Democratic government, and if their own self interest isn't enough to make them change their minds, they are well and truly a lost cause. Indeed, they are the enemy of the American people in a very real sense, working to help the most authoritarian nativist bigots destroy the most important American constitutional values in the name of raw power and tribal hatred.<br />
<span style="color: white;">...</span>mikeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13057701313718589322noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8537045684820674531.post-24684042583972821102018-08-18T09:39:00.003-07:002018-08-18T09:39:19.353-07:00Be Careful What You Wish For<span style="color: white;">...</span><br />
So, as has been discussed and documented endlessly, the arc of the Republican party over the last several decades has been to increasingly put winning politically over governing responsibly. Under Clinton, they tried hearings and even impeachment. Then, under the odious GW Bush, they discovered that, hey, governing is really hard and probably takes a level of expertise and careful attention to detail that they were unable to muster. Then, under Obama, they discovered that full on burn-it-down, sand in the gears obstruction didn't result in any political costs at all. And now, under Trump, they are fully prepared to sacrifice American sovereignty as long as they can hold onto power.<br />
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So now, as the truth about the 2016 Trump campaign slowly trickles out, the Republicans, both in government and in the electorate, are working themselves around to a simple conclusion about Russian interference. It amounts to "so what?" Once it becomes impossible to argue, even on the margins, that the Russian government didn't intentionally hack the Democrats and work with the Trump campaign to influence American voters in the run-up to the 2016 elections, the party and its voters will simply decide that foreign interference doesn't matter - that it's essentially no different from any other interested party. Voters can make up their own minds, and if no actual votes were changed, the election was free and fair.<br />
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But here's where that's going to get dicey. If the November mid-term elections go as expected, the Republicans are going to be massively butthurt. Led by their Tweeter-in-chief, they're going to be screaming about rigged elections and voter fraud and...wait for it...interference. As soon as they need evidence of electoral shenanigans to support their desperate cries that they simply COULDN'T have lost, suddenly that interference by the GRU and the Internet Research Agency is going to take on a whole new look.<br />
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Now, hypocrisy as a political gaffe long ago lost its cachet. You can look at Mitch McConnell shepherding through the Kavanaugh nomination and compare what he's saying to what he said when Merrick Garland was the nominee, and see that the most blatant hypocrisy doesn't merit any more than an occasional snarky tweet. But this is going to be political hypocrisy on an entirely new level. Suddenly all the denials about Russian interference and collusion with the campaign are going to switch to a full-throated condemnation of the Republican party and its candidates for winning as a result of Russian interference and campaign collusion.<br />
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And just like that, in the course of two years, American electoral credibility will be gone forever. By placing this stunted, angry man-child in the highest position in the land and letting him and his cult members dictate so much of the narrative, we will have reduced every electoral outcome to a matter of opinion to be argued about and never accepted. I always thought American small-d democratic institutions were strong enough to withstand even the GW Bush/Trump onslaught. That might have been optimistic, because I just never anticipated the attacks would follow such a bizarre path, and the institutions would be threatened in such an indirect manner.<br />
<span style="color: white;">...</span>mikeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13057701313718589322noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8537045684820674531.post-26343850718692855512018-08-13T10:04:00.003-07:002018-08-13T10:04:43.896-07:00Liar!<span style="color: white;">...</span><br />
It's endlessly amusing to watch how Trump responds to every accusation, charge or innuendo. He's like a pathological eleven-year-old, stealing cookies and breaking lamps and repeatedly denying it. Everybody's lying. All the women who accuse him of sexual misconduct are lying, even though we have all heard him on tape saying he regularly gropes and abuses women. He says people who call him a racist are lying, despite the fact that he regularly says racist things right out loud. He says the media is lying whenever it reports on his own behavior, even when we all witnessed that behavior. And now we have Omaraosa and her book. He says she's lying - and she says she has audio recordings.<br />
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In the end, it doesn't matter if she has recorded conversations. Because to Trump, it's not about reality - it's about what's in his own head. He told Lester Holt on live television that he fired Comey because of 'the Russia thing'. And still he claims there was no obstruction of justice. He dictated the message for his son Don Jr. claiming the meeting with the Russian agents at Trump Tower in June was about adoption, something we now know was not true, and that Trump knew it was false at the time. Still he claims there was 'no collusion'.<br />
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I know, we've been at this for a couple years now. But sometimes you have to take a couple steps back and look at who America elected to lead the free world. This stupid, intemperate, fragile little man is making a mockery out of political leadership and good governance all over the world. It's the tyranny of a toddler, throwing tantrums, stealing cookies and insisting that everyone else is lying about everything. We've been so lucky, with all the turmoil with Russia and China and Turkey and Syria that we haven't faced a serious international crisis. Because it's very hard to see a way this administration might navigate a true crisis without making it worse.<br />
<span style="color: white;">...</span>mikeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13057701313718589322noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8537045684820674531.post-90324842660016690352018-08-12T10:04:00.000-07:002018-08-12T10:04:10.750-07:00The OTHER Facebook Problem<span style="color: white;">...</span><br />
So we've been discussing endlessly the rights and responsibilities of the social media companies that have effectively taken over and 'privatized' the public square. First it was Russian GRU influence operations, and lately it has been Alex Jones and free speech in the age of privately owned platforms. Ironically, it was that latest argument about what Facebook can - and more importantly <i>should</i> - do about publishers like Jones that led me to my most existential problem with Facebook.<br />
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See, I LIKE Facebook. It seems like a wonderful idea, a whole bunch of people all over the world hanging out together, shooting the breeze, laughing and joking and also discussing the important issues of our time. That really appealed to me. I'm interested in a lot of things, from music and science to foreign affairs and public policy, and being able to discuss them with people who may not agree with me seems like an exciting, stimulating opportunity to learn and grow from each other. And while that's true in a perfect world, the world, alas, is a lot less than perfect. And people, well, that's a whole 'nuther kettle of fish.<br />
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It was in a conversation on Facebook the other day that I had this rather unpleasant epiphany. See, I don't much care for Alex Jones, but when it comes to his right to access the public square I would always err on the side of too much speech. I can - and do - choose not to read Jones' idiocy, but as soon as somebody is banned, I no longer get to make that choice. And if it's Jones today, it might well be you or me tomorrow. Well, most people I know disagree with me on this topic. That's fine, in fact it's downright interesting to hear what they have to say. But one of my 'friends' took the opportunity to post a needlessly harsh, mean, rude, personal attack on me, and to make it worse, he was blatantly dishonest in how he characterized my position.<br />
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Now, communicating in text form can get dicey, as it's not always clear the intention of the people doing the communicating. But when you have been 'friends' on Facebook for a long time, you should be able to expect kindness, not hostility, and you should always give your friends the benefit of the doubt. But people are, at the end of the day, emotional animals, and when communications happen in a format that is not in any way face-to-face, they sometimes feel empowered to indulge a kind of hard wired mean streak. That same mean streak exists in other formats, but it is suppressed because it's HARD to be mean, rude and insulting right to someone's face. But most of those social inhibitions just seem to vanish in conversations on the internet.<br />
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So for now I find myself avoiding Facebook. I'm not one to make grand pronouncements - I'LL NEVER POST ON THIS SHITTY WEBSITE AGAIN!! - but until I feel comfortable scrolling through my newsfeed again, I'll probably mostly refrain from posting. Because this is the most intractable kind of problem - it's something we evolved a solution for hundreds of thousands of years ago, and therefore have no solutions for today. People are mean. They're self-interested and often angry. And if you give them a safe platform from which to fly that mean-human flag, you can often expect them to do just that. But when it comes from someone you like and trust, someone who you felt was a friend, it feels like betrayal...<br />
<span style="color: white;">...</span>mikeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13057701313718589322noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8537045684820674531.post-61858384967722431412018-08-11T17:21:00.002-07:002018-08-11T17:39:03.958-07:00Terms and Conditions<span style="color: white;">...</span><br />
Lemme tell you why we're doomed.<br />
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It's not particularly hard to grasp. We're doomed because there are two 'factions' that hate each other viscerally because, ultimately, they just can't agree on a basic starting point. One set of facts, one observed reality. From there, we could figure out what needed to happen, from government intervention to civil war. At least there would be a way forward, even if it was fatal.<br />
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But as long as people are alowed to argue 'they're protesting the anthem' when they tell us very clearly what they're protesting, as long as people can argue that the people in power are the victims of racial prejudice and animus, when they can ignore the way 21st century American law enforcement treats African American men despite voluminous documentation - well, see, there's the problem.<br />
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If there's no problem, there's nothing to solve, and if those in power are actually the victims the solutions - however harsh - are clear...Michael Hyatthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11316769019524130729noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8537045684820674531.post-66047039264019104272018-07-09T16:03:00.000-07:002018-07-09T16:03:11.366-07:00All the News that's Fit to Complain About<span style="color: white;">...</span><br />
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Both sides do it. Complain about the news, that is. On the Conservative side, they've been so deeply enmeshed in lies, propaganda and conspiracy theories for so long that they can't begin to figure out how to address actual facts, quotes and events. On the Liberal side, well, we hate pretty much everything. You don't see nearly as much whining about 'Fake News' from liberals - Fox News is state TV, the propaganda outlet for the Republican party, and other outlets like Breitbart traffic in such bizarre nonsense that to call it fake news would be to lend it a cachet of credibility far beyond its own intrinsic worth. Liberals complain about coverage and content choices. At this point one might reach the conclusion that Twitter exists primarily as a medium for complaining about the media.<br />
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But here's the thing. The 'news' all these politically active people on both sides of the ideological divide are complaining about? It's not. News, that is. In many cases it is a costly, extravagantly produced television show designed not to inform, but to sell products. Television shows, just as a reminder, are profitable because they are a delivery medium for advertisers. As a result, the television news suffers from time constraints - it is fundamentally impossible for them to discuss ANY issue at even the minimal depth to actually inform their viewers. It doesn't matter if they're talking about health care policy, SCOTUS, North Korea or immigration, they leave out even the most salient details. They leave them out because the producers don't believe people want to know them, and because, with only 40 minutes of content per hour, they simply don't have time to deliver a complete picture of the issue, let alone the events of the day.<br />
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Then there's the other delivery mechanism, an anachronism from previous centuries we like to call a newspaper. This is where the complaints get, well, weird. People complain about what's being covered, and they complain about what's NOT being covered. They complain about who's writing the stories, the topics of the stories, the amount of coverage the story gets (too little/too much) and they complain about the overarching editorial choices the newspaper's management staff makes. Person X has a paid job writing for the NY Times? That's shameful and ridiculous. Person Y DOESN'T have a job writing for the NY Times? They are silencing our voices. Person Z wrote something I disagree with - he must be fired now.<br />
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Frankly, I don't understand any of this. Sure, the right-wing echo chamber is an embarrassment of false and incomplete narratives, primarily because it exists to support a right-wing political contingent that long ago ran out of anything of value to offer, and is now utterly dependent on false and incomplete narratives to sell its toxic set of policies to a public that is every year worse off for supporting them. But we're supposed to be the smart ones, literate and deeply concerned with actual facts, whether they support our desired policy positions or not.<br />
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Read what you want - don't read what you choose. But complaining about what is said or written in these ridiculous entities we call television and newspapers is pointless. They will never get it right, because they are so fatally flawed that it is impossible for them to do so. They will take shortcuts, offer anecdotes, quote sources and frame a narrative that is at best so incomplete as to be hollow, and at worst just farcically incorrect. If you actually care about public policy, read the source material, seek out the authoritative sources, read the longform deepdive white papers and research studies. If you're concerned about legislation, read the bill(s). If you're concerned about regulation, read the rules. If you care about international affairs, see what the politicians, journalists and pundits in other nations are saying.<br /><br />Here's an example. When Supreme Court Justice Kennedy resigned, the immediate implication was all around abortion, and Roe v Wade. But Roe was decided almost fifty years ago - did you go back and read the original decision, just to be clear on what might be at stake? Have you read it, even now? What about Casey v Planned Parenthood? When Trump rants about NATO funding, did you do a little research on how NATO is funded, just to see what the hell he's talking about? Whining about what CNN isn't covering or what some NYT OpEd writer said in a clickbait weekend column isn't informing you or anyone else - once again, because it is impossible to be informed by watching TV/Cable news and reading newspapers online.<br />
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Do yourself and everyone else a favor - find out what's happening, don't complain about how certain flawed media outlets are telling the story. Because they no longer have value as sources of information.<br />
<span style="color: white;">...</span>mikeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13057701313718589322noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8537045684820674531.post-66265410109634696332018-07-07T15:03:00.000-07:002018-07-07T15:03:41.062-07:00Why Competence Matters<span style="color: white;">...</span><br />
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One of the major problems of both the Trump campaign and the administration that resulted is the utter incoherence of the message. Whether you're a journalist, pundit, economist or part of another nation's government, trying to figure out what he wants and why he wants it has become the largest part of the job. It's pretty clear it was never intended to turn out this way, but from where we are today, looking back over the last three years, the primary method of operation, perhaps even the desired end-state itself, has been some kind of large-scale economic warfare. Part of it stems from the position of victimization that Trump has exploited in the conservative community - THEY are cheating, THEY are taking advantage of us, WE have to make them play fair and pay up! - and another part of it stems from the fact that his understanding of global trade and political norms is essentially that of a precocious ten-year-old with a large cache of comic books.<br />
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First it was sanctions. Economic sanctions are a kind of targeted trade war designed to stop short of actual warfare, in order to coerce another nation to either act in a certain way, or to stop acting in a certain way. The idea is that they function as both a carrot and a stick - the stick damages the wealth and income of targeted individuals, corporations and governments, while the carrot is that once the behavior is changed, the sanctions are removed and everybody can go back to the business of business.<br />
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Then came the tariffs. Similarly, tariffs are a kind of economic warfare, designed to force other nations to participate in a regime of trade protocols that is healthy for everyone, and to make sure that governments don't use their economic and national power to put a thumb on the scale to favor that nation's business interests.<br />
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The important thing to remember in effectively using sanctions and tariffs is not their application - that is the difficult, risky part - but rather their removal. The goal is not the economic warfare itself, but rather to coercively drive certain very specific changes in the behavior of the targeted nations. The point is changing behavior, and the economic actions are merely the method for accomplishing that goal.<br />
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All of which brings us to Donald Trump. As US president, he loves sanctions and tariffs. He violated the JCPOA precisely in order to re-impose sanctions on Tehran. And this year he has imposed tariffs on most US trading partners, both friend and foe alike. Now let me ask you - have you seen any reporting on what the purpose of these punitive economic measures might be? I'm guessing you haven't, because, appallingly, Trump has never specified what he wants those nations to do.<br /><br />That's right - he has imposed a massive regime of economic warfare against multiple nations around the globe in order, one presumes, to make them bend to his will. But he has not said, ever, what it is they might do to get the tariffs or sanctions removed. In the case of Iran, he has on occasion said something about regional conduct, missile development and a sunset clause, but that agreement was signed several years ago and was not open for negotiations. If he wanted to negotiate another treaty, he could try, but there was no need to abrogate an existing agreement in order to do that.<br />
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On tariffs, it's even worse. He says he wants global trade to operate in ways that are fairer to the US, but never says in what way. He says EU tariffs are too high, but overall EU tariffs are a negligible 3%. He says Canada is taking advantage of the US and risking national security, but the US actually runs a trade surplus with Canada. He says China is running roughshod over existing international laws around intellectual property, but he makes no demands around this issue. It's impossible for these nations to come into compliance with a set of trade rules that exist only in Trump's imagination. Which means there can be no actual end to this trade war, because nobody knows how to win, or even to surrender.<br />
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What is Trump doing? Well, he's pandering to 'the base'. He's listening to whatever they say on Fox News. He brings a zero-sum transactional mindset along with a raging egotistical arrogance that prevents him from accepting advice, even - perhaps especially - when he's in deeply over his head. But what the specific changes he's trying to create in the international order might be, no one - not even he - has any idea.<br />
<span style="color: white;">...</span>mikeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13057701313718589322noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8537045684820674531.post-45927989504156445272018-07-01T12:07:00.000-07:002018-07-01T12:12:09.393-07:00The Tyranny Fantasy<span style="color: white;">...</span><br />
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I've neglected this blog in recent months. My life has been...challenging, and the remarkable collapse of the American federal government under Trump has sucked all of the air out of the room. It's hard to think about various issues, even really important ones, when every morning Twitter delivers a new set of atrocites and blossoming fascism. But I wrote a piece about the upcoming political campaign, and in the course of coming back to teh Blogger, I found a comment on a piece I wrote some time ago about <a href="http://yougotttaconsiderthesource.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-second-amendment-reality-check.html">the 2nd Amendment</a>. Now I'm not here to pick on commenters - I LOVE commenters - even though this one has a bit of a problem with coherence.<br />
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But I was taken by this comment because it reflects a common argument among second amendment maximalists. And the argument is offered in such sincere seriousness while taking what amounts to two opposite and logically incompatible positions that it always fascinates me. Notice the use of the phrase "Government Tyranny", used multiple times in a single paragraph. It's a descriptor of some set of events that is so broadly understood and accepted on the far right that they really believe it needs no explanation.<br />
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But what are they describing with this phrase? What set of events in the United States are they anticipating that would place them in open warfare with the US government? The commenter refers to the slaughter of billions and billions of people - but what historical precedent are they examining? Sure, we can think about Armenia, we can think about Nazi Germany, we can think about Stalin's Soviet Union, we can think about Rwanda - but do those historical events apply somehow to the largest, oldest, most successfully established democracy in the world? What established democratic nation can we look to that has somehow fallen victim to 'government tyranny' to such an extent that it's citizens found themselves in open warfare with their government? Not Syria. Not Egypt. Not Libya. These were nations that HAD authoritarian, tyrannical (if you will) governments, nations where the people had no hope for their children or their future.<br />
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Sometimes they invoke some kind of 'economic meltdown' that leads to widespread looting and the collapse of American society. But they never describe what events might cause such a 'meltdown', falling back on phrases like 'runaway inflation' and 'Wiemar Republic', neither of which do they seem to understand either economically or historically. Fueled by some kind of fascination with Zombie movies and stockpiling weapons and supplies coupled with a barely suppressed desire for an opportunity to kill lots of black and brown people without paying a legal price, they envision a world where cities are in ruins and only them and their heavily armed friends will survive, killing looters and defending their compound from the ravenous hordes.<br />
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Do they not understand that American service people take their oath to the constitution seriously? Do they not understand that the US is comprised of 50 State governments in addition to the federal government, each sovereign and each with dozens or hundreds of armed law enforcement agencies and a military force controlled by the governor? Do they not understand that America has strong, mature democratic institutions that would short-circuit any descent into whatever they imagine 'tyranny' represents? Apparently they do not.<br />
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But wait - it gets weirder. If we give them even a small benefit of the doubt - if we, as a thought experiment, postulate that this 'government tyranny' is underway - then we can examine the key claim of the argument. So in this near-future America, cities are in ruins from rioting and looting, people are dying in huge numbers, there is no law enforcement, everyone is on their own while the government relentlessly hunts down the rebel leaders and puts entire communities into prison, labor and re-education camps. But wait - the brave 2nd amendment crew, in their 5.11 Tac Vests, boots and MOLLE gear, with their ARs and AKs and pistols are coming to the rescue.<br />
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Of course, this is government tyranny. You know - the US government. Predator drones circle out of rifle range, watching everything. A team planting IEDs at night is clearly visible in the thermal sensors, and a Hellfire missile obliterates them. A raiding party approaches a government installation, and a circling AC-130 kills all of them in 45 seconds - they never fire a shot. The tyrannical government sends troops into Memphis to round up the rebel leadership. The brave Tennessee fighters get their rifles and shotguns, paint their faces and send platoons into the streets to ambush the government troops. But the troops are riding MRAPs and Bradleys and Strykers, covered by precision artillery fires from the nearest firebase. Again, drones have seen the brave freedom fighters setting their ambushes. As the artillery barrage tears apart their positions, the government troops roll through, with machine guns and anti-tank rockets mopping up the remains of the resistance. The fighters never saw a single dismounted infantry unit to target with their rifles, and without air, armor or artillery of their own, they are all dead in an hour.<br />
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So there you have it. In the same breath, they tell us that American government tyranny is a real thing, and is very likely if not inevitable, and that they need their poodle-shooters and street-sweepers to stop it. The thing these two scenarios have in common is they are both ridiculous fantasies. There is no mechanism where a mature democracy would descend rapidly into open rebellion and warfare, and there are no weapons in civilian circulation that can have even a minor, temporary effect on a modern combined arms force.<br />
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So when they tell you they need their guns to protect us all from 'Government Tyranny', they are describing a situation that cannot occur, and a solution that cannot be effective.<br />
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Good job, guys.<br />
<span style="color: white;">...</span>mikeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13057701313718589322noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8537045684820674531.post-75258426052616723562018-06-29T14:25:00.000-07:002018-06-29T14:25:33.778-07:00What, Me Worry?<span style="color: white;">...</span><br />
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In less than two years, the vultures have come home to roost. The Republican party, as the political organization representing movement conservatism, has fought an increasingly impossible generational war to avoid slipping into demographic irrelevance. And now, the fallout from that war, represented by the presidency of Donald Trump and the rise of white supremacy and violent misogyny is weighing heavily on the electoral hopes of conservative America. The upcoming mid-term elections should represent the best opportunity for the Democratic party to take control of federal governance in decades. Indeed, before the rise of Trumpism, the most optimistic projections for a Democratic House majority were centered on 2024 or 26. With Trump, it's all in play, right now.<br />
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There are two things that worry me. They are both things that the Democrats can control. There's no point in worrying about the economy, or a war, or Trump's health, or any other factor beyond control. When things happen, both parties have to react to them, and the chips fall where they fall. One thing worries me a little - that because it's truly evergreen, a problem with Democratic policy choices and messaging forever. The other is bigger, and risks creating problems that even the desperate Republican party could exploit.<br />
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The smaller of these two problems is policy messaging. This has always been a strong Republican advantage. They do bumper stickers - "Morning in America", "Make America Great Again" etc. - while Democrats do White Papers. Now, I LIKE White Papers, but you have to be able to communicate effectively in four minute cable news hits and Twitter, neither platform lends itself to the White Paper format. So we say "Healthcare is a Human Right" and wow, that's so vague as to be meaningless. So we try "Medicare for All" and not even the people who say it can agree on what it means. It's the same when we call for "Comprehensive Immigration Legislation", and it only goes downhill when we shout BREAK UP THE BANKS or demand that businessmen be sent to prison en masse. It's important to remember that the spittle-flecked madmen and madwomen largely on the other side, so you should try to keep the message rational and constitutional.<br />
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I do think that some of the nuance and detail in policy is important to communicate, even though there is neither in Republican messaging. But that's mostly because the Republican party is fully invested in barefaced lying to support their positions, so the Democrats have to have some built-in firewalls to protect them from the lies. (Remember Death Panels?) So, again going to healthcare - it's going to be THE big issue from now until 2021 at least - if we shout SINGLE PAYER we're opening up the opportunity for them to scream about raising taxes. And not even dishonestly, although they will find a way to exaggerate the issue. Americans spend $4 trillion dollars a year on health care, and that would be a LOT of taxation - far more than could be borne by the richest 10% alone.<br />
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Oddly, the second problem is easier to solve, because it would be such a brutal self-inflicted wound. The conventional wisdom is that running as the NOT-TRUMP is not enough. That Democrats have to STAND for something, to be for things rather than just against him. First of all, the Democrats ARE for things - and health care and immigration will be two of them at the forefront. But come on. Open a newspaper. Open a browser. Turn on the news. What is everyone talking about? It's Trump. Remember that America elected an African American president not because of his message, but because he was NOT GW Bush. This is THAT on steroids.<br />
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In every opportunity, every speech, every rally, every cable news hit, Democrats need to emphasize that they're NOT Donald Trump, they're not a corrupt crime family with a third grade education and a massive inferiority complex. Even though it's the mid-terms, every Democratic candidate should run against Trump. They should tie their opponents tightly to Trump, they should explain what they'll do to stop Trump from acting, and they should promise to clean up the cesspool that the West Wing has become under Trump.<br />
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And this should not worry them. With 56-58% of the popular vote, they can sweep both houses of congress. None of this is about convincing Trump supporters to vote D. Anybody who's still a fan of the Trump White House at this point is a lost cause, but the numbers keep saying that shouldn't matter. And frankly, if the nation continues down that path after two years of seeing it in action, we truly will have the government we deserve.<br />
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One additional point. Liberals want to see liberal policies enacted - that's only rational. And the more liberal one's ideology, the more liberal the policies one wants to see. But during the 2016 campaign, I saw that morph into an odd belief that more liberal policies would be more popular, and receive more votes. That's not only politically wrong, it's statistically impossible. Ideology is a bell curve, with the vast portion of the electorate near the center. Every step to the left loses more votes than it gains, just as the Republicans kept moving right until they'd lost everyone but white southern men. So perhaps we can tone down the rhetoric, reduce the use of the word 'socialism' and talk about how we're not DJ Trump and what we might do to make our country a better place.<br />
<span style="color: white;">...</span>mikeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13057701313718589322noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8537045684820674531.post-63091954129058913122018-04-11T13:19:00.000-07:002018-04-14T11:49:55.579-07:00The Pointless Feel-Good Madness of the Rising Facebook Fury<span style="color: white;">...</span><br />
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<a href="http://vectors.pro/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/facebook-f-splat-splash-icon-logo.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://vectors.pro/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/facebook-f-splat-splash-icon-logo.png" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="800" height="280" width="280" /></a>Wow. Everybody hates Facebook, and they'd like something bad to happen to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, because - um - some bad stuff happened, and nobody's doing anything, and we really need to BLAME somebody or something for the bad stuff that happened. Here's the key question: What did Facebook do to earn such bitter enmity and loathing? If you can't explain it in a couple of sentences, and instead fall back on shouting "Privacy!" or "He SOLD our data" or "FAKE RUSSIAN NEWS", you need to go back, do some serious research, and think about it a little harder. Perhaps I can help.<br />
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There are two issues here. One is the Facebook business model. When you run the largest multi-datacenter consumer internet site in the world, your growth models are premised on offering billions of dollars of technology services for free, and you base your revenue models on advertising, you need to deliver effective advertising. The way to do that is to understand as much as you can about every user, so that you can deliver the ads they are most likely to click on. Those advertisers will recognize the higher response rates on your platform and pay you correspondingly higher advertising rates. Let's be very clear - THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THIS. Companies have ALWAYS sought to know as much as they could about their customers - when you use your loyalty card at the grocery store, they give you a discount, because the information they are collecting about your purchasing habits is valuable to them.<br />
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The key to this discussion is that there are two kinds of data. There is PII - Personally Identifiable Data - and there is masked or aggregated data, where the trends and characteristics of a user or group of users can be analyzed and shared without exposing WHO those users are. Every company has PII in their internal systems. Whether it's payment data, address, banking, age, health, financial status, home ownership etc - it's impossible to work with people without collecting information about them. Social media is it's own thing - people, in the course of using the platform, tell the system a great deal about themselves, both directly (I have two kids and another on the way, I have four dogs, I live in Cleveland etc) and indirectly (Likes, Emojis, Quizes etc).<br />
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Google uses the information they collect to provide ad targeting services too. But there's ONE big difference. Google provides the targets themselves - no PII every leaves their possession to go to the advertisers. Facebook has at least one program where they will provide PII to the ad networks to do their own targeting. This is 100% of the problem, and will likely be reduced in light of the firestorm. But that's it - all the screaming about privacy and data protection and "selling" data comes down to nothing more nefarious than who is using the data to target the ads. It's not optimal, but it's really not the end of the world. And if you think it's sufficient reason quit using the Facebook platform, or if you think it makes Zuckerberg uniquely evil, you really should look hard at the other online platforms and tools you use.<br />
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The other issue is the ad content itself. How can they rapidly identify those ads that are problematic, that represent foreign electoral influence, for example? And is it even desirable for them to take it upon themselves to filter ad content? This gets really dicey. Yes, as a private company they are not obligated to provide unfettered speech a la the first amendment. But as a content and messaging company, they MUST retain credibility. If people feel their voices are being silenced, the platform itself will lose credibility, and thus users. And make no mistake, this would be a 'both sides' problem. If we demand that Facebook silence certain kinds of content, they're going to make absolutely certain that there is NO hint of political bias in the decision. That means they're going to silence at least one liberal for every conservative. And because content guidelines can never cover every eventuality, these decisions are going to be seen as crude and arbitrary, and there's just no way that a company the size of Facebook could provide sufficient resources to arbitrate every complaint.<br />
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The argument about "Fake News" is just a complete red herring. Yes, the Russians used Facebook (and Twitter and Instagram) to attempt to influence the 2016 US Presidential election - and they did so with both paid advertising and straightforward user postings. If you want to prevent foreign money from paying for these kinds of ads, great, but don't pretend that money can't be moved around in such a manner as to conceal its source. Russians won't purchase the ads directly, Americans will. The question of where the money actually came from, as with all campaign finance questions, will ultimately go unresolved. And, once again, if you want to empower Facebook to arbitrarily silence controversial users, don't get all weepy on me when they silence YOU too. They don't want to be in the censorship business, and if we force them to take on that role, they're, once again, going to make sure it doesn't look slanted, and that means silencing voices we want to hear.<br />
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At the end of the day, all consumers of political and public policy news should be skeptical. If you read something, and it's something you REALLY want to believe, that's the moment you should be extra-cautious about just accepting it at face value. Do your due diligence or accept that you're being lied to and used. Pizzagate was a stupid, irrational conspiracy theory with zero evidence to support it. People who believed it WANTED to believe it. People who took a moment to check other authoritative and primary sources quickly discovered the truth. This is called 'motivated reasoning' and it has NOTHING to do with Facebook or social media. Fox News is the greatest example of a propaganda outlet that KNOWS it's audience only wants to hear certain things, even if they are untrue.<br />
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So, does this mean there are no problems with Facebook and the larger social media ecosystem? Of course not. What it DOES mean is the current hysterical freak-out has much less to do with Facebook policies and processes and much more to do with our own frustration and sense of helplessness. I would think that the spittle flecked hatred of all things Zuckerberg will die down after the midterm elections, when there are more actual functional checks on Trump's madness. But ultimately, don't expect much to change, because there's really not very much to BE changed.<br />
<span style="color: white;">...</span>mikeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13057701313718589322noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8537045684820674531.post-92169712974927585082018-04-05T14:41:00.000-07:002018-04-05T14:52:55.731-07:00The Kevin Williamson Saga - Ur Doon It Worng<span style="color: white;">...</span><br />
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So, at long last, our long national nightmare has come to an end. Kevin Williamson is no longer employed as a writer at The Atlantic. Your children can come out of the safe room and you can all sleep sound tonight.<br />
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Right?<br />
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I find this whole thing to be distasteful, and I am particularly disappointed with the behavior of so many of my fellow liberals. What Williamson said was foul, but I have two important reasons why we should have attacked his content (and encouraged him to produce more of it) rather than screaming for his head. The first is based in values I believe are critical to the American experience - values that are rapidly disappearing from both sides (yes, I said it) of the political spectrum. The second reason is more calculated, more pragmatic, and more important in the specific sense of women's rights and the abortion argument.<br />
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First, let's talk about writing. Williamson hasn't been silenced, exactly. He can still write a blog, and offer pieces as a free lancer. It was The Atlantic that was silenced, shouted down by a mob for doing what they believed was best for their commercial organization. They might have been wrong about that in the long run, but we'll never get to find out. Williamson was pushed out of a professional writing job. As someone who views himself as a writer first, I find that simply unacceptable. In America we have always believed that you have a right to sell your services to the highest bidder, and if that resulted in content that we found offensive, we had the option of not patronizing that particular purveyor of ideas, or of even writing our own piece denouncing the positions offered. Too often I see my fellow lefties shrieking in fury over a writer with whom they do not agree getting offered a job by a major outlet. I can only imagine how awful they would feel if some conservative hate mob ran them out of THEIR dream job for offering a political position that they found offensive. I guess I can't speak for all the people I thought I knew, but I don't want to do that.<br />
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Which brings us to the more pragmatic argument. There is NO reason why we should be arguing about women's reproductive rights in 2018 - Roe v Wade was decided almost fifty years ago. But one of the more 'powerful' (to some) arguments on the right is that abortion is murder. Indeed, they often compare abortion in America to the Holocaust or genocide. This is a stupid, specious argument, but we keep letting them get away with it. Why? Just like this instance. What Williamson said - that a woman who had an abortion should be hanged - is really nothing but the logical outgrowth of this kind of rhetoric. In that sense, it's both logically consistent and brutally honest. In the Summer of 2016, the politically ignorant Donald Trump said the same thing on the campaign trail. Why? Because it's OBVIOUS, and he had no grounding in the tactical political messaging of the anti-abortion rabble. They KNOW this is toxic - they can go as far as suggestion some limited punishment for doctors, but the logical consequences of their "abortion is murder" stance is something that will kill their movement almost instantly.<br />
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So Williamson put it out there. It was a HUGE opportunity for the pro-choice community to engage and put other conservatives on the spot. "Is Williamson wrong? If abortion is murder, isn't he actually RIGHT?" The big, ugly secret behind criminalizing abortion would out on the table for all to see. Religious nutjobs would agree with him, politicians would run from him, but they all would have to explain how to adjudicate the mother in a world where abortions were criminalized. I would have encouraged him to speak out further on how women should be prosecuted and executed for a medical procedure. He'd do more damage to their neanderthal misogynist views on women's rights then anybody would have imagined. And for that matter, I KNOW The Atlantic quite well. I've been friends with James Fallows for over a decade, and they welcome engagement from both sides. Williamson's pieces would have opened up a major debate in their pages, and thoughtful people would have had a chance to speak to women's rights in front of an audience prepared to consider what they have to say.<br />
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So congratulations, fellow lefties. You took a major opportunity to advance the dialog on women's reproductive rights and threw it in the dumpster, all while you took an unnecessarily illiberal, authoritarian approach to speech. And in the battle to get ideologues fired from writing jobs, I suspect the Conservatives will be coming hard after this. We got our scalp, shot ourselves in the foot and ended up silencing ourselves.<br />
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It's just not a good look...<br />
<span style="color: white;">...</span>mikeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13057701313718589322noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8537045684820674531.post-38391596388008297702018-03-01T14:37:00.000-08:002018-03-01T14:37:20.833-08:00Knowledge is Power, but Stupid is Eternal<span style="color: white;">...,</span><br />
One of the dumbest arguments you see in the gun rights debate is the insistence that if you don't have a deep, specific knowledge of guns, their components and characteristics, and the jargon that describes it all, you can't have a considered opinion on the topic. As someone with a typically higher level of mechanical expertise on the subject than your typical wingnut gun rights absolutist, please allow me to weigh in on the subject.<br />
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First, it's a specious argument, really a category error, because we aren't against 'guns' in this argument, but against gun violence - the killings and suicides are are destroying so many lives in our country. The obvious fact that the easy availability of modern firearms is the direct cause of the gun violence in the US - NOT just the high profile mass shootings, but the endless nightly death and horror that occurs every day and every week, like clockwork - is the reason we'd like to see some strong limitations on the right of the people to keep and bear arms. Vigorous gun regulation works to massively limit gun violence in every nation that has tried it, and the tighter gun regulations in other nations don't seem to be causing any loss of 'liberty'.<br />
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But even in the context of this debate, it's a false imperative. YOU know what you're against. You know what a gun is, what it looks like, what it does. You are trying to stop murders - indeed, our people would never stand in the way of the kinds of regulations we'd pass if we hadn't at some point lost our collective minds as a population. You don't need to know what caliber cartridge is being used to slaughter kids. You don't need to know the difference between an upper and lower receiver. You don't need to know the make and model of the handguns that take hundreds of American lives - and destroy thousands more - every single day.<br />
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That said, the ONE exception to this rule is if you are advocating for a 'type ban'. It's fine to talk about an 'assault weapons ban' because we all know what it is we're asking for. But if you want to debate the actual functionality of the legislation - and you should, because there would be significant efforts to build in large-scale loopholes that prevent it from doing what we want it to do - then you'll have to get serious about learning what it is you want to ban. You can't ban 'assault rifles' because there is no legally agreed-upon definition for that phrase, and as soon as the NRA lobbyists get their input in the legislative language, it will be essentially meaningless anyway.<br /><br />Nope, you're going to have to learn about stocks and grips and mechanisms and barrels and flash suppressors and all of the parts and pieces that will make up the meat and potatoes of your bill. You're going to have to figure out how to think like the manufacturers and include language that prevents them from designing the same rifle with different features. In that case, you're going to need to take a deep dive into the topic.<br /><br />The exception to THAT, however, is if you want to advocate for a ban on semi-auto firearms. As an old-school revolver guy, I'm totally OK with that, but it's not something I'll be putting any effort into. No way congress passes it, no way a President signs it, and no way it gets through the courts who would strike it down as 'overly broad'. Seriously, if we can move the needle on the gun debate so far that this becomes a viable solution, it will mean that some pretty effective gun control measures have already passed and the problem is still growing despite them.<br />
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I just wanted to put up this quick post because this seems to be a trending argument among the pro-gun absolutists on social media, and it's simply another attempt at obfuscation. If somebody tells you that you don't know enough about guns to argue against their easy availability, just tell them you know all you need to know because what you're really arguing against is murder.<br />
<span style="color: white;">...</span>mikeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13057701313718589322noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8537045684820674531.post-50398950844116995632018-02-17T11:18:00.000-08:002018-02-17T11:18:34.068-08:00Something Must Be Done!!!<span style="color: white;">...</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Or maybe it should read<br /><b>Get Pissed and Do Something</b></td></tr>
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So today we find ourselves with two ongoing narratives battling for their share of popular outrage. One is yet another mass shooting, this time at a school in Florida, and the other is Russian social media based interference in the American (and other) democratic election process. In these cases, the outrage is expressed in remarkably similar terms - that is people demanding action. Enough is enough, they scream, and they demand somebody DO SOMETHING. And that's fine, as far as it goes - in both cases we find ourselves helpless, and in the face of that kind of helplessness, angry. And we know that, as citizens, we have no real power to change the rules, to somehow turn the world from this crazy, destructive, unsustainable path it has somehow gotten onto, and make it better, make it make sense.<br />
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Both of the outraged demands that somebody DO SOMETHING have something noteworthy in common. In both cases, nobody ever offers any real thoughts or suggestions about what it is we should do. Instead - particularly in the case of the gun murders - the best they can do is demand some magical end-state, without ever even thinking about how to get there, what it might take politically and how much time it would require. I note this partly because it is the same with demands for government funded single payer health care - we want a functional system up and running, but absolutely refuse to do the hard work of thinking about what it would take for us to get to that point.<br />
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Let's first consider the election interference, because in the case of these two impossible demands it is probably the easier one to approach. American elections are tremendously costly primarily because they require a full-spectrum advertising blitz. Not just television and radio, but internet, social media and rallies on the ground. There is nothing we can do to prevent Americans from posting political advertising and messaging, and meeting with others in support of their candidates and issues. The Russian intelligence agencies recognized this early on, and set up a group to impersonate Americans and sew chaos and division. It was incredibly effective, and probably was partially responsible for the election of the most unqualified idiot imaginable to the most powerful position in the land.<br />
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Make no mistake, 2016 was a learning process for them. In many ways they were sloppy, making only a minimal effort to cover their tracks and spending only a million dollars a month on the effort. This year, they will do a better job of hiding the source of funding and recruiting Americans to be the front men for an operation that will then supply content - both stolen (and possible altered) private messaging and emails, and social media posts of the most ugly and outrageous kind possible. Remember, the goal is to create a level of hate and discord that makes a democratic electoral system break down under the weight. The playbook is written, they are coming for us again in 2018, and they will do a better job than they did last time.<br />
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So what can we do about it? Obviously, we're not going to ban political social media messaging and posts, and while we can try to make certain that those posts that are paid advertising are purchased by Americans, but that kind of loose limitation is easily bypassed by the professionals in Russia. It's already clear that won't be near enough. Education won't work, because so many Americans WANT to believe the things they believe, and anything that reinforces those beliefs (crooked Hillary) will be believed, liked and shared. I'm wide open to suggestion, but I believe that the only option that remains is active measures.<br /><br />The US - both in the NSA and in the Military - has an offensive cyber operation in place. (So, it should be noted, does every other country.) We have the option of breaking systems, destroying networks and erasing data. Every time we can target the source of this kind of interference, we could shut it down and force them to reconstitute those capabilities. Seems like that might be effective, right? Of course, with any escalation, you're going to get a counterattack. As mentioned above, they also have an offensive cyber warfare capability, and could respond with their own active measures. What will they come for? State electoral systems? Banking systems? Railroads? Electrical grid? Then how do we respond, and where does this escalating cyber war leave us? And does any of it actually protect our fragile democratic elections?<br />
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As to guns, what we hear is 'ban AR-15s', 'ban semi-auto weapons', ban ammunition types and the old standbys, improve background checks and address our mental health crisis. And of course, none of these things are bad, per se. But they are desired end-states, not anything like a plan or a course of action. If you demand one of these end-states, shouldn't you be obligated to at least offer a rough outline of how you're going to get there? In trying to game out a path to a solution, at least you come to understand how desperately difficult solving these problems is going to be in our current political environment.<br />
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The short answer to the gun problem is going to be nothing less than a shift in political belief systems. At some point, Americans are going to refuse to go along with the status quo. Right now, a significant portion of Americans have decided that this slaughter of innocents is a reasonable price to pay in exchange for unfettered access to modern firearms. But now we're on a path that leads to more slaughter, and higher body counts. Las Vegas was a breakthrough in high-volume murder, and all the people who will commit similar crimes in the future are paying attention. It's almost certain that we will - at some point - experience our own "Australia Moment" when the carnage becomes so sickening, and comes to so many otherwise 'safe, white' places, that we demand that our leaders - at least at the State level - simply ignore the arguments about the 2nd amendment and do the draconian things we need to do to put an end to this madness.<br />
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At the end of the day, demanding action - that somebody DO SOMETHING - isn't a particularly effective political strategy. It just reinforces the understanding of the power imbalance, and lets those 550 legislators in Washington know that nobody actually believes that they will act. But to be fair, this is where we are in the process. The 2nd amendment is toxic, and it's killing Americans at an alarming rate. If enough people get out and demand action, and vote in pro gun control candidates, then change will someday be possible. So yeah - I'd like to hear concrete suggestions, but today I'll settle for anger and outrage.<br />
<span style="color: white;">...</span>mikeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13057701313718589322noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8537045684820674531.post-24916865599927846062018-01-27T14:33:00.001-08:002018-01-27T14:33:08.615-08:00Blogging in the Age of Trump and Twitter<span style="color: white;">...</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Once upon a time, everyone was doing it</td></tr>
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Trump ruins everything. Blogging, for me, was a kind of an extended conversation where I could think about trends and events and try to derive meaning or even understanding from them. And we had a little informal group - our 'Bloggerhood' - that would read and comment, providing feedback and input and helping the process of turning knowledge into wisdom go forward. It was fun, often hilariously funny, thought provoking and endlessly fascinating. Blog posts went from a few sentences to a few thousand words - you could easily read, digest and comment on a number of them throughout the day.<br />
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Blogging, in general, is dying today. Nearly dead. Part of it is Trump - people are so appalled and gobsmacked at his corruption, ignorance, arrogance and vicious hatred that they can't look away, they can't let a day go by without 'reporting' on his hypocrisy or damage to democracy. So that's what many blogs in my beloved Bloggerhood have become - just another website that rehashes the latest Trump outrage. It's like everybody I know has lost the ability to think about the world, and can only focus on the news from yesterday.<br />
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But here's the thing. We ALL read the news yesterday. I don't need my friends to tell me a brief tl;dr version of the news reports I read. There's seldom any thoughtful analysis provided with these days old outrage reports - which is understandable because at this point there is very little left to be learned. We know what we've got, we know what the rules are, we know that our American small-d democratic experiment is very sick - perhaps terminally so.<br />
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Today, more than ever, thinking about the intersection of society, culture, economics, technology and public policy is desperately important. These are the sources of power for individuals and groups, and the way those groups form and relate creates communities - and wars. Now would be a great time to accept that we've ALL heard the outrageous stories, and we are - to the extent of our ability to sustain outrage at this point - outraged too. PLEASE think about, instead of telling me that Trump or Hannity or Nunes or Gowdy did something awful, which we already know, tell me what it MEANS. How it fits. What it might lead to. Please think about THINKING again - there is no value in reporting yesterday's news - that's why print newspapers are dying too.<br />
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Now, to be fair, Trump isn't the only suspect in the death of blogging as a broadly democratic publishing platform. In fact, Twitter is the MAIN suspect. There is apparently a belief among many that one can do the same thing on Twitter that one could do on blogs, but it would take only a fraction of the time and effort. Of course, that turns out to be a false assumption, but ease and convenience will trump time and effort every time. One of the things that amuses me no end is the proliferation of 20, 30, even 50 part Twitter 'threads'. These are blog posts, chopped up to fit within the 280 character limit, and often incoherent as a result. But just write a blog post and link to it from Twitter? I suspect that most of the people who will read the fifteen hundred word Twitter thread would never click on that link. Blogging is SO last decade, amirite?<br />
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Obviously, this has affected me too. I write a lot less - with so much Trump overload, it's hard to come up with other, interesting topics that might engage a readership. And while my readership numbers have stayed about the same, nobody comments anymore, so the whole interactive learning thing is no longer an option. But I mostly write to work out my own beliefs and understanding of events - I've always thought you can't really know even what YOU actually think until you set out to write it down. Then you'll very likely discover that even YOU don't believe precisely what you thought you believed. But I'll never just repeat the same news I read yesterday - that's just not interesting for me or anyone else. If there's a lesson to be learned (other than Republicans in America are craven hypocrites, which we already know well), I might START with a newsworthy event, but that would never be the point of the piece.<br />
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[Tomorrow we'll see lots of blogs talking about how the GOP demanded Democrats return the Weinstein donations, but say nothing about returning the Wynn donations. Seriously, do you really think that's an interesting topic?]<br />
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Blogging is magical because it removed the barrier between the writer and publication. You no longer needed an intermediary to make your work available to a global audience. That's the most democratic thing I can think of - if the fax machine brought down the Soviet Union, then blogging changed all the rules for information management forever and ever, amen.<br />
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I'm not ready to give it up for dead quite yet.<br />
<span style="color: white;">...</span>mikeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13057701313718589322noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8537045684820674531.post-4951630338310612822017-12-26T12:31:00.000-08:002017-12-26T12:31:28.384-08:00Helping My Favorite Bastard<span style="color: white;">...</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Don't be afraid. Bitcoin is your friend.</td></tr>
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Last week my fellow blogger <a href="http://bigbadbaldbastard.blogspot.com/">Big Bad Bald Bastard </a>wrote a <a href="http://bigbadbaldbastard.blogspot.com/2017/12/dunning-krugerrands.html">piece expressing his contempt</a> for Bitcoin. It was, as a useful analysis goes, pathetic, uninformed claptrap. Now, I'd ordinarily just ignore that - people hear about a technical topic, they hear people TALKING about it, and they form opinions based on nothing so much as a <i>feeling</i>, a sense that it is somehow dangerous or evil. But Mr. Bastard is different. I've known him for more than ten years, and he is one of the smartest people I know, well-read and broadly informed across multiple domains and topics. To be fair, he seldom writes about technology - and make no mistake, cryptocurrencies are complex technologies - but for him to go so far off the rails struck me as stunning, and I just feel like I need to help him understand why he needs to re-visit the topic in some deeper detail.<br />
<br />
I'm not going to do yet another cryptocurrency explainer here - any of you can go read the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin">Wikipedia article</a> and there's no dearth of authoritative information sources if you want to go deeper. Instead I want to take issue with the Bastard's premise, and challenge some of his conclusions.<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>The Big Picture</b><br />
The first question is about the concept of a digital currency itself. It's unclear from his piece what the Bastard thinks about the idea writ large, and yet I struggle with this ambiguity. Setting aside any problems with implementation, is there any reason why an anonymous digital currency - essentially a cash equivalent for use across the internet - should not be welcomed, even embraced? Right now, if you want to transfer funds digitally for any reason, you have to use a bank or financial company as an intermediary. All the details of the transaction are available to business, corporations, marketing companies and governments. We still have cash - even if we use it less than we used to for convenience sake - why shouldn't that option at least be available on the wire?<br />
<br />
<div>
<b>Pick an Argument</b><br />
Part of the Bastards distaste for Bitcoin (and presumably all other cryptocurrencies) is that he sees it as an embodiment of the whole Ayn Rand/Ron Paul/Libertarian project, which he hates. I'm sympathetic to this conclusion, even though it is largely incorrect. Why? Well, to whatever extent he finds Libertarians stupid, unrealistic, racist and cruel, I either agree with him or even exceed him in contempt for this 'ideology'. But does this argument truly apply to cryptocurrencies? Well, it's true that they do tend to like the fact that it is not issued by any government or agency, and that it DOES provide a mechanism for avoiding government fees and taxes. But is a solution like Bitcoin really the Libertarian ideal? No, it's not. In general, a currency must meet two often incompatible requirements. It must be a:<br />
<br />
1.) Reliable store of value<br />
2.) Functional medium of exchange<br />
<br />
Bitcoin is not a reliable store of value. The value of a Bitcoin floats on the exchanges, in a daily dance that all currencies and commodities go through called 'price discovery'. Commodities are worth exactly what people will pay for them, so they are traded on exchanges precisely so that the market can decide how much that is. In short, Libertarians like gold, because its value is intrinsic, rather than based on government backing.<br />
<br />
But make no mistake - Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are highly functional as a medium of exchange, and are used as such thousands or millions of times every day - to the complete satisfaction of the parties to the transaction.<br />
<br />
<b>But People Steal Bitcoins All The Time</b><br />
Mr. Bastard raises the point that hackers have stolen a lot of Bitcoins. This is true. The primary exchange, Mt. Gox, actually collapsed when hackers were able to take possession of all their Bitcoins. None of their customers could clear any transactions. This is all very true - but is it in any way reflective of the value or worthiness of a cryptocurrency? Actually, no. Hackers are constantly trying to steal anything of value on the internet. They have stolen orders of magnitude more regular dollars and Euros than they have stolen Bitcoins, and they steal intellectual property and pretty much anything they can get their hands on. If you're stupid, lazy, sloppy or just plain unlucky, you could lose anything you have on your computer or in the cloud. Interestingly, it's actually EASIER for a regular user to secure their Bitcoins than it is to secure their bank account. You are completely reliant on your bank to secure your money, but you don't have to store your Private Key online. You can put it on a thumb drive or even print it out, and put it in a home safe or safe deposit box. Hell, if you wanted to, you could print out your key and turn it into a book cypher.<br />
<br />
<b>The Greed Factor</b><br />
The reason that Mr. Bastard chose now to write his Bitcoin piece is very likely because Bitcoin has been in the news quite a bit due to an extraordinary runup in the value of Bitcoins expressed in US Dollars. He clearly finds this troubling, but I can't even begin to imagine what he thinks it tells us about cryptocurrencies. Investors are always looking for a way to diversify their portfolio, so as a high-risk investment, putting some dollars into Bitcoins in a rising market makes perfect sense. The market is volatile, and some people are going to lose money. But that happens all the time, with copper, and oil, and soybeans. Exchanges exist for just this reason - to determine the current market price for a given commodity - and it is no reflection on the underlying commodity. When the price stabilizes, the commodity is still there.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>The Blockchain - The Answer to All Your Cryptocurrency Questions</b><br />
Another highly surprising argument that Mr. Bastard raised is that Bitcoins aren't 'real'. That's false, although the reason it's false is fairly hard to understand. Bitcoin is not a technology - it is a currency, or perhaps a product. The technology that enables cryptocurrencies is a cryptographic-based transaction monitor called the Blockchain. Every Bitcoin that has ever existed, and every transaction that has ever been executed is recorded in the Blockchain. The Blockchain can't be altered, it can't be tampered with, it can't be erased. It is the Blockchain that makes Bitcoins real - they can't ever disappear. Mr. Bastard wrote (referencing the Tulip panic of the seventeenth century) that at least, unlike Bitcoins, tulip bulbs were 'real' and still had value as tulip bulbs. Again, he's talking about the inherent value of a currency. Take your wallet out of your pocket. Look inside. You'll see pieces of green paper, cut to a uniform size and printed with a picture of a dead president. What is the inherent value of a $20 bill? I'm pretty sure it's zero. That is the magic of fiat currency - the money is representative of value. It doesn't carry that value in and of itself. Once again, this is why Libertarians prefer gold.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Let There Be Bitcoins</b><br />
Speaking of fiat currency - and man, do Libertarians HATE fiat currency - the government produces those pieces of green paper using a printing press. So how the hell do you produce Bitcoins? Unsurprisingly, the Blockchain provides an answer to that question. It's called 'mining', and by providing the distributed computing power required for the large scale calculations made within the Blockchain, a user is periodically rewarded with one Bitcoin. It's exactly like a printing press turning paper and ink into money, but it's digital, so it uses processing power and connectivity instead. Once again, Mr. Bastard seemed to have a problem with this process, but he never really made it clear what that problem was.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Lions and Tigers and Mobsters, Oh My</b><br />
And, of course, there's the standard complaint. If you have an anonymous digital cash-equivalent, then people will use it for criminal purposes. Of COURSE they will. Let me tell you a quick story. Back in the early '80s, I let a friend of mine use my apartment in San Rafael as the operational headquarters for a very large cocaine transaction being shipped to Alaska. I was not a known drug dealer, and I had the defensive wherewithal to protect both the cocaine and the money. So on the appointed night, I had five guys crawling around on my living room floor, carefully arranging foot-high stacks of US Currency from the wall to the kitchen. It was a SEA of money - more than I have ever seen in one place before or since. It was striking, really. But it occurs to me that nobody ever suggested that we get rid of cash dollars because they get used for purposes like that. That's not ALL they're for, and we like the freedom of using cash anytime we want that reassurance that our purchase is untracked.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Conclusion</b><br />
The idea of a cryptocurrency was easier than the execution. This is a whole new concept, and it was based on some programming and a bunch of math and it was hard. There have been some birthing problems, but they're getting addressed. When we finally have a solid, stable, broadly accepted cryptocurrency, it probably won't be Bitcoins at all. But Bitcoins is where we learned how to do this, how to roll out a Blockchain based payment solution and manage the process.<br />
<br />
But it seems like an important - perhaps even necessary - part of a modern digital economy. I just can't for the life of me understand why someone would think that the right answer is to make sure that banks and governments should be permitted to know everything about everything we buy, every dollar we transfer, every charitable contribution we make. I'm hopeful that in having this conversation I can convince my friend to think about this a little harder, and perhaps re-evaluate his position.<br />
<span style="color: white;">...</span></div>
mikeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13057701313718589322noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8537045684820674531.post-71112070145549154472017-12-23T13:37:00.000-08:002017-12-23T13:37:00.604-08:00Super Villain du Jour<span style="color: white;">...</span><br />
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Eric Schmidt. Elon Musk. "Tech Bros". Gamergate. If you're an American liberal, your new favorite target of hatred and opprobrium is people who have had some success in the tech industry, particularly in Silicon Valley. And if you examine a highly competitive industry-specific locale and are shocked - SHOCKED I say - to find some bad actors, some arrogant people (many of whom found something they were unusually good at, and like star athletes or musicians or actors, invested their entire self-worth in that set of skills), and some foul human attributes like bigotry and misogyny, well, maybe you had an unrealistic set of expectations.<br />
<br />
But come on. It's not a horrible, dystopian place full of rich people harming others. It's actually a place where the excitement of invention and the opportunity to build something of value from nothing has been embraced by going on three generations. I started working in tech in 1986, and moved to Silicon Valley in 1990. I've been there through Apple, Sun, Oracle, Ashton-Tate, Intel, Novell, the rise of Windows, the Browser wars, the rise and fall of the UNIX workstation, tape cartridges, optical media and the internet. Believe me when I say it, "I've SEEN things you...people...would not believe".<br />
<br />
Are there some rich people doing awful things? SURPRISE!! Of course there are. Are there some priviledged assholes saying ugly things online? Wow. Never saw that coming. But to paint the entire region and the amazing things that are done there every day as some kind of fundamental evil is not only wrong, it's stupid.<br />
<br />
One of the funniest things I see - typically from people who have spent little to no time in the valley themselves - is the description that this is somehow correlated with the generalized evil of 'white men' (or white cis men in common usage). I've worked in the valley for years, and you know what we don't have much of? White men. Asians, South Asians, Germans, Eastern Europeans sure - but in most companies I've worked at white men were the least numerous demographic category represented.<br />
<br />
One of the things I have always LOVED about the valley - although it's kind of fading out now as things become more 'corporate' - is that it was entirely meritocracy based. I was a building products salesman with zero college when I started working in tech. Immediately, from my very first employer (Polaroid), my supervisors noticed that I seemed to be able to figure technical and process things out quickly. Everywhere I went, I got raises and promotions not because I had this degree from that University or I know those people, but because at the tip of the spear, operating on the bleeding edge of the technology envelope and living on our own dog food, I was able to make things work and convince people to buy them.<br /><br />The same was true of women in particular, and people of color. There was never enough time, never enough resources, never enough knowledge. If you walked in the door and started making things work, you became a star.<br /><br />Now, big companies all suck. Polaroid, Google, Apple, Facebook - the suits come along and make a bunch of rules and all of a sudden there's a place for pay discrimination and some weird version of the 'Good Ol' Boys Network' that in this case extends to Hyderabad and Guangdong. But what we're talking about here is an institutionalized set of limitations and restrictions that affect the entire Fortune 1000 equally. It's not a 'tech' phenomenon, it's a CORPORATE phenomenon. But there are thousands of brilliant, exciting little startups full of interesting, smart people who only want to see their vision brought to market. They don't CARE who helps them, and they will work with - and reward - anyone who can drive that process.<br /><br />One of the things you learn very quickly working in a venture-funded startup, is that a LOT of the direction and guidance comes from the VCs themselves. They are very hands on, and if you work at a company like that the portfolio owners are going to talk to you and your team. Regularly. And I'm going to tell you - if they've got $10 million real US dollars invested in your company, and they see you fucking with a woman or a gay guy or a black guy instead of all pulling on the rope in the same direction - well, you're not going to enjoy the conversation. You're going to get told to leave your horseshit at the door, develop the product and build the company.<br /><br />Or get out.<br />
<br />
THAT is the reality of Silicon Valley.<br />
<span style="color: white;">...</span>mikeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13057701313718589322noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8537045684820674531.post-49225367649773528372017-11-29T15:01:00.000-08:002017-11-29T15:07:13.846-08:00EDC - Practical, Useful, No Guns<span style="color: white;">...</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSk0eu5cX5ag-um7aCqFYbcZkhDnq2xcM1i5cFF3rMs6P0kdIz9_TfhIx5-hrSXcQjZNgayRHv1yYU8-DSN9l1ggppdJI3XCHufXSgOIIc1rDnI5RgW5qfCo8pDEmR6X1rS4dvP8NjWsg/s1600/gear+bag.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="736" data-original-width="877" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSk0eu5cX5ag-um7aCqFYbcZkhDnq2xcM1i5cFF3rMs6P0kdIz9_TfhIx5-hrSXcQjZNgayRHv1yYU8-DSN9l1ggppdJI3XCHufXSgOIIc1rDnI5RgW5qfCo8pDEmR6X1rS4dvP8NjWsg/s400/gear+bag.jpg" width="500" /></a></div>
<br />
Seb Gorka is a massive Dorka, but the idea behind the article was pretty interesting. What do we carry when we leave the house on a given day? I've long been a fan of the gear bag/man purse solution - every since I got my first mobile device, an Apple Newton in 1994. The idea is you don't have to locate all the different bits you want and load up your pockets, you just grab your keys and gear bag and you're off!<br />
<br />
So this is my current gear bag of choice. It's a Maxpedition Beefy Organizer - the size of an oversized wallet, it would be perfect if it had a shoulder strap. But it's pretty close to perfect as it is.<br />
<br />
Clipped on the front is my longstanding favorite every day carry knife, the Benchmade AFCK Mini. It's no longer made, but you can find them used and they are a superb choice. I also stuff a couple of elastic hair ties in the net pocket on the front - when they break you NEED to have a backup available.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEugBnoHmXVz40I0CMCBK1bZge4WSKRxr_rCm9rL6NSHMACtrxmNhJpXDP_Np1pIijjaYCtkzhsfNhCx5p9bpNQT_2MciLGi0w3eEjyu9IkhfHvh3A45sJ5-3Q8hw50Sy11vLyxUhDIvE/s1600/gear+bag+full.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="434" data-original-width="685" height="310" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEugBnoHmXVz40I0CMCBK1bZge4WSKRxr_rCm9rL6NSHMACtrxmNhJpXDP_Np1pIijjaYCtkzhsfNhCx5p9bpNQT_2MciLGi0w3eEjyu9IkhfHvh3A45sJ5-3Q8hw50Sy11vLyxUhDIvE/s400/gear+bag+full.jpg" width="500" /></a></div>
<br />
Here it is opened up. Since the AFCK lives on the front, I've set it to one side. But you can see how neatly everything just fits inside, always easy to get to. Pocket stuffers are easy to spot - they're always digging around in their various pockets trying to find something. It's like enduring a pat-down search a dozen times a day, except you're doing it to yourself.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSQ_nfbdkuE3he2rC_BtH52RzQ6VE-OBNvv4E9re5C_Zz4A69fUgQZVfbuorBO6NQb3fgBkz1wRUFy7JhyggkA70wtnlr1nJEOObrD832E_TRk2bOmqShVTAKuGJ5_jQiyE9puLBRuSZ0/s1600/edc+gear.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="782" data-original-width="1095" height="350" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSQ_nfbdkuE3he2rC_BtH52RzQ6VE-OBNvv4E9re5C_Zz4A69fUgQZVfbuorBO6NQb3fgBkz1wRUFy7JhyggkA70wtnlr1nJEOObrD832E_TRk2bOmqShVTAKuGJ5_jQiyE9puLBRuSZ0/s400/edc+gear.jpg" width="500" /></a></div>
<br />
And here's the gear:<br />
<br />
1.) My 'glasses'. Just 1.5x drugstore cheaters, they were given to me years ago by an old girlfriend. My eyesight isn't that bad, but by golly when you need 'em, you need 'em bad.<br />
<br />
2.) Aformentioned and beloved Benchmade AFCK<br />
<br />
3.) Nail Clippers. The BIG size, because they're just easier to hold onto, and they generate a very strong clipping force. Leverage and stuff.<br />
<br />
4.) Telescoping pointer. Yep, it's old school - I went through my laser pointer period decades ago - but when you pull it out and extend it, you automatically get everyone's attention. Kids today, amiright?<br />
<br />
5.) Tactical pen. Yes, you can write with it, and as a non-lethal self defense weapon it is utterly unrivaled. The 'point' isn't that sharp - it's not a knife - but if you use it to strike nerves, joints or even skulls, it ends the fight in a hurry.<br />
<br />
6.) 7 Power monocular telescope. I'd love to carry a pair of binoculars - being able to see things a block away is remarkably useful - but obviously they're too big and heavy to be part of a gear bag. The monoculars are of good optical quality and are plenty small and light to always have one with you.<br />
<br />
7.) Power brick. It's a gotta have. This is a 10,000 amp/hour battery that can charge my phone five times. It's one of the great insurance policies you can buy.<br />
<br />
8.) Kubaton. Simple aluminum cylinder, you can really 'punch above your weight' when you have one of these and know a few weird tricks.<br />
<br />
9.) Pillz. Yes, I take pillz. A lot of pillz. If I'm going to be gone for more than an hour, I want to have the requisite pillz (and coffee beans!) with me.<br />
<br />
10.) Smiths PP1 Multifunction sharpener. Knives need maintenance. This has both ceramic and carbide guides depending on the condition of the blade in question. Plus a hone for serrated blades. It's indispensable.<br />
<br />
11.) This is a cheap little Gerber folding knife. I once bought like a dozen of them - this is the last one I have. I don't like to use the Benchmade for the more 'industrial' tasks, so the Gerber is my box cutting type tool. After the Battle of Cupertino, I was searched, searched again and taken to the jail. It was only then I realized that they had missed the little Gerber I had tucked in my elastic wristband. Believe me, THAT was a delicate negotiation!<br />
<br />
12.) Simple little flashlight. One AAA battery. Nothing special, but it lights things up when it's dark, and it's easy to carry.<br />
<br />
13.) Earbuds. I got these with the soft rubber cups, because the hard plastic ones hurt my fragile ears. They sound good, and they work great for both phone calls and music.<br />
<br />
14.) Hairbrush. When your hair is measured in feet, not inches, a comb is of zero practical use. A decent little hairbrush with strong rubber spikes keeps things neat and orderly.<br />
<br />
So there you have it. No guns, not tourniquets, no alpha-male signalling. Just the things I want to have with me, all in one place, effortless.<br />
<br />
Please feel free to post your EDC in comments. Let's see what other people (who are not me) do.<br />
<span style="color: white;">...</span>mikeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13057701313718589322noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8537045684820674531.post-30058204871440511242017-11-23T14:26:00.000-08:002017-11-23T14:26:55.607-08:00Good Friends We Had, Good Friends We Lost Along the Way<span style="color: white;">...</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sometimes Farce, Sometimes Tragedy</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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I've been researching, studying and writing about politics and economics (you can't separate 'em) since the 'soft coup' in 2000 that put the Odious GW Bush in power. There are a lot of people I've come to like and respect in the process, but every now and then one of them gets lost, reaches the worst, most inaccurate conclusions and just stops thinking, learning and listening. It always saddens me when it happens - it's not like I have an infinite supply of friends, especially not thoughtful, well-read and insightful ones who I can learn from. But I bring with me a set of rules, and I can't imagine trying to understand the chaotic and maddening political landscape without sticking to them no matter what.<br />
<br />
1.) No false equivalences. Things can be in a category - there can also be category errors - but each thing brings its own set of context, and offers a different set of conclusions. When you advocate 'one-size-fits-all' solutions, you don't end up solving anything.<br />
<br />
2.) No fantasies. There are things that are possible constitutionally, and there are things that are possible politically. The conversation HAS TO be held within those parameters. If you want to shriek SOCIALISM, if you want to destroy capitalism, if you demand a massive government program like publicly-funded single payer universal health care without at least learning enough to know what you'll have to overcome to deliver it, if you expect the very people who benefit from greed and corruption to eliminate greed and corruption from the political process - if these are the kinds of political goals you espouse, we're having two different conversations.<br />
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4.) The rules matter. If you don't like your party's candidate selection/nomination process, you can try to change it. But bear in mind that there are longstanding vested interests in that process, and until you can change it those are the rules of the game we're playing. We should continue to point out the rules that make no sense - disproportionate representation of rural states in the Senate, the Electoral College, etc - but we can't pretend we can ignore them or eliminate them in the short term.<br />
<br />
5.) Politicians are dishonest. Pundits and scholars CANNOT be. If you can't come up with an actual viable argument for the policies you like, lying is not an acceptable option. Neither is pretending I said something I didn't say so you can argue against THAT. If an honest analysis demonstrates that your policy doesn't do what you claim, you don't get to invoke magic. You either have to accept the analysis and try to argue around it, or you have to change your policy.<br />
<br />
Ultimately, the point of public policy as it plays out as politics is not to win so much as to make the lives of people in the community - constituents - better than they were. But every now and then, people on either side can 'lose their mind' and they often become obsessively focused on one arbitrary issue, typically attacking those on their own side of the center for a perceived lack of ideological purity or less than fanatical support for a particular extreme set of actions.<br />
<br />
I've seen liberals I liked become so deeply enmeshed in anger over decisions made in Washington that they develop a burning hatred for their own country. Does the US do some bad things? Absolutely. Is the US (or banks, or pharma, or insurance companies, or {fill in the blank} the root of all evil in the world? Nope. Not even close. When you lose sight of global realities, you become a sad caricature, a laughable dancing bear. Look at Glenn Greenwald. Don't be like Glenn.<br />
<br />
I wanted to talk about this a little bit, because this week I walked away from a friend I've liked and admired for a long time. But he's become so focused on tearing down the Democratic party, its institutions and the establishment left in general that you can no longer have an interesting or even rational conversation with him. There's a large contingent of the post-Bernie left that never got over the Democratic Primary, but with the government our system has allowed to form after the 2016 election, if we can't unite against the hatred, greed and corruption of the Republican party at this point, we're doomed.<br />
<span style="color: white;">...</span>mikeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13057701313718589322noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8537045684820674531.post-84762251255763100662017-11-09T12:04:00.000-08:002017-11-09T12:04:00.678-08:0020/20 Vision<span style="color: white;">...</span><br />
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It seems abundantly clear at this point that as long as the American government is controlled by the Trump/Ryan nexus, Democrats are going to have a significant popular advantage throughout the electorate. Between the embarrassing, buffoonish Trump with a demonstrated disinterest in policy and process, and the almost comic-book villain personification of Ryan as he pursues Republican policy goals that are universally loathed by 80% of the electorate, the political ads just write themselves and in all but the reddest constituencies (you know, the racist ones) and the Democratic candidate starts with a powerful built-in advantage.<br />
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I still don't think the Democrats will recapture the majority in the House of Representatives, but it's hard to imagine they can't re-take the Senate and significantly tighten up the House. And with another year to go, Trump (or Mueller) could easily change the dynamic so even the House is in play.<br />
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But seriously. We need to start thinking about 2020. In the run-up to 2016, there were people who said that maybe it would be best in the longer-term if Trump were to win, burn the existing structures to the ground, and open the way for a liberal government to truly take power. I thought this was a horrible idea - certainly plausible, but it just seemed to me the costs would still be too high, no matter the longer term outcome. Well, as it turns out we ended up with this experiment in political destruction by government incompetence and corruption, so what the hell. Maybe it will all turn out for the better.<br />
<br />
But we need to think seriously about candidates. It's true - I'll grudgingly admit - that Hillary Clinton was not a great politician. She ended up in a leadership role almost accidentally, did a wonderful job in her political roles, but faced with a relentless non-stop attack from both the Republican Party and the media, attacks that were encouraged by an effective cyber-influence campaign operated by a foreign adversary, and ultimately brought down by a federal police force that wanted to end Democratic leadership in the White House, a victory might have been just a little more than we could have expected. And even with that, she won the election, only losing by a tiny rounding error worth of votes that happened to be in exactly the right place. We have to do better.<br />
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I don't like Bernie Sanders. I think he's a flim-flam man, a fast talker who happens to share (to the extent we actually know them) my preferred policy goals. But he shows no interest in the details, and he's afraid to even suggest funding or regulatory details because he's terrified he'll be challenged on them. His government funded universal free health care for all is a nice little slogan, but he never engaged honestly with how he'd pass it, how he'd fund it and how he'd implement it. His numbers were clearly wrong, but when asked about that he attacked rather than engaged. I don't really like Paul Ryan, and a liberal Paul Ryan doesn't do much more for me. We have to do better.<br />
<br />
I'm a politics geek, a gearhead who looks at policy function, economic distributional outcomes and effective government intervention in the private sector. I don't have any idea who the Dems should nominate - particularly in light of the chaos and suspicious swirling around the Republicans that obscures who their candidate might be - but I do think it's a conversation we need to be having. I don't believe we need to move radically to the left - most Democrats, if they had the power, would pass effective, liberal, technocratic legislation that would solve problems without disastrous unintended consequences. A big key will be nominating the anti-Trump - a clean, brilliant, well-spoken professional without a whiff of corruption. Yeah, another Barack Obama. He's proof that we CAN do better.<br />
<br />
There will be challenges in 2020, but they won't be ideological. Trump will have thoroughly destroyed the 'conservative' brand, and most any Democratic candidate should win any race not dominated by racists. One big key will be keeping the Russians from driving the narrative. Another - related in many ways to the first - will be making sure that the primary elections and nominating process aren't used to divide the Democratic vote.<br />
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Mainly, we have to recognize 2016 for the outlier that it was. The longer we on the left continue to rend our garments and re-litigate the primary, accuse each other of everything from dishonesty and corruption to socialism and something nebulous we call 'neo-liberalism' (which is apparently bad), the less we will be able to take advantage of the tailwinds that Trump is creating and intensifying. He's a clear and present danger, and we need to come together and agree that replacing him with a Democrat with as much legislative power as possible is critically important.<br />
<span style="color: white;">...</span>mikeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13057701313718589322noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8537045684820674531.post-82325507195676972312017-11-03T13:02:00.001-07:002017-11-03T13:02:55.432-07:00The End of Physics?<span style="color: white;">...</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/00/Standard_Model_of_Elementary_Particles.svg/1200px-Standard_Model_of_Elementary_Particles.svg.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="765" data-original-width="800" height="266" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/00/Standard_Model_of_Elementary_Particles.svg/1200px-Standard_Model_of_Elementary_Particles.svg.png" width="280" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Our story so far...</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<b>Point 1.) </b>The Large Hadron Collider in Europe, with a budget of almost eight billion euros, is the most powerful particle accelerator/collider in the world. It was built to replace FermiLab's Tevatron, the previous most powerful collider. Best known for discovering the Top Quark in 1983, the Tevatron was improved over its twenty year lifespan, eventually reaching collision energies of 1.8TeV (trillion electron volts) by colliding protons and anti-protons at 9oo GeV each. But it was recognized quite early on that, based on our understanding of the Standard Model, much higher collision energies and luminosity (essentially, the number of collisions recorded over a given period of time) were going to be necessary. When the US government cancelled the SSC being built in Texas in 1993, CERN's proposal to build the LHC was adopted and funded. After some frustrating delays, the LHC began it's initial run in 2009, with the intention to ramp up to collision energies of 13 TeV in 2015. The goal was to find out what could be learned about the fundamental characteristics of matter at energies and densities similar to what was extant in the immediate aftermath of the big bang. Specifically, the Higgs Boson, Dark Matter and Supersymmetry were expected to be discovered or disproved, and at long last the Standard Model would be completed.<br />
<br />
<b>Point 2.) </b>The Standard Model can be comfortably thought of as the most successful failed theory in the history of physics. Every single prediction it makes has been proven, and yet we KNOW it is brutally incomplete. If we accept that gravity is one of the fundamental forces (along with electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force, the strong nuclear force), then we need to understand both how it is mediated and why it is so much weaker than the other forces. While the discovery of the Higgs Boson filled out the last box in the Standard Model, we are left with no operational theory of quantum gravity, and no clue as to what most of our universe is made of.<br />
<br />
So now we're nearing the end of the 2017 data run at LHC. The joyful discovery of the Higgs is years behind us. And once again, despite some tantalizing events that turned out to be mere statistical anomalies, we come away with nothing. No Graviton. No dark matter. No Supersymmetric particles. No surprises, nothing that tells us anything beyond what we already know. And nothing to help us fill in the pieces we KNOW are missing. If gravity is a force, the gravitational field has to be mediated by a quantum force carrier. We KNOW that's how it works, but if we can't find that 'graviton', we can't understand gravity.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, outside the realm of CERN, physicists are just lost, stumbling around in the darkness. Without a ten billion dollar machine, they have no idea where to look for new discoveries. We've spent decades watching theoretical physicists indulge in the worst form of academic masturbation, creating dense, elegant mathematics that make no predictions and cannot be tested experimentally. Between string theory, inflationary cosmology and Supersymmetry, the larges portion of working physicists today aren't even doing science. They're working on unfalsifiable speculation that leads off in silly, pointless, untestable directions like the multiverse, or worse, that our entire universe is somehow just a digital simulation.<br />
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The way science is supposed to work is that the theorists postulate a theory, and the experimental scientists and engineers develop ways to test the predictions that the theory makes. If they start finding actual evidence that supports the theory, it gets plugged into the larger base of knowledge to make sure it fits in all the corners and doesn't fall apart at certain energies or conditions. Once enough evidence is gathered for the theory, it becomes accepted science. But that's just the beginning. Accepted science is boring. Now the theorists go back to work, trying to 'break' the theory - to find a reason why what we THINK we know is wrong. Because if we get something wrong, that means there's more to learn.<br />
<br />
All of which brings us back to the Standard Model. We KNOW it's wrong - or at least incomplete. We know what it tells us, and we know there are things it's NOT telling us. And that's with a ten billion dollar mega-machine churning away at the problem. So whither physics? What happens if we learn nothing of consequence for years to come? How do you do fundamental research when the basic cost of knowledge is beyond your species willingness to pay the cost of 'basic science'? How do we get from where we are to the next discovery when we do not have the equipment to do the experiments? And, of course, what if we, as a species, decided to spend $25 or 30 billion on a new collider at much higher energies, and nothing changed?<br />
<br />
I find it sad and frustrating to be living in such an amazing time, a time when we understand so much that no human ever understood before, and yet we seem to have no path forward. We're seeing breakthrough science in machine intelligence, computing power, data analytics and robotics, and that's both interesting and life changing. But we're stuck with the nagging thought that big science has picked all the low-hanging fruit and left us here, wondering what is just beyond the limits of our ability to discover it. And scientists keep going off in weirder and weirder directions because they don't have any way to do new science today.<br />
<span style="color: white;">...</span>mikeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13057701313718589322noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8537045684820674531.post-65769046423045469552017-11-01T14:18:00.001-07:002017-11-01T14:18:48.215-07:00Social Goddam Media - Somebody Really Should DO Something...<span style="color: white;">...</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Watch your ass, Jesus, <br />she's got a BIG right hand</td></tr>
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Russian intelligence agencies have not been sleeping for the last ten years. They have been watching the political and ideological polarization in western democracies, and they have noted the opening that provided a skilled and prolific propagandist in in the age of the internet. They understood Wikileaks, they understood Infowars, they understood the power that gave them to guide the narrative. But then, with the unfettered power to publish professional (or not-so-professional - it turns out it doesn't really matter) looking narratives directly to targeted audiences provided by Facebook and Twitter (among so many others), they discovered how easy it was to actually <i>shape </i>the domestic narrative. They found that by pushing made-up stories through Social Media, they could actually drive the entire American news cycle. That's right, they paved a direct highway from troll/bot farm to Fox News and MSNBC.<br />
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There's a number of reasons they chose to support Trump, but it's not unreasonable to consider that 2016 was a proof of concept exercise, an opportunity for 'live fire' testing of a new and powerful weapon of destabilization. Putin has long been furious with Bill Clinton's manipulation of the drunken and mentally debilitated Boris Yeltsin in the years after the fall of the Soviet Union. He also angrily - but carefully - observed the US sponsored 'Color Revolutions' in Georgia and Ukraine, and planned to defeat the Americans at their own information game. When Trump came along, with his nativist, nationalist and isolationist rhetoric, he was the obvious vessel to support with a full-spectrum cyber-campaign that might help him destabilize the EU and weaken NATO.<br />
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So the hackers used advanced phishing techniques to steal information, while the paid trolls and bots spread story after story smearing Clinton and encouraging anger and humiliation among Berniecrats. Altogether, it was a quite effective campaign, using stolen data to amplify false narratives in a way that could be targeted against any set of demographic characteristics.<br />
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And now everybody's pissed.<br />
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So, with the next election a year away, what is to be done? Well, for all the spittle-flecked hatred being flung at the leadership of Facebook and Twitter, you'd think it would just be a matter of some bipartisan legislation banning them from...what, exactly? Political speech? Dishonest posts? Foreigners? Hmmm, maybe this isn't quite as easy as we thought.<br />
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Suppose we were aware of - and worried about - the power of social media to amplify specific messages and agendas long before the events of 2016 transpired? Well, that's problematic, because that phrase - "amplify specific messages" - is precisely the goal of online advertising. The platform was built to provide carefully segmented, highly targeted access to paying customers. The owners of the platform rely on those revenues, and would not set out to intentionally cripple them, regardless of the larger risk they represent. And a platform that goes around deleting posts and banning users isn't going to be successful for very long - the market would soon produce a platform who's sole raison d'ĂȘtre would be "we let you post and read what YOU want". Can you imagine ANY effective action that could have been taken to prevent an adversary nation from using social media tools like Facebook to undermine our democratic processes?<br /><br />What role do we want government to take in limiting our exposure to propaganda? One thing I DO know - if you silence someone I hate, I'm happy, but if you silence ME (or someone I agree with) I'm furious. But that dynamic sort of prevents any action at all, doesn't it? Of course, Facebook isn't the government, so you have no absolute right of free speech on a digital communication platform, but what is the attraction of a platform like that when it seems to silence anyone at any time for anything? Wouldn't we immediately seek a platform that let us share our thoughts and beliefs without keeping such a heavy thumb on the topic scale?<br />
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Nobody's going to like it, but I know what the answer is. Foreign governments are going to have to become a little more careful in how they deliver targeted propaganda on social media platforms - hiding sources of funding, using better writers and grammar, perhaps being a little more selective in choosing false narratives - but beyond that, this is now a core feature of western democratic politics. From Brexit to Berlin, Washington to Paris, some of the most effective activists will be rabble-rousing on Facebook, and there's nothing that can be done that doesn't make the situation worse.<br />
<span style="color: white;">...</span>mikeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13057701313718589322noreply@blogger.com0