Mass disability - dysfunctional web sites, apps for everything

I last wrote about "mass disability" and the Left Behind in a 2021 post. The concept has sometimes seemed on the edge of going mainstream but it's never quite made it. Maybe we're getting closer; a recent Michael Tsai post (No App, No entry) reminded me of my Mastodon thread from a few weeks ago:

What is the crazy that drives Trumpism and the many global equivalents?

It is that the minimal IQ to function well in the modern world is now about 120 and that eliminates most people.

This is both the most important fact of our time and the least palatable. It is the thing that cannot be said and it will be ruin of us if we don't say it ...

I've been saying this for years. Today I was reminded of it while doing some travel booking.

During the bookings I encountered:

1. A web site that didn't work with my older version of Safari (I knew what was wrong and switched to Chrome. 

2. A Delta web site bug (I recognized it as a bug and knew what to do). 

3. Place that was out of rental cards but I new Expedia would have some contracts that would let me find one. 

4. Travel web sites that all needed new credentials...

... These are all routine parts of modern life including maintaining flaky computer systems (let me tell you ...) and phones ...

It was not like this even 35 y ago. Travel agents handled travel complexity. There were no smartphones. Computers were very limited. There was no internet for most. By necessity everyday life was much simpler. Most people could cope with it.

Now most cannot cope.

This is the most important feature of our time. And nobody can talk about it. 

I remember some good discussions on this thread but I can't find any of them now. Perhaps by design Mastodon has a limited memory. (My home instance has no search, so I had to download my archive and search it to find the date of the post. Then I could slowly navigate to it.)

I expanded on the theme a bit later:

Hotel laundry year 2000

1. Insert quarters to buy detergent, operate washer and dryer.

IQ requirement: 65 (my son could do this after a demonstration)

Hotel laundry year 2023

1. Scan QR code to download app whose profit comes from unspent funds.

2. Install app, create account with Apple ID

3. Figure out cryptic UX so can deposit funds (several odd unintuitive steps)

3. Deposit funds, paying just enough to cover this sesh. Pat the 25 cent low transaction penalty... 

4. Spot the scam behind app and avoid it (eg find at minimum)

5. Diagnose why after paying money and confirming machine it’s still not working

6. Authorize specific transaction

7. Start laundry.

(My son could not do this)

8. When complete delete app. 

IQ requirement: minimum 110, higher to spot the scam. 

This is why America is burning.

People are scared and angry and feeling left behind -- and they can't come out and say they are unable to manage their tech. Because that's the ultimate shame.

See also:

• Biden's essential task is to help the Left Behind 1/2021
• Complexity, cognition, civilization 11/2021
• What is the middle class and why can't most Americans get there? 11/2020
• Broken world: applying for a minimum wage job via a corporate HR web site 3/2017
• Trumpism and transition to mass disability 8/2016
• Is most American poverty actually disability? 10/2013
• The post-AI era is also the era of mass disability 12/2012 (we've been in the AI world for years)
• Unemployment and. the new economy 1/2011 (rather than unemployment we ended up over the next decade with a shrinking middle class and more people on the edge).
• Mass disability and the middle class 9/2011

Civilization, complexity and the limits of human cognition - another attempt at explaining the 21st century

The 70s were pretty weird, but I was too young to notice. (Not coincidentally, the Toffler/Farrell Future Shock book was written then.) By comparison the 80s and 90s more or less made sense. In 1992 Fukuyama wrote "The End of History" and that seemed about right for the times.

Things got weird again in the late 90s. I was in a .com startup and I remember valuations getting crazy about 1997, 3 years before the .com crash. We were still picking ourselves up from the crash when 9/11 hit. (A year later, on a purely personal note, my youngest brother vanished.) In the early 00s came Enron and other frauds almost forgotten now. Then in 2008 the real estate collapse and the Great Recession. We were barely recovering from the Great Recession when Trumpism hit. Followed by COVID (which was expected and not at all weird) and the Great Stupidity of the American Unvaccinated (which we did not expect and is perhaps weirdest of all).

Each time the world went off kilter I have tried to figure out a root cause:

In Feb 2009 I tried to figure out the crash of 2008:

At last count my list of contributing factors to the crash of '09 included ...

1. Complexity collapse: we don't understand our emergent creation, we optimized for performance without adaptive reserve
2. Mass disability and income skew: The modern world has disenfranchised much of humanity
3. The Marketarian religion: The GOP in particular (now the Party of Limbaugh), but also many Democrats and libertarians, ascribed magical and benign powers to a system for finding local minima (aka The Market). The Market, like Nature, isn't bad -- but neither is it wise or kind.
4. The occult inflation of shrinking quality: What happens when buyers can't figure out what's worth buying. Aka, the toaster crisis - yes, really.
5. performance-based executive compensation and novel, unregulated, financial instruments: a lethal combination. See also - You get what you pay for. The tragedy of the incentive plan.
6. Disintermediating Wall Street: Wall Street became a fragile breakpoint 
7. The future of the publicly traded company: A part of our problem is that the publicly traded company needs to evolve
8. The role of the deadbeats: too much debt - but we know that
9. Firewalls and separation of powers: a culture of corruption, approved by the American electorate, facilitated dissolving regulatory firewalls
10. Marked!: Rapid change and the Bush culture made fraud easy and appealing

I put Marked! pretty low on the list, but maybe I should bump it up a bit. The Hall of Shame (Clusterstock) lists a lot more fraud than has made the papers [1]...

• Fairfield Greenwich Group: quietly complicit in the Madoff fraud?
• Angelo Mozilo: white collar mobster
• Sam Israel: a $400 million fraud. In the old days, he'd have been front page news. I never heard of him.
• Many more, each of which would have been in the news once - including: JS Forte, RS Piccoli, JG Ossie, D Palmer, A Nodel, Marc Dreier.
• Those swindlers who have made the news... Allen Stanford, and, of course, Mr. Madoff.

By 2010 I was focusing on RCIIIT: The rise of China and India and the effects of IT.

... The Rise of China and India (RCI) has been like strapping a jet engine with a buggy throttle onto a dune buggy. We can go real fast, but we can also get airborne – without wings. Think about the disruption of German unification – and multiply than ten thousand times.

RCI would probably have caused a Great Recession even without any technological transformations.

Except we have had technological transformation – and it’s far from over. I don’t think we can understand what IT has done to our world – we’re too embedded in the change and too much of it is invisible. When the cost of transportation fell dramatically we could see the railroad tracks. When the cost of information generation and communication fell by a thousandfold it was invisible ...

In 2016 and again in 2018 I tried to explain Trumpism by contributing factors (I was too optimistic about Murdoch's health though):

• 65% the collapse of the white non-college “working class” — as best measured by fentanyl deaths and non-college household income over the past 40 years. Driven by globalization and IT both separately and synergistically including remonopolization (megacorp). This is going to get worse.
• 15% the way peculiarities of the American constitution empower rural states and rural regions that are most impacted by the collapse of the white working class due to demographics and out-migration of the educated. This is why the crisis is worse here than in Canada. This will continue.
• 15% the long fall of patriarchy. This will continue for a time, but eventually it hits the ground. Another 20 years for the US?
• 5% Rupert Murdoch. Seriously. In the US Fox and the WSJ, but also his media in Australia and the UK. When historians make their list of villains of the 21st century he’ll be on there. He’s broken and dying now, but he’s still scary enough that his name is rarely mentioned by anyone of consequence.
• 1% Facebook, social media, Putin and the like. This will get better.

That 1% for Facebook et all is pretty small — but the election of 2016 was on the knife’s edge. That 1% was historically important.

A few months ago I listed 3 causes for the post-COVID supply and labor shock economics of 2021:

1. Wealth became extremely concentrated. 

2. Returns on labor for 40% of Americans fell below modern standard for economic life.

3. Good investments became hard to find.

It's almost 2022 now, so we're into almost 25 years of the world not making sense any more. So now I'm digging even deeper for a root cause.

Today I'm going with Gordon's Law: the complexity of a complex adaptive system will increase until it reaches a limiting factor. Our civilization is a complex adaptive system and its complexity increased until it hit a limiting factor -- the complexity capacity of the average human. These days between 40 and 50% of American's can't handle civilization 2021 (sometimes I call this mass disability (see also). Witness among other things, The Great Stupidity of the FoxCovians.

It's a variant of the "Future Shock" Toffler wrote about 52 years ago. I don't have a fix; I don't think the world will get less complex. Our technologies are moving too fast. Maybe we'll just get used to not understanding the world and civilization will stumble on regardless. After all, for most of human history the world was incomprehensible -- and we did manage. Sort of. Mostly without civilization though ...

Primary care 2019 vs. 1989

There’s been at least a 200-300% increase in care complexity between when I started medical practice and today. Many new classes of medications for fairly common disorders, many more specialty interventions that may be considered.

At the same time computer based clinical decision support systems have been a surprising failure. (Emily uses Epic, I use VistA/CPRS). In the 90s we expected far more than we actually got.

We are asking a lot of the modern primary care physician.

Tech regressions: MORE, Quicken, PalmOS, iOS, Podcasts, Aperture, Music, iPad photo slide shows, and toasters.

One of the odder experiences of aging is living through technology regressions. I’ve seen a few — solutions that go away and are never replaced.

Symantec’s classicMac MORE 3.1 was a great outliner/editing tool with the best style sheet implementation I’ve seen. It died around 1991. The closest thing today would be Omni Outliner — 16 years later. There’s still no comparable Style Sheet support.

Quicken for DOS with 3.5” monthly diskette records of credit card transactions was the most reliable and useable personal accounting tool I’ve experienced — though even it had problems with database corruption. I think that was the 1980s. Today I use Quicken for Mac, a niche product with unreliable transfer of financial information, questionable data security, and limited investment tools.

PalmOS Datebk 5 was an excellent calendaring tool with good desktop sync (for a while the Mac had the best ‘personal information management’ companion). That was in the 1990s. When PalmOS died we went years without an alternative. I briefly returned to using a Franklin Planner. Somewhere around year 3 of iOS we had equivalent functionality again — and a very painful transition.

iOS and macOS have seen particularly painful combinations of progressions and regressions. OS X / macOS photo management was at its best somewhere around the end of Snow Leopard and Aperture 3.1 (memory fuzzy, not sure they overlapped). OS X photo solutions had finally reached a good state after years of iPhoto screw-ups — the professional and home products more or less interoperated. All Apple needed to do was polish Aperture’s rough edges and fix bugs. Instead they sunset Aperture and gave us Photos.app — a big functional regression. Apple did something similar with iMovie; it’s much harder to make home “movies” than it once was.

iOS was at its most reliable around version 6. So Apple blew it up. Since that time Podcasts.app has gone from great to bad to not-so-bad to abysmal. The iPad used to have a great digital picture frame capability tied to screen lock — Apple took that away. For a while there was a 3rd party app that worked with iCloud photo streams, I could remotely add images to my father’s iPad slideshow digital picture frame. There’s nothing that works as well now; as I write this I’m working through a web of bugs and incompetence (I suspect a desperate timeout stuck into iTunes/iOS sync) to sneak some photos from Aperture to an iPad.

Apple Music is following the path of Podcasts.app as Apple moves to ending the sale of music (probably 2019). At the same time iTunes is being divided into dumbed down subunits (iBooks regression). The last 2-3 revisions of iTunes have been so bad that this feels almost like a mercy killing.

We don’t have a  way to avoid these regressions. Once we could have gotten off the train, now the train stations are dangerous neighborhoods of lethal malware. We need to keep upgrading, and so much is bundled with macOS and iOS that we can’t find 3rd party alternatives. Data lock is ubiquitous now.

I think regressions are less common outside digital world. It’s true toasters aren’t what they were, but since 2006 Chinese products have become better made and more reliable. Perhaps the closest thing to tech regressions in the material world is the chaos of pharma prices.

This takes a toll. There are so many better ways to spend my life, and too few minutes to waste. I wonder what these regressions do to non-geeks; I don’t think it goes well for them.

Broken world: applying for a minimum wage job via a corporate HR web site

My #1 son is a special needs adult. He’s excited to start at $10/hour job running food around a sports stadium. It’s work he can do — he’s got a great sense of direction and he is reasonably fit.

The job engagement process is run by an archaic corporate web site that looks like it was built for IE 3. The site claims to support Safari but warns against Chrome. It is not useable on a smartphone.

The HR process requires managing user credentials, navigating a complex 1990s style user interface, and working around errors made by the HR staff — who probably also struggle with the software. He would not have the proverbial snowball’s chance without my ability to assume his digital identity.

Sure, #1 is below the 5th percentile on standard cognition tests — but this would have been a challenge to the 15th percentile back in the 90s. In the modern era, where most non-college young people are primarily familiar with smartphones, this is a challenge to the 30th percentile.

Which means the people might want to do this job are being shut out by the HR software created to support the job. Which probably has something to do with this.

The world is broken.

#massdisability

Trumpism: a transition function to the world of mass disability.

We know the shape of the socioeconomic future for the bottom 40% in the post globalization post AI  mass disability world.

But how do we get there? How does a culture transition from memes of independence and southern Christian-capitalist marketarianism to a world where government deeply biases the economy towards low-education employment?

There needs to be a transition function. A transform that is applied to a culture. With the anthropology perspective I’ve long sought Arlie Hochschild makes the case that Trump is, among other things, a transition function that erases Tea Party Marketarianism and embraces the heresy of government support (albeit for the “deserving”).

In a complex adaptive system we get the transition function we need rather than the one we want. No guarantee we survive it though.

See also:

• Trumps is a Politics of Loss and Revenge 8/2016: Marshall demolishes false dichotomy between economic distress and white racism.
• Gordon's Notes: Donald Trump is a sign of a healthy democracy. Really. 8/2015. Well, today I’d write “a desperate democracy”, but my tough love take on why we have this pathologic human being contending to more or less destroy civilization.
• Trump explained: Non-college white Americans now have higher middle-aged death rates than black Americans 11/2015. Marshall does a better job in his 2016 post.

Why DOJ should block Aetna and Anthem acquisitions: A story of strategic pre-authorization delays

The health insurance industry is consolidating. Aetna acquired Humana and Anthem bought Cigna. That leaves UnitedHealth, Aetna and Anthem as the mega-corporate rulers of US healthcare. Unless, of course, the US Justice Department blocks these mergers. 

Like most people who pay attention to healthcare policy I very much hope the DOJ does its job properly. I’m glad we have the Obama DOJ to stand up for us, at least now we have a fighting chance. That’s not why I’m writing this blog post though, and it’s not the reason why I’ll be writing Senator Klobuchar to ask her to work against these mergers.

I’m writing this because, of course, I’m personally mad at Aetna. I think I know why Aetna and Anthem are in a position to do the acquiring, and it’s not because they’re better at delivering health care. I think they’re winning because they excel at both strategic incompetence supported by a tobacco-industry class executive culture.

In my case a physician ordered a radiology procedure for me that requires pre-authorization by my insurance company - Aetna. The order, alas, was placed in early December — perilously close to the end-of-year period. A period where cost can shift, depending on deductibles, from the insurance company to the insured, or from one carrier to another.

Aetna could decline the authorization. That might have been a reasonable act — not every physician recommended procedure is a good idea, particularly when the physician owns the imaging process. I’m guessing they don’t have grounds for denial, so instead they simply stall. Information is provided … and Aetna can’t find it. They ask for the same information several times. They will succeed in running out the clock. My physician’s staff tell me Aetna excels at this game, even by industry standards they’re good at not delivering what we pay for. Which is usually considered theft.

Aetna’s executives don’t have to write up a formalize this profitable process. They don’t need to put anything in writing. All they have to do is underfund their pre-authorization process (a “cost center”), or provide financial incentives to delay payments, or not staff for the holidays, or promote executives who are good at cost control. Most likely they do all four. 

I suspect Anthem has the same skill set, but Humana and Cigna probably aren’t quite as good at being evil. There are so many ways in healthcare to do well by doing wrong; it’s a rough rule of thumb that the more profitable a healthcare operation is the less good it’s doing.

Aetna is going to win their little battle with me. The best I can do to get even is write Senator Klobluchar (I know Senator Franken will oppose) and complete their legally mandated complaint form.

And I can write a blog post.

See also

• Happy accident fraud - Feds move on Aetna and other health insurers with deceptive provider listings 5/2015. “Don’t put your Disability Claims office on the fifth floor of a building with a faulty elevator to defraud anyone, just do it for the cheap rent.” After signing up you discover there you actually can’t get healthcare
• Anthem - Putting the Hell in Health Insurance 8/2010. Strategic incompetence in action. Their profits let them buy Cigna.
• Emergent fraud: Anthem and automatic payment denials 9/2010. We really don’t want Anthem owning Cigna
• Big GOP stealth donors: aetna, coke, koch, exxon; pfizer, unitedhealth, walmart, Microsoft. Yeah, Aetna and UnitedHealth.
• Gordon’s Notes: Emergence: how entropy and incentives create scams 2/2009. A systemic problem where information asymmetry exists.
• AMA asks Justice Department to block Aetna-Humana, Anthem-Cigna mergers 11/2015. I don’t often agree with the AMA, but they are right about this one.

Update 12/30/2015

After completing the official complaint form, and separately posting a public message to Twitter @aetnahelp and follow-up email to socialmediacustomerservice@aetna.com, I received this message on the morning of 12/30:

Of course it’s too late now, Aetna ran out the clock. As we knew they would. Even though the bad guys won this one, I would try public Twitter messages and email to socialmediacustomerservice@aetna.com in future. A kind of special service track for the geek elite. 

Calendaring in iOS, OS X, Outlook 2010 and Google Android/Chrome are all very different.

If you’ve ever wondered why healthcare institutions can’t easily share data between computer systems, just take a look at Calendaring in iOS, OS X, Outlook 2010 and Google Android/Chrome.

Google went down the road of calendar overlays. You can have as many calendars as you like and you can share them across a Google Apps domain or between Google users. Public calendars are available for subscription. My current Google Calendar calendar list holds twenty distinct calendars of which 8 belong to my family. (One for each family member, one for entire family, a couple of parent-only calendars that the kids don’t see.) In Google’s world, which is consistent across Chrome and Android, shared calendars can be read-only or read-write. Google supports invitations by messaging.

I love how Google does this, but I’m a geek.

I’ve not used any modern versions of Outlook, but Outlook 2010 also supported Calendar subscription. They didn’t do overlays though, every Calendar stood alone. I never found this very useful.

Apple did things differently. Not only differently from everyone else, but also differently between iOS, OS X, and iCloud.  OS X supports calendar overlays and subscriptions, but the support of Google Calendar subscriptions is  weird (there are two ways to view them and both are poorly documented). iOS has a very obscure calendar subscription feature that I suspect nobody has ever used, but it does support “family sharing” for up to 6 people/calendars (also barely documented). There’s an even more obscure way to see multiple overlay Google calendars on iOS, but really you should just buy Calendars 5.app.

iCloud’s web calendar view doesn’t have any UI support for Calendar sharing, I’ve not tested what it actually does. Apple is proof that a dysfunctional corporation can be insanely profitable.

All three corporations (four if you treat Apple as a split personality) more-or-less implement the (inevitably) quirky CalDAV standard and can share invitations. Of course Microsoft’s definition of “all-day” doesn’t match Apple or Google’s definition, and each implements unique calendar “fields” (attributes) that can’t be shared.

Google comes out of this looking pretty good — until you try to find documentation for your Android phone and its apps. Some kind of reference, like Google’s Android and Nexus user guides. As of Dec 2015 that link eventually leads to a lonely PDF published almost five years ago. That’s about it.

I don’t think modern IT’s productivity failure is a great mystery. 

Happy accident fraud - Feds move on Aetna and other health insurers with deceptive provider listings

Happy accident frauds are emergent frauds — nobody needs to plan them. Don’t put your Disability Claims office on the fifth floor of a building with a faulty elevator to defraud anyone, just do it for the cheap rent. Then save costs by replacing your customer support staff with an automated call management system.

The insurance industry is great at emergent frauds enabled by complexity and powered by perverse incentives. It’s baked into their business model; any player who doesn’t cheat will go bankrupt.

So it’s not surprising that health insurers competing in public marketplaces have produced inaccurate physician directories. It’s not limited to public ACA style coverage, we get our Minnesota health care through an employer plan, and after we chose Aetna we discovered their oral surgery listings were fictional. They seemed to have many providers available in our area, but all the ones we called said the listing was wrong.

Why pay the costs to maintain an accurate listing when an inaccurate listing gets you customers who can’t actually make claims?

The good news is that the Obama administration is now starting to address the problem. Alas, the fines are likely to be pathetically small, we’ll need class action litigation to really change things or find ways to drive the worst offenders out of business by failure of ‘network adequacy’. (emphases mine, note the related problem of prince concealment in the industry, another part of a fundamentally murky business)

White House Moves to Fix 2 Key Consumer Complaints About Health Care Law - NYTimes.com

The White House is moving to address two of the most common consumer complaints about the sale of health insurance under the Affordable Care Act: that doctor directories are inaccurate, and that patients are hit with unexpected bills for costs not covered by insurance.

Federal health officials said this week that they would require insurers to update and correct “provider directories” at least once a month, with financial penalties for insurers that failed to do so. In addition, they hope to provide an “out-of-pocket cost calculator” to estimate the total annual cost under a given health insurance plan. The calculator would take account of premiums, subsidies, co-payments, deductibles and other out-of-pocket costs, as well as a person’s age and medical needs.

Since insurers began selling coverage through public marketplaces 19 months ago, many consumers and doctors have complained that the physician directories are full of inaccuracies. “These directories are almost out of date as soon as they are printed,” said Kevin J. Counihan, the chief executive of the federal insurance marketplace.

Medicare and Medicaid officials have found similar problems in the directories of insurance companies that manage care for beneficiaries of those programs. In December, federal investigators said that more than a third of doctors listed as participating in Medicaid plans could not be found at the locations listed.

The new standards significantly strengthen an earlier rule, which required insurers to publish directories online and to make paper copies available on request. In the federal exchange, violations are subject to civil penalties of up to $100 a day [ed: 0.000001% of revenue?] for each person adversely affected.

Federal officials said that inaccurate provider directories could be a sign of larger problems. If doctors listed in a directory are not available or are not taking new patients, consumers may not have access to covered services, and the insurers may not meet federal standards for “network adequacy,” the officials said. Consumers must often pay extra when they use doctors outside the network of their health plan, so an inaccurate directory could also lead to higher costs for patients.

… Aetna says that data in its directory is “subject to change at any time.” UnitedHealth tells Medicare beneficiaries, “A doctor listed in the directory when you enroll in a plan may not be available when your benefits become effective.” …

See also:

• Emergence: how entropy and incentives create scams: 2009, Aetna’s FSA management - just make it hard to process a claim
• Mobile phone fraud - The accidental data charge and other scams: 11/2009. A lot of these scams have gone away during the Obama administration, thanks to more competition between carriers and a lot of regulatory action. Government can work.
• Emergence: how entropy and incentives create scams 2/2009.
• Emergent fraud: Anthem and automatic payment denials 9/2010
• Anthem - Putting the Hell in Health Insurance 8/2010
• Health insurance: we’re defeated by a complexity attack 11/2009
• Employment benefit complexity: we are sheep 11/2007
• The hidden insurance problem: they can play the game better than we can 11/2007

Gordon's Laws of Acquisition updated: The Device Limit

It wasn’t the MacBook Air’s SSD problem confounded by encryption usability problems and the “Update Needed” ghost user. [2]

It wasn’t the cognitive gymnastics that connected inability to access iCloud video to Apple’s newly announced device limits. (Though once I connected this to weeks lost to iTunes sync bugs I was probably getting there.)

It wasn’t that our still warranteed AirPort Extreme Base Station acts like it has a failing power supply.

It was, finally, when the MacBook Air ran into a cyclic reboot problem. That’s when I did the math.

Our family owns 5 iPhones [1] and 3 Macs (and various iPods, but I’ll ignore those). Child #1 and #3 have school iPads. About ten devices across five users, and each user has iCloud and Google Accounts (more than 13 Chrome Profiles).  So maybe 20 or so things each of which has a 98% chance of being problem free in any particular week. How often should we have a trouble-free week?

That would be (0.98)^20, or about 67% of the time. So about 1 week in three I should run into one or more significant debugging problems. That’s pretty much what I see. I have other things I’d rather be doing.

This isn’t the first time I’ve run into this kind of complexity crunch. Until 2005 we were primarily a Windows XP household with a single lonely iBook. XP was emphatically not problem free 98% of the time. Maintenance was eating way too much of my life. I bought a G5 iMac, retired the XP machines, and, after I made it through some grim early days with the G5, life got a lot better.

So what can I do in 2015? XP was pretty bad by 2005 — I don’t have such an easy target today. I’ve already cut out a lot of services; we use a selective mix of Google Apps and iCloud with a handful of other high quality high reliability services (Pinboard, Feedbin) that only I use.

The answer, I think, is fewer devices. So instead of buying an iPhone and an iPad, buy an iPhone 6s+. If I want a new MacBook, I have to find something comparable to get rid of. If the WiFi is bad in a part of the house, I don’t buy a WiFi extender; I just don’t use the WiFi there. Over time, work towards fewer devices and services — sacrifice power for reliability.

Oh, yeah, and no (useless) Apple Watch.  Life is too short.

Fewer devices means it’s time to modify Gordon’s Laws of Acquisition (2008)…

1. Never acquire anything until you really, really, want it -- three separate times.
2. The real cost is the lifetime cost, from acquisition to disposal … think subscription — not ownership. In the modern world we don't own, we subscribe to something that's neither inert nor living. The purchase price is often the least of things.
3. Don't buy on promises or potential. Acquire for real value now. Anything in the future is a plus (or, sometimes, a minus).
4. Don't buy more than you can consume now. We all have fixed resources to acquire and adopt new things; acquisitions that sit on the shelf depreciate very quickly.
5. (new) Every purchase must reduce maintenance time and complexity, typically by replacing a less reliable device or by substituting one device for two devices.

 See also

• Why you will live in an iOS world 12/2010: “a hunch this opportunity cost is important to understanding what happened to the world economy between 1994 and 2010” foreshadowed a post from two weeks ago. Contrary to what i wrote then I think I’ll still be on OS X in 2018.
• Gordon’s Laws for software and service use 4/2010. i don’t pick up new services any more, not unless I can get rid of 1 or 2 old ones.

[1] I won’t pay for anything else. The thought of trying to maintain any other type of phone gives me hives.

[2] My blog post is still in draft. That was just 3 weeks ago.

IT and productivity - two noteworthy posts from Equitable Growth

Brad DeLong, as best I can tell, does not lead the Washington Center for Equitable growth. Along with Nick Bunker he does, however, produce many of their best blog posts (RSS icon proudly displayed) - like two from a Hamilton Project Future of Work conference (intro PDF, Brynjolfsson and McAfee [1]) that I recently posted back-to-back in my app.net feed.

The first is by Brad, taken from a Larry Summers speech which explains why Summers matters (emphases mine) …

Morning Must-Watch: Larry Summers and Friends: The Future of Work - Washington Center for Equitable Growth

… we have enormous antidotal evidence and visual evidence of [modern IT/AI] technology having huge and pervasive effects … On the other hand, the productivity statistics over the last dozen years are dismal. Any fully-satisfactory synthetic view has to reconcile those two observations…

… I think it is a mistake to think of the economy as homogeneous–as producing something called “output”. As we approach these issues, an aspect that doesn’t get enough attention is that sectors through progress work themselves into economic irrelevance. … candle-making was a major industry in the 1800s, illumination is a trivial industry today…. 

We need to recognize that a sector that has rapid technological progress but of which the world can absorb only so much becomes ultimately unimportant in the economy….

…Consider two goods today: a television set, and a year at a university (or I could use a day in a hospital). The consumer price index for the latter two categories is in the neighborhood of 600. the consumer price index for the former category is 6. There has been a hundredfold change in the relative price of TV sets and the provision of basic education and health care services.

If anybody is wondering why governments can’t afford to do the things they used to do, I just gave you a big hint.

If anybody’s wondering where most people are growing to be working in the future, i just gave you a big hint.

If anybody’s completely confident we will have rapid productivity growth in the future, they should be giving pause–because no matter how much productivity we have in agriculture or illumination, it doesn’t really matter for the aggregate economy. Increasingly, that’s becoming true of a larger and larger fraction of what it is that we produce.

…  in the 1960s,= ,,,  about 6% of the men in the United States between the age of 25 and 54 were not working. Today, 16% of the men in the United States between the age of 25 and 54 are not working. It won’t be very different even when the economy is at full employment.

Something very serious has happened with respect to the general availability of quality jobs in our society.

… Whether you think it is due to technology or to globalization or to the maldistribution of political power, something very serious is happening in our society.

The second is by Nick Bunker …

What to worry about on the supply side - Washington Center for Equitable Growth

…  A new paper by economists Stephen G. Cecchetti of Brandeis International Business School and Enisse Kharroubi of the Bank of International Settlements argues that an over-bloated financial sector can reduce productivity. They contend that by drawing talented workers toward Wall Street, the finance sector lowers the total productivity rate….

From Summers we see that certain technologies have dramatically diminishing returns, so that they become a smaller part of a larger whole. Obvious, now that he’s pointed this out. There is only so much light that we can use. Is this also true of computing power? Is it true of energy?

Is Summers saying all employment will shift to expensive and inefficient health care and education? Isn’t that what Baumol said?

It’s a good exercise to consider how computational processing could follow the path of the lightbulb. There is, for me, no significant difference between a response time of milliseconds and picoseconds. Between modern processors and SSDs there seems no pressing need desktop performance increases. To some extent the human users is the rate limiting step. Only when one eliminates the human user does a millisecond vs. picosecond delay matter, as with high frequency stock “trading” (manipulation) — or the timescales of an AI.

Thinking of high frequency trading, we are reminded that vast amounts of modern economic activity transfer wealth without producing product. They have low to negative productivity, as found by Cecchetti and Kharroubi. Some of these are parasitic processes as would arise from any complex adaptive system, others are forms of more or less transparent fraud rooted in complexity exploitation. In our times information technology has been an essential enabler of both.

Considering failures of productivity enhancement, what do we make of Google Search? Ten years ago Google Search was miraculous, now it increasingly fails to produce much of value [2]. The web grew very quickly on an advertising based business model, but that model has failed and a new model is unborn. Progress is unpredictable in whitewater times.

Or consider email. We’ve been using it widely for almost 30 years, yet very few people use email well. Much time in routine corporate life is wasted by incompetent email [3]. Alas, email’s failures can’t compare to the disappointment of the “electronic health record” or “EHR”

Ahh, the EHR! What dreams we had in the 1980s. Dreams that took me from rural practice to another degree to a career in healthcare IT. It was so obvious how patients would benefit, and how all providers would become far more productive. 

The reality of the EHR has been a crushing disappointment. One day, perhaps, the dreams will come true — but nobody in 1990 would consider the state of clinical automation in 2015 anything but an appalling failure. A failure not of technology, but of business incentives, of markets, and of complex interlocking rigidities.

The list goes on. The same technology that enables location-based alerts also enables malware and adware.  Our economic landscape has been transformed; new technology causes vast wealth creation, but then wealth concentration drives the greater economy to a stagnant deflationary spiral.

Perhaps we’ve been here before. It took 60 years after the 1780 “start” of the industrial revolution for worker living standards to definitively rise. If our revolution started 70 years ago, maybe the rise will start any time now.

Or perhaps we’re headed in a different direction. An Economy is not a system for satisfying humans, or a system for producing goods or wealth or jobs. The “Complex Adaptive System” cliche truly applies. It is an immaterial ecosystem that produces things like wealth and jobs, but also emergent amoebacorp and brain sucking jobs in finance. The Economy is a beast of its own, slouching towards Bethlehem.

- fn -

[1] The PDF includes two killer graphs …

and

 

[2] While writing this post I often searched for prior posts in notes.kateva.org. Google did a poor job, Duck Duck Go constrained to “site:kateva.org” did much better.

[3] If you ever hear of a corporation that teaches employees to write effective email please let me know. I’d like to buy shares.

Related

• Global finance and parasites 9/2009
• Secular stagnation and the Beveridge curve - the role of frail boomer parents 6/2014
• Speculation: The corporate ecosystem and American stasis: corporations are players independent of their owners and managers, and they have changed our financial ecosystem the same way algae change a pond (Amaebocorp) 11/2010.
• The morality of markets - and a response to hunger 9/2010
• Baumol’s cost disease: medicine, education and post-AI disruption 10/2012
• Fraud, IT, Economics and the Depression: Galbraith is most impolite 8/2011
• Finance 2.0, Oil and Project Syndicate - entertainment 2012! 12/2011
• Fraud on Cyber: An annotated sample of Gordon’s Notes 8/2011
• Causes of the Great Recession: China, GPSII and RCIIIT. Now for Act III. 4/2010
• 21st century deception and the evolution of the emergent mind 6/2007
• The IQ of an ecosystem and other questions of emergence 5/2007 

Managing the Facebook Problem

Facebook Reasserts Posts Can Be Used to Advertise. So if I click "Like" on a new offering by Encyclopedia Britannica, my Facebook friends (friends of friends of friends?) will see that in their ad stream and EB will be charged a click fee.

Since my Facebook friends and family members are into sex dolls and bondage they'll be terribly offended by my boring tastes and stop sending me party invitations.

It's the same story with Google+ of course, but G+ isn't a Problem. That's because by the time G+ came out we all knew the rules of the game. My 2011 TrueName G+ account lasted about two weeks; I use G+ services today through my John Gordon and corporate/professional identities.

The Facebook Problem is that I started using it when I was young and stupid - and I still value it. It's been a good way to keep our distant family members connected, and keep connections to old friends. Facebook Pages have worked well for the kids sports teams and especially for following notifications from local non-profits, selected businesses, and government.  

So... a bit of a conundrum. Were I to start using Facenbook today I'd use a 3rd synthetic identity, bringing the total [3] to four (each of these has its own Chrome Profile - which works better on Windows than OS X)

• Public geek: John Gordon. (Once we'd have said "intellectual", but geek is less pretentious and certainly accurate in my case.) I switched my blogs from my TrueName to John Gordon in June 2005.
• Corporate-Net/Professional: Today that's LinkedIn and a G+ account at this time.
• TrueName: This is John Gordon F.... Once it led to a web site, an Amazon account and a Google Profile. Most of those are gone.
• FriendsAndFamily: Something like John Lanan -- where the last name might be somewhat unique but not too unique.

So can I do with Facebook what I did with my net identity in 2005 [1]?

 

Maybe -- for the moment anyway. Facebook allows one username change and a "limited number" of name changes -- though the new name is supposed to be a RealName and was designed for American marriage/divorce practices. Pseudonym use is a violation of Facebook's TOS. (Remember the 2010 Google Buzz and 2011 G+ TrueName wars? Charles Stross's rant is still a classic, he's still not on G+ [2])

 

I may do the Facebook name change - at least as a stopgap measure. I already have a separate locked down pseudonymous Facebook account with zero followers, I'll migrate to that account for subscribing to Page activities and managing Pages. I'll remove my image and identifying information from Facebook, and switch the phone to a GoogleVoice/Hangout number associated with one of my many non-TrueName Google identities. My oldest child has a Facebook account, but I think the younger two will go elsewhere.

 

I rather doubt Facebook will miss me, but I will miss the good things Facebook brought me.

 

- fn - 

[1] My TrueName is fairly unusual, but happily there's now an actor with the same name. He's almost as handsome as I am, and his images have swamped mine. It didn't take long for Google to more or less forget about me, the dominant hit with my TrueName is my public LinkedIn profile. 

[2] Charlie has a popular Twitter account and might worry about where Twitter is going, but as an professional writer he can't separate his professional and personal identities as easily as I can. I think he's always considered his Twitter identity to be both a professional and public intellectual identity.

[3] I'm simplifying. My iPhone's user-resettable advertising identifier is an effective identity, and iCloud/AppleID is a non-public identity related to a set of services not including email.

See also

• A retrospective view of Microsoft's Hailstorm 5/2005: Once controversial, now quaint, even noble.
• Google's two factor authentication and why you need four OpenID accounts 9/2010. Credentials organized by security, which is a different dimension from identity organized by privacy. Not that the multi-dimensional identity-credential intersection is complicated or anything. My 2013 hacked Adobe credentials were Category I: "You want it? Take it." My mysterious 9/2010 Gmail account hack was Category IV.
• My Google profile -- another brick in the wall 12/2007. Before G+ I was 113810027503326386174, that identity link is now dead; it may have died when I turned of G+ on my TrueName account.
• Gordon's Notes: Why the name change? 6/2005
• Gordon's Notes: The Buzz profile problem: I am Legion 2/2010 - Google's first TrueName attempt. I like that old post of mine.

Update: As part of my migration I made a Facebook profile picture which no doubt violates TOS.

Here's the latest iteration -- my first ever use of Acorn.app (and not quite kosher because it's a section of an Apple owned desktop image, but I'm iterating...)

 

Project Memfail: Tackling my search space problem

I've hit the Wall.

It's partly entropy-related wetware failure, but I'd be in trouble even if I were immortal. I have two many search-spaces and information stores in too many places.

Things aren't so bad in my personal domain - I have two search spaces. My Simplenote files (via NvAlt), Email (Mail.app) and Google Docs (via Google Drive and CloudPull [1])  are mirrored back to my Spotlight search space, and I use a Google custom search engine against my blogs, archived web site and app.net streams. So my two personal search spaces are private/secure and public. I can manage that [2], and I'm careful not to add anything that would require a third search space.

In my work domain though it's a mess. I have information scattered across several Wikis, multiple document stores, my local file system and multi-GB email store, and the remnants of blog whose server died. All of this in an environment that, for multiple reasons, is driving to an information half-life of 1 year. I have too many search spaces; I can no longer track them all.

So I'm launching Project Memfail :-). I need to rescope my search spaces - esp. my corporate one.

- fn -

[1] My main information loss over the past decade was GR Shares, I have some recovery there via CloudPull.

[2] Native spotlight search has issues, but I can work around those. Of course when Google Custom Search dies I'll be in for a painful transition.

American Healthcare: only the little people pay list

In healthcare, only the uninsured pay list price. They actually pay the crazy amounts that show up on their healthcare bills. Other payers, like insurance companies, pay a steeply discounted amount. Sometimes 70% off.

Pretty outrageous eh?

It's not new though. That's how it worked when I was a country doc in the early 90s and it was old and outrageous then. Now it's getting more attention; but it's not new. The weird thing is that this 'secret' has been in plain view for decades.

That's not the end of the story though. At least when I was in practice, we couldn't do a cash discount. The insurance price was based on list, and if we lowered list the insurance payments would fall. Indeed, our 'customary' charge rating would also fall, and in the bizarro world of healthcare finance what insurers were willing to pay us depended in part on our past charges.

Back then we wrote off many cash charges, but times have changed. For one thing, the Bush GOP made it much harder for regular folk to declare bankruptcy and escape healthcare debt.

So now that this story is getting traction, I wonder if Americans are ready to learn about how Evaluation and Management CPT codes (E&M Coding) destroyed primary care. Hint: "What gets measured gets done" doesn't mean "what is good gets done".

Many Americans still think we have a great healthcare system. It's probably not our only mass delusion.

The evolution of spam: Nordstrom and mandatory spam acceptance

We've come a long way baby.

A year ago Nordstrom's began offering optional email receipts as "a convenient, environmentally friendly alternative to paper receipts."

Of course there are alway a few skeptics who doubted Nordstrom's integrity, but USA Today was reassuring

Retailers ditch paper and pen, use email for receipts - USATODAY.com

... no retailer serious about building a relationship with its customers would consider taking advantage of email access, said John Talbott, assistant director of Indiana University's Center for Education and Research in Retailing.

That's because for the retailer, the most significant benefit is being able to offer a service customers appreciate, he said. It isn't about cutting costs, he said, as less than 1% of a retailer's total revenue goes toward paper and ink for receipts.

Instead, the driving force is providing an option that makes the store a more appealing place to shop...

Yesterday Emily bought a shirt at Nordstrom's. The email receipt, she was told, was mandatory. No, of course there'd be no spam. She doesn't have a spam account, so she gave them her gmail account.

She got her first Nordstrom spam a few hours later. I'll show her how to use filters later today.

Not to worry though, paper receipts are not long for this world. Soon we'll be buying things with our phones. No spam there, since of course there's no tie between our phone's unique identifier and our email and phone number.

Apple's quality problem is a complexity problem too

Marco Arment, builder of a respected OS X app, writes

Three Things That Should Trouble Apple – Marco.org: 

... Apple’s software quality is declining.

I’m not just talking about the most recent releases of everything, or the last couple of months — I’ve noticed this trend for about 2–3 years. As Apple’s software has grown to address larger feature sets, hard-to-solve problems such as sync and online services, shorter release cycles, increasingly strong competition, and Apple’s own immense scale, quality has slipped...

I've noticed it for at least that long, but OS X Lion is a particular disappointment.

Siri is a recent example. After a promising start Siri died. I'll pin this one on Cook. Jobs had his flops, but he usually turned off the marketing until the bodies were buried or the problems were fixed.

The bigger quality problem though - that one came from Jobs. Some of it had to be the talent distraction of iOS development, but Lion is full of bad choices. Whoever decided to change how files were saved instead of focusing on quality and reliability should find another job.

Then there's the MobileMe to iCloud migration. Was there really no way to incrementally fix and extend MobileMe?

It is true that the endless malware race forces developers into disruptive and often imperfectly tested software updates. Microsoft faces this problem too however, and I think they're doing better with it. Apple chose to inflict much of the combinatorial complexity of interactions between iOS and OS X devices, synchronization across disparate data models -- not to mention the crazed, DRM-driven metastatic Apple ID Hell family/payer/owner identity and authentication problem. Apple chose to focus on marketing rather than customer value when they created their Aperture/iPhoto mess - and Apple continues to market Aperture as a smooth upgrade for iPhoto despite that mess. Rather like Siri, come to think of it.

Apple's quality problems are far from under control, and I don't think Cooks's executive compensation plans are helping.

Post-singularity life is burning a lot of neurons

In 3 days I've tackled three monster Apple bugs.

One is with Apple ID infrastructure, one with Image Capture in Snow Leopard, and a third probably arose in an iTunes server during an iOS tunes purchase.

Two of these bugs defeated Apple 2nd tier support. All of them are likely rare; I will probably never see these particular bugs again. Unfortunately, there are a lot of these bugs arising from interactions of Cloud and software and data.

One bug I've definitely solved -- it was bizarre. I have a good theory and a test case for another. The third might be fixed but needs more testing.

It's mildly satisfying to figure these things out, but it's an insane waste of time and neurons. I could have been learned options trading [1] in the time I've wasted.

Note that only one of these was OS X specific. Two of them are Apple Cloud bugs. The ones I understand best appear to be complexity problems -- too many moving parts, too many edge cases, too many ways for things to break.

Post-singularity life does not scale.

[1] Yeah, there are no good investments any more.

Update: This Stross essay is pertinent.

SF, big ideas, ideology: what is to be done? - Charlie's Diary 

... We're living in the frickin' 21st century. Killer robot drones are assassinating people in the hills of Afghanistan. Our civilisation has been invaded and conquered by the hive intelligences of multinational corporations, directed by the new aristocracy of the 0.1%. There are space probes in orbit around Saturn and en route to Pluto. Surgeons are carrying out face transplants. I have more computing power and data storage in my office than probably the entire world had in 1980... 

... to the extent that mainstream literary fiction is about the perfect microscopic anatomization of everyday mundane life, a true and accurate mainstream literary novel today ought to read like a masterpiece of cyberpunk dystopian SF...

 Even dystopian science fiction didn't predict we'd spend all our time keeping our whizzy tools working.

iCloud, iOS, and identity: The end of app sharing

I don't think we'll actually get to DRM RetinaLock (retinal enhancements enforce video DRM), but we are pretty much at the "Palladium" future I'd written about 8 years ago.

That's what I concluded after migrating a friend's iTunes and iOS content, and navigating the chaotic intersection of Digital Rights Management (FairPlay), identity management, ownership identity, and Cloud vs. multi-device iTunes vs. multi-user OS X. Not to mention the MobileMe vs. iCloud migration.

Really, has anyone figured this out? I mean, I think I'm pretty good at this stuff, but we're talking combinatorial explosion here. Different rules for email, calendar, music, video, apps, across multiple identifies and platforms -- with no way to merge or reconcile multiple identities...

Apple IDs and iCloud

... Enter the Apple ID you want to use for iCloud in Apple () menu > System Preferences > iCloud. Enter the Apple ID you want to use for store purchases (including iTunes in the Cloud and iTunes Match) in iTunes > iTunes Store... [1]

... You cannot merge two or more Apple IDs into a single one...

... You can switch the Apple ID you use for store purchases at any time. However, you can only change the account you use for any iTunes in the Cloud features once every 90 days...

and (emphases mine)

iTunes Store: Associating a device or computer to your Apple ID

... Your Apple ID can have up to 10 devices and computers (combined) associated with it. Each computer must also be authorized using the same Apple ID. Once a device or computer is associated with your Apple ID, you cannot associate that device or computer with another Apple ID for 90 days...

... : Removing a device from your Apple ID does not override the 90 day timer. The timer must complete 90 days from the day the device was associated before it can be associated to another Apple ID....

Only a post-singular AI could truly visualize all the options here.

It's fairly clear, however, where Apple wants us to go.

Today my family's five devices sync to one iTunes instance. Each devices has the same AppleID for store purchases, but different MobileMe identities. The family can share movies, apps, music and so on. [2] Mail and Calendars for each device go to the Cloud.

The future is quite different. There will be no more iTunes, no more shared media libraries, no more shared app libraries. Each iOS device will be associated with a single identity for both purchasing and iCloud services. (Though a child's identity may be associated with a parent's credit card, or purchases will be iTunes credit only.) OS X will become only a way to access Cloud media, and that access will be tied to identity as well.

My sympathy for piracy grows.

- fn -

[1] In reality, when I reviewed my friend's devices, it was not possible to set a different Apple ID for iCloud.
[2] Heaven knows what the licensing says we can do. Only some older music is DRMd.

See also:

• Apple IDs and iCloud
• iTunes Store: Associating a device or computer to your Apple ID
• Apple Scrambles To Merge Apple IDs To Stave Off iCloud Sync Mess | Epicenter | Wired.com 9/2011 -- they didn't manage the merge but there's a transitional role where the Apple ID and the MobileMe ID can live together for MobileMe users and perhaps even into iCloud. I'm going very slowly with my family's iCloud migration.
• Gordon's Notes: The sharing challenge: access, topic and identity. Why G+ fails. 11/2011 - a different sort of sharing problem
• Gordon's Tech: The multi-iPhone family - two approaches 7/2010 - the good old days.
• Gordon's Tech: Apple's identity and account system is screwed up. Again. 10/2008 - the .mac to .me transition stunk

Update:

More on the peculiar 90 day limit here. It seems to pertain to 'downloading past purchases' or iTunes Match. It applies to the entire computer rather than a user account. What a friggin' mess.

Update 2: More thoughts as I replay this post

• I wonder if the 90 day limit will eventually be a standard for transferring ownership of digital purchases. I can't find any information on how that duration was established.
• I suspect in a few years there will be a lot of digital material in the family repository that only I will be able to use. Ownership transfer would be "nice". Hacking FairPlay is more likely (eventually 2012 FairPlay should be pretty hackable).
• With Apple's new regime there are significant advantages to combining Apple hardware with Google and Amazon products. After all, they can't fit into Apple's model. In the new world we can't share our iBooks, but everyone can share Kindle books. A shared Apple identity may prevent use of iCloud, but it won't prevent use of gCloud.
• Curiously, this may mean the return of family night at the movies! Instead of sharing across multiple devices, we'll be back to sharing on a single device with a large screen.

Apple's FairPlay DRM, subscriptions, and the cost of MLB At Bat

Last year I bought MLB.com's At Bat for something like $10 or $15. Then it was an "App". That meant, based on Apple's FairPlay DRM, I could install it on multiple devices as long as each device was synchronized to an iTunes instance that was associated with my App Store/iTunes ID (and credit card). In our home that can be up to five devices, though in practice only my son used it.

No consumer loves DRM, but FairPlay was well named. It struck a Jobsian balance between buyer and seller, like those .99 songs we used to have. It didn't get in my way very often.

It's too badFairPlay doesn't work that way any more. This year MLB.com At Bat 12 is just a shell for a $15 subscription -- and Apple's subscription/In-App purchase policies are an inelegant mess ...

iTunes Store: About In-App Purchases

... Non-replenishable In-App Purchases are items that only require you to purchase them once, and can be transferred to multiple devices authorized with the same iTunes Store account.

• Bonus game levels
• City guide maps

Replenishable In-App Purchases are items that have to be purchased every time and cannot be downloaded again for free.

• Extra health
• Extra experience points

Subscriptions are one-time services that must be purchased again once the subscription period expires. 

• One-month subscriptions
• Location service subscriptions

Auto-Renewing Subscriptions are services that can be purchased with different renewing subscription durations.

• Weekly newspaper subscriptions
• Weekly magazine subscriptions...

... Subscriptions and replenishable In-App Purchase cannot be transferred or synced to another iOS device. Non-replenishable In-App Purchases  and auto-renewing subscriptions can be transferred to another iOS device authorized with your iTunes Store account. For example, if you transfer a game from an iPhone to an iPod touch, only the game levels will sync over, the extra ammo and experience points will not be transferred...

Four different classes of In-App purchase, each with different policies on renewal, transfer, and multiple device use.

So which rule applies to MLB.com's At Bat 2012? Is it a non-replenishable In-App purchase that can be transferred between devices? Or is it Subscription that cannot be transferred? I couldn't tell from the description, but the answer is in a customer review [1] ...

... if you make the in-app purchase it is available on another device ... regardless of whether you make an in-app purchase or not banner ads are still displayed ...

So, for this year at least, the effective cost of MLB At Bat is still $15; it behaves like an In-App Purchase if you pay the $15 up front. On the other hand, I wonder how it behaves if you pay the subscription fee ...

FairPlay was a Jobs-class compromise. Apple's subscription plans are post-Jobs; I hope they'll take a second look at the mess.

[1] This is unrelated to my post, but I have to say it's rude behavior to show ads in a paid app. It's worse than rude really -- banner ads typically include clickable links that break Apple's feeble parental controls.

Rule 34 by Charlie Stross - my review

I read Charlie Stross's Rule 34. Here's my 5 star Amazon review (slightly modified as I thought of a few more things):

Rule 34 is brilliant work.

If Stross had written a novel placed in 2010, it would have been a top notch crime and suspense novel. Charlie's portrayal of the criminal mind, from silence-of-the-lambs psychopath (sociopath in UK speak, though that US/UK distinction is blurring) to every day petty crook, is top notch.

Stross puts us into the minds of his villains, heroes, and fools, using a curious 2nd person pronoun style that has a surprising significance. I loved how so many of his villains felt they were players, while others knew they were pawns. Only the most insightful know they're a cog in the machine.

A cog in a corporate machine that is. Whether cop or criminal or other, whether gay or straight, everyone is a component of a corporation. Not the megacorp of Gibson and Blade Runner, but the ubiquitous corporate meme that we also live in. The corporate meme has metastasized. It is invisible, it is everywhere, and it makes use of all material. Minds of all kinds, from Aspergerish to sociopath, for better and for worse, find a home in this ecosystem. The language of today's sycophantic guides to business is mainstream here.

Stross manages the suspense and twists of the thriller, and explores emerging sociology as he goes. The man has clearly done his homework on the entangled worlds of spam and netporn -- and I'm looking forward to the interviewers who ask him what that research was like. In other works Stross has written about the spamularity, and in Rule 34 he lays it out. He should give some credit to the spambots that constantly attack his personal blog.

Rule 34 stands on its own as a thriller/crime/character novel, but it doesn't take place in 2010. It takes place sometime in the 2020-2030s (at one point in the novel Stross gives us a date but I can't remember it exactly). A lot of the best science fiction features fully imagined worlds, and this world is complete. He's hit every current day extrapolation I've ever thought of, and many more besides. From the macroeconomics of middle Asia, to honey pots with honey pots, to amplified 00s style investment scams to home foundries to spamfested networked worlds to a carbon-priced economy to mass disability to cyberfraud of the vulnerable to ubiquitous surveillance to the bursting of the higher education bubble, to exploding jurisprudence creating universal crime … Phew. There's a lot more besides. I should have been making a list as I read.

Yes, Rule 34 is definitely a "hard" science fiction novel -- though it's easy to skip over the mind-bending parts if you're not a genre fan. You can't, however, completely avoid Stross's explorations of the nature of consciousness, and his take on the "Singularity" (aka rapture of the nerds). It's not giving away too much to say there's no rapture here. As to whether this is a Rainbow's End pre-Singular world … well, you'll have to read the novel and make your own decision. I'm not sure I'd take Stross's opinion on where this world of his is going - at least not at face value.

Oh, and if you squint a certain way, you can see a sort-of Batman in there too. I think that was deliberate; someone needs to ask Charlie about that.

Great stuff, and a Hugo contender for sure.

If you've read my blog you know I'm fond of extrapolating to the near future. Walking down my blog's tag list I see I'm keen on the nature and evolution of the Corporation, mind and consciousness, economics, today's history, emergence, carbon taxes, fraud and "the weak", the Great Recession (Lesser Depression), alternative minds (I live with 2 non-neurotypicals), corruption, politics, governance, the higher eduction and the education  bubble, natural selection, identity, libertarianism (as a bad thing), memes, memory management, poverty (and mass disability), reputation management, schizophrenia and mental illness, security, technology, and the whitewater world. Not to mention the Singularity/Fermi Paradox (for me they're entangled -- I'm not a Happy Singularity sort of guy).

Well, Stross has, I dare to say, some of the same interests. Ok, so I'm not in much doubt of that. I read the guy religiously, and I'm sure I've reprocessed everything he's written. In Rule 34 he's hit all of these bases and more. Most impressively, if you're not looking for it, you could miss almost all of it. Stross weaves it in, just as he does a slow reveal of the nature of his characters, including the nature of the character you don't know about until the end.

Update: In one of those weird synchronicity things, Stross has his 2032 and 2092 predictions out this morning. Read 'em.