Mass disability and the middle class

My paper magazine has another article on the Argentinification of America - Can the Middle Class Be Saved? - The Atlantic.

I'll skim it sometime, but I doubt there's much new there. We know the story.  The bourgeois heart of America is fading. In its place are the poor, the near poor, the rich and the near rich.

I have thought of this, for years, as the rise of mass disability. In the post-AI world the landscape of American employment is monotonous. There's work for people like me, not so much for some I love. Once they would have worked a simple job, but there's not much call for that these days. Simple jobs have been automated; there's only room for a small number of Walmart greeters. Moderately complex jobs have been outsourced.

Within the ecosystem of modern capitalism a significant percentage of Americans are maladapted. I'd guess about 25%; now 35% thanks to the lesser depression.

There are two ways to manage this - excluding the Swiftian solution.

One is to apply the subsidized employment strategies developed for adults with autism and low IQ. Doing this on a large scale would require substantial tax increases, particularly on the wealthy.

Another approach is to bias the economy to a more diverse landscape with a greater variety of employment opportunities -- including manufacturing. This is, depending on whether you are an optimist or realist, the approach of either modern Germany or Nehru's India. This bias compromises "comparative advantage", so we can expect this economy, all else being equal, to have a lower than maximal output. Since in our world the benefits of total productivity flow disproportionately to the wealthy (winner take all), this is equivalent to a progressive tax on an entire society.

So, either way,  the solution is a form of taxation. Either direct taxation and redistribution, or a decrease in overall growth.

I suspect that we will eventually do both.

See also:

• Unemployment and the new American economy - with some fixes (1/11)
• Post-industrial employment: adjusting to a new world (5/10)

CERN's neutrinos - kudos to the BBC coverage

Amidst a flurry of sensational coverage, the BBC gets special credit for the headline and the quote (emphases mine) ...

BBC News - Speed-of-light experiments give baffling result at Cern:

... Puzzling results from Cern, home of the Large Hadron Collider, have confounded physicists because subatomic particles seem to have beaten the speed of light...

...But for now, he explained, "we are not claiming things, we want just to be helped by the community in understanding our crazy result - because it is crazy".

"Speed of light" is the right headline, not "faster than light". The quote is important too -- they are not claiming things.

It's hard to overstate how outrageous a result this is. By comparison the "cold fusion" claims of 1989 were prosaic. There are many experimental conditions in which various things propagate faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, but those experiments are all consistent with the universe as we model it.

This result is not consistent with our models. True "faster than light" travel implies "causality violation"; a form of time travel where effect precedes cause.

Just based on how science works, rather than any knowledge of physics, I would give 90% odds that this result does not last a month, and 99.9% odds that when all is done the speed of light will survive. Despite that, there is a good chance of normally interesting physics somewhere in there.

If the results hold up, of course, a Nobel would be the least of it.

My G+ Profile - open to connect

My blogs are pseudonymous, but it's not hard to find my true name if you click around a bit. I just prefer that my corporate colleagues and customers don't suffer the full range of my opinions and speculations.

Which means, since G+ is open, I'm good with sharing and corresponding there. I typically share with my "extended circle" (circles and one removed) -- just a bit short of public. I use LinkedIn for purely corporate and teaching connections, Facebook is where I tell kid stories, so G+ is the intellectual slot. It's a good match to the blogs.

If you're interested, here's my profile [1] and my "John Gordon" circle.

[1] Note the URL has the number of this beast: 113810027503326386174. Just call me 113.

(cross posted to notes and tech.)

Facebook vs. G+: not in the same ballpark

Rebecca Rosen asks Is Facebook Forever?

Of course in our world "forever" is any double digit lifespan.

I might like to think Facebook won't be here in 5 years, but consider my graduate school students.

I asked how many use Google Reader. Three hands went up. Three out of forty or so.

I asked how many use G+. The same three. Geeks like me.

I asked, reluctantly, how many use Facebook. Most hands went up.

Sigh.

Google Reader may not be dead after all

Google's Yonatan Zunger implies there's life in Google Reader yet ...

Yonatan Zunger - Google+ - Some more tips and tricks for using Google+ search: *…

"Reader integration is something we're very excited about. A great deal of the Reader team is now, in fact, working on Google+, so there's a lot of crosstalk between the groups."

It's buried in the comments on his G+ tips post.

The neglect of Reader, including a failure to complete half-implemented features like bundles, made me add Reader to my "Dead" list. i've expressed frustration that G+ didn't seem to have learned from Reader. Maybe, I speculated, the Reader team had lost a political battle.

Seems I was wrong. Reader's neglect may have come from the original team moving to G+.

Best news in weeks.

Car and bike: Observations

I've cycled with cars for over 40 years. These days I commute by car most days, by bike weekly. This is what I believe ...

1. My idyllic bicycle commute is significantly riskier than my car commute. It's not mountain climbing or even motorcycling, but it's a risk I knowingly assume. As the average age of Minnesota drivers heads north, so will my risk.
2. The main reason many drivers hate cyclists is we push our risk onto them. To a certain level of cycling injury, regardless of fault, I'd rather be be the cyclist than the driver. If the driving fault were mine, I'd choose death. We cyclists choose our risks, but we make drivers assume comparable risks.
3. Another reason some male drivers dislike male cyclists is we make them feel guilty and inferior. Given what #1 says about our judgment that's illogical, but we're talking about guys here. I feel inferior when I'm in my car and I see a real woman cycling through the snow and ice.
4. All my life I have been frustrated by black active wear clothing. I suppose it's black because young ones buy active wear and they wish to attract mates. I am not seeking a mate. I am trying to stay healthy. I want more lime-green-yellow reflective clothing. My 4-5 high intensity flashing and probing bicycle lights are offset by black wind pants. I'm hoping this will improve as cyclists age. Ortlieb, to their credit, sells red and yellow bags.
5. The biggest car-bike problem I face in the age of the bicycle lane is passing a line of stopped cars on the right. Drivers in the right lane hate being passed on the right side. Right side mirrors positioned for driving don't work well for detecting a passing bike. On the other hand, as a cyclist, there's no realistic alternative to passing stopped cars on the right.
6. It is illegal to cross over a double yellow central line, even to pass a slow vehicle. I believe Minnesota women over 25 prefer not to cross this line. On the other hand, guys like the excuse to be rogue and rough and to feel, for a moment, almost young again. I believe that is why the cars that pass too close to me on a narrow road are usually driven by women.
7. Inline skaters are to cyclists as cyclists are to drivers. Have mercy on skaters.

Update 9/22/11: A Dutch design to address the passing stopped cars on right problem.

To thine own self be true

It shows up on mugs, posters and greeting cards. To thine own self be true must have a pleasing sound to contented psychopaths.

I assumed it was some woefully misguided advice to embrace one's inner nature. Misguided, that is, for most of us. I haven't spent forty years wailing on my nature for nuttin.

Goes to show it's been a long time since I had any culture. It's Hamlet of course, part of a core dump of fatherly advice that's fathered centuries of repetition (emphases mine) ...

SCENE III. A room in Polonius' house.

... these few precepts in thy memory

See thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,

Nor any unproportioned thought his act.

Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.

Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,

Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;

But do not dull thy palm with entertainment

Of each new-hatch'd, unfledged comrade. Beware

Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,

Bear't that the opposed may beware of thee.

Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;

Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment.

Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,

But not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy;

For the apparel oft proclaims the man,

And they in France of the best rank and station

Are of a most select and generous chief in that.

Neither a borrower nor a lender be;

For loan oft loses both itself and friend,

And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.

This above all: to thine ownself be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Obviously, since it's part of a load of self-improvement advice, Polonius is not advising mere acceptance of one's nature. In the language of the time "to thine ownself be true" means "know yourself" -- don't deceive yourself. Which is the mission of middle age, so not too bad.

The corrollary that "knowing oneself" means one will be entirely trustworthy is, to put it mildly, naive. On the other hand, most of Polonius advice is more high minded that practical. I don't think Shakespeare thought he was passing on advice for the ages. He'd have been amused to find it on 21st century mugs.

Life in the post-AI world. What's next?

I missed something new and important when I wrote ...

Complexity and air fare pricing: Houston, we have a problem

... planning a plane trip has become absurdly complex. Complex like choosing a cell phone plan, getting a "free" preventive care exam, managing a flex spending account, getting a mortgage, choosing health insurance, reading mobile bills, fighting payment denials, or making safe product choices. Complex like the complexity collapse that took down the western world.

I blame it all on cheap computing. Cheap computing made complexity attacks affordable and ubiquitous...

The important bit is what's coming next and now in the eternal competition.

AI.

No, not the "AIs" of Data, Skynet and the Turing Test [1]. Those are imaginary sentient beings. I mean Artificial Intelligence in the sense it was used in the 1970s -- software that could solve problems that challenge human intelligence. Problems like choosing a bike route.

To be clear, AIs didn't invent mobile phone pricing plans, mortgage traps or dynamic airfare pricing. These "complexity attacks" were made by humans using old school technologies like data mining, communication networks, and simple algorithms.

The AIs, however, are joining the battle. Route finding and autonomous vehicles and (yes) search are the obvious examples. More recently services like Bing flight price prediction and Google Flights are going up against airline dynamic pricing. The AIs are among us. They're just lying low.

Increasingly, as in the esoteric world of algorithmic trading, we'll move into a world of AI vs. AI. Humans can't play there.

We are in the early days of a post-AI world of complexity beyond human ken. We should expect surprises.

What's next?

That depends on where you fall out on the Vinge vs. Stross spectrum. Stross predicts we'll stop at the AI stage because there's no real economic or competitive advantage to implementing and integrating sentience components such as motivation, self-expansion, self-modeling and so on. I suspect Charlie is wrong about that.

AI is the present. Artificial Sentience (AS), alas, is the future.

[1] Recently several non-sentient software programs have been very successful at passing simple versions of the Turing Test, a test designed to measure sentience and consciousness. Human interlocutors can't distinguish Turing Test AIs from human correspondents. So either the Turing Test isn't as good as it was thought to be, or sentience isn't what we thought it was. Or both.

Update 9/20/11: I realized a very good example of what's to come is the current spambot war. Stross, Doctorow and others have half-seriously commented that the deception detection and evasion struggle between spammers and Google will birth the first artificial sentience. For now though it's an AI vs. AI war; a marker of what's to come across all of commercial life.

See also:

• Stross whiffs on the Singularity 6/30/11
• Google's Goals: Skynet 1.0 (10/2006)
• Phishing with the post-Turing avatar (1/2010) - phishing is going to get much deadlier. Imagine AIs that harvest your social web to produce custom scams.
• Slouching towards Skynet (12/2007) - how brains evolve
• The evolution of comment spam - from parasite to symbiote? (8/2009)
• xkcd: Suspicion - a classic

Update 9/22: Yuri Milner speaking at the "mini-Davos" recently:

.... Artificial intelligence is part of our daily lives, and its power is growing. Mr. Milner cited everyday examples like Amazon.com’s recommendation of books based on ones we have already read and Google’s constantly improving search algorithm....

I'm not a crackpot. Ok, I am on, but I'm not alone.

Complexity and air fare pricing: Houston, we have a problem.

Early in my life air travel was almost as expensive as today. At that time, however, we had travel agents and competitive service. It was hassle free.

Later air travel was inexpensive and hassle free. The world felt smaller.

Then it became complicated -- but travel software made up for lost travel agents. We were ahead of the airlines.

Now, it's not so good. It's not just the security hassles. It's not just that the cost of a Minneapolis to Montreal trip has gone up 20% a year for the past four years (now doubled, Hawaii and Europe are cheaper).

It's also that planning a plane trip has become absurdly complex. Complex like choosing a cell phone plan, getting a "free" preventive care exam, managing a flex spending account, getting a mortgage, choosing health insurance, reading mobile bills, fighting payment denials, or making safe product choices. Complex like the complexity collapse that took down the western world.

I blame it all on cheap computing. Cheap computing made complexity attacks affordable and ubiquitous. [1]

In my most recent experience with information asymmetry I found tickets on US Airways for $490 (1 stop) on both Bing and Kayak. When I added a 2nd traveler, however, the price of both tickets increased by $100. (This was harder to spot on the US Airways site as they list deceptive prices, hiding all the "additional fees" airlines carved out to disguise price increases.)

A bit of research (time is how we pay our complexity tax) revealed this happens when the 1st ticket allegedly uses the last "cheap" seat on a flight. The next ticket costs more, and because airlines are loathe to confess this they increase the price of both. That may be so, but it means there's a great incentive to have a few cheap seats that will attract hits from travel sites, but that will turn into high price tickets for the 2nd passenger. This doesn't even have to be planned, natural selection means this kind of emergent "happy accident" of complexity, once discovered, will be leveraged.

This has costs. Maybe high costs. We pay them either by cash lost to legal frauds, or we pay them in time. I think they have more do with the lesser depression than most admit.

It would probably be cheaper for me to just pay my fraud tax to the airlines, but of course I'm not going quietly. I'm studying the (now obsolete) tricks of the trade [2]

• Shop Tuesday at 3pm ET
• Start shopping 3.5 months before departure, buy prior to 14 days
• Tues, Wed and Sat are cheapest days to fly

[1] In the words of James Galbraith (emphases mine): "... The financial world, as it exists, has nothing to do with the commodity world of real exchange economics with its delicate balance of interacting forces. It is the world of technology at play in the form of quasi mass produced legal instruments of uncontrolled complexity. It is the world of, in other words, of evolutionary specialization in the never ending dance of predator and prey...
[2] Seems like there's opportunity for outsourcing complexity management to a new age travel agent and their equivalent for managing the complex scams of everyday life. I fear, however, that only a few of us realize we need help.

Update: Twelve hours after posting I was able to buy both tickets for a total of $200 less than the Saturday price. Same times and planes. I learned ...

• Email alerts are worthless. I think they're just a way to harvest email for spam (we live on Planet Chum). Instead I took advantage of a Kayak feature -- they save the last search in a short list on main screen. I refreshed this twice daily. Between Saturday night and Sunday night I was able to get both prices at the listed price.
• I had to keep referencing the search results Kayak provided. The US Airways site kept substituting the flight I didn't want as the "preferred option". I took me 4 runs to get it right. It's hard to explain what they were doing but to succeed I had to carefully track all the flight numbers.
• Kayak passed my reservation to US Airways as 2 adults. The flight was 1 adult and 1 child. I suspected I needed the Kayak reference to get the price I wanted. Kayak passes its request through URL parameters (only sort of works) so I edited the URL parameter to 1 adult and 1 child.
• US Airways makes pointless use of Flash to animate simple result display. This is revealing.

See also:

• Arms race in the market: Dynamic vs. predictive pricing 7/2006
• The best time to buy a plane ticket 7/2007 - Wed

Never thought I'd see - Microsoft and web standards

I did not expect this ...

Echoing Apple, Microsoft bans Flash from Metro IE10 in Windows 8 - Computerworld:

... The Metro style browser in Windows 8 is as HTML5-only as possible, and plug-in free," said Hachamovitch. "The experience that plug-ins provide today is not a good match with Metro style browsing and the modern HTML5 Web....

Forget no more Flash. This is no more Active X.

Today we salute the fallen web standards warriors of the 1990s.

What is Facebook search good for?

Earlier today my FB stream included a notice from a local "Page" I "like". Something about a ski swap.

So I tried my FB page "search" pane with words like "ski" and "Brainerd". Even though I "liked" the "Page" the search failed. I had to resort to my shaky wetware to locate the post.

So what is all the talk about "social search"? How exactly is Facebook a threat to Google?

I've begun adding all the FB "Pages" I follow to Google Reader. These public pages, unlike personal pages, have feeds (it's a secret). GR search works quite well.

The BBC is making In Our Time archives available for download (!)

After years of making past IOT episodes available only for streaming, the BBC is making the archive of their History of Ideas program available for download.

In addition to the regular weekly In Our Time podcast, you can now download all previous editions of the series via the podcast genre pages listed below.

In Philosophy, for example, there are currently 62 programs available dating back to 1998. In early 2010 the BBC made back episodes available to stream, but now they've gone all in. My 2006 tech post on grabbing old episodes is now happily obsolete, my fears of 2008 have been refuted, and I don't need to covertly circulate DVDs of past programs.

These are not great times for the old world (US, Canada, Japan, Europe, UK), but there are still a few candles in the dark. This is one of them, there's more good news in efforts to freely distribute learning and education. Echoes of the Enlightenment as it were.

In honor of this happy event, I'm adding a "good news" tag to Gordon's Notes. A wee ray of sunshine in my daily gloom.

PS. It's not now documented, but little known, that Blooger has tag (label) feeds. For example, this is my "good news" feed (1 article at the moment, I don't want to overdo it) - http://notes.kateva.org/feeds/posts/default/-/good%20news. The label feeds get the main feed title, so you would want to rename them on subscription.

Waiting for the 25th

We may have something worth saying then.

The humanity experiment has mixed results: Organ trade and enslaving the disabled

Uplifting the naked ape is having mixed results ...

Your money for your life - enslaving the cognitively disabled (China)

Out of more than 20 similar cases that occurred from 2007 to 2011 nationwide, most of the suspects came from Leibo. Mentally disabled people were sold here to criminals and then taken to mines in other provinces including Fujian, Hebei, Shandong and Liaoning.

... According to the Wuhan-based Chutian Metropolis Daily, many villagers in Leibo county exploit mentally disabled people, either forcing them to work under appalling conditions, often unpaid and poorly fed, or by profiting from their deaths.

From July to August last year, the central hospital in Leibo received eight mentally disabled patients, aged between 20 and 50 years old, after they had been rescued by local police in an operation.

They only weighed about 40 kilograms on average, with a dull look and slow reactions, had very little appetite and had lost their instinct for survival. They all died of multi-organ failure within two months.

Liu Xingwei, vice secretary of Leibo county's Politics and Law Committee, told the Xiaoxiang Morning Herald that no legal action was taken against the traffickers, who had snatched the victims under the claim of "sheltering" them, "because there is no related law."

and

Organ-selling firm in NHS talks - mirror.co.uk

... a subsidiary of the General ­Healthcare Group – Netcare – was last year fined nearly £700,000 after pleading guilty to illegally transplanting human organs in South Africa.

... Netcare admitted last November that it had recruited children to donate kidneys which were then transplanted to wealthy clients. More than 100 illegal operations were carried out at a hospital in Durban, South Africa, between 2001 and 2003.

In a statement issued last November, the company said payments were “made to the donors for their kidneys, and that certain of the kidney donors were minors”. The statement added: “Certain employees participated in these illegalities, and (the hospital) wrongly benefited from the proceeds.”

The company said the organ-selling scandal had been dealt with “by the South African legal system and is now closed”.

Heck of a fine. More via Google on the GHG / Netcare scandal, which actually dates to about 2003. Crime paid; the bad guys got away ...

Kidneygate: What the Netcare bosses really knew - Investigations - Mail & Guardian Online

On May 27 four Durban surgeons are due to stand trial for their part in South Africa's kidney trafficking scandal.

But evidence in the Mail & Guardian's possession suggests that top Netcare executives are fortunate not to be standing beside them.

"Kidneygate" is the long-running saga of how -- between about 2000 and 2003 -- about 200 Israeli patients with kidney disease were brought to South Africa to receive organs from living donors who were presented as their relatives.

The donors were in fact poor Brazilians, Israelis and Romanians who were recruited by international organ traffickers and paid a relatively modest sum to give up a precious kidney -- a criminal offence under South African law.

To make matters worse, at least five of the donors are now known to have been legal minors at the time of the operations.

The four doctors -- John Robbs, Ariff Haffejee, Neil Christopher and Mahadev Naidoo -- are bitter at finding themselves at the short end of a chain of ethical dissimulation.

In theory, the buck stops with the doctor doing the cutting, but in reality, the transplant surgeons were little more than skilled mechanics dealing with bodies on an assembly line, maintained, paid for and legally underwritten by the big healthcare factory that is the Netcare Group.

Netcare: not know or not care?Investigations by the M&G suggest that the biggest scandal of the case, which has dragged on since the first arrests in 2003, is the absence from the dock of any decision-maker from Netcare.

The company's Durban subsidiary, Netcare KwaZulu-Natal trading as St Augustine's Hospital, did plead guilty, paid a R4-million fine and agreed to a R3.8-million confiscation order in November 2010.

Twitter

I've resisted Twitter. I auto-tweet what I share in Google Reader, but that's it.

I hate the 128 character limit.

I liked Google Reader Shares -- but it never took off. Worse, Google is neglecting Reader.

I had hopes for G+, but Google's true name policy is bad policy -- and a worrisome sign of what's coming.

Facebook is evil the way Microsoft used to be evil. They just can't help themselves.

I'm going to look at Tumblr again.

And I'm going to look, again, at Twitter. Worries me, however, that like Google and Facebook they're in the packaging business. Packaging us for advertisers. I want to pay for my microblogging.

Too bad I'm a market of one.