Peculiar consequences of wealth concentration

There is enormous, incomprehensible, wealth in the world. Increasingly, across all nations, it is concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people.

This has obvious consequences, but I'm sure there are surprising consequences too.

Emily and I remember a boat tour of island estates of eastern Florida. Each estate costs millions, but they were empty. Only caretakers visited, though we were told each had owners.

Owners who bought them, but had better things to do. Or maybe nothing good to do at all.

That is a problem with modern wealth. It's easy to spend a few million relatively well. Beyond that -- what is it good for? A yacht is nice if you like boats -- but then it gets boring. You can hire people to manage hassles, but then you have to manage people. A private jet? A mansion? Private artwork? Wild sex and drugs?

It would be different if we could buy lifespan -- and maybe one day that will happen. Not yet though -- at least not much if any more than the average citizen of a wealthy nation.

All that money can be used for is to play, to compete, to make more money. A game in which there is little meaning to losing, and little meaning to winning ...

Ferret flu: An existential challenge to anti-Darwinist Republicans?

The good news is that it's still hard to design a lethal plague. The 'cost of havoc' is higher than I once thought.

Yes, influenza can be weaponized by guiding Darwinian natural selection - but that takes years of patient work and advanced technologies. It's beyond the grasp of, say, Anonymous.

So this research is good news - for most of us.

Isn't it a problem for the anti-Darwinist wing of the GOP though? The group that opposes the teaching of natural selection? How do their Senators get their heads around this issue?

Greece, America and GOP 2.0

Krugman tells us Germany and the EU must bail out Greece lest the entire EU crash and burn. Germany is unenthusiastic. Michael Lewis makes Germany's lack of enthusiasm understandable ...

Amazon.com: Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World Michael Lewis

… government owed … $1.2 trillion, or more than a quarter-million dollars for every working Greek ….

… In just the past twelve years the wage bill of the Greek public sector has doubled … The average government job pays three times the average private-sector job ...

… The national railroad has annual revenues of 100 million euros against annual wage bill of 400 million ...

… The retirement age for Greek jobs classified as "arduous" is … fifty for women …

… In 2009, tax collection disintegrated, because it was an election year ...

… as estimated two thirds of Greek doctors reported incomes under 12,000 euros a year ...

…. Greece has no working national land registry ...

… all three hundred members of the Greek parliament declare the real value of their houses to be the computer-generated objective value … "every single member … is lying to evade taxes"...

Lewis describes Greece as a "perfectly corrupt society". Greece seems to have hit the limits of corruption; where the only honest people are either perversely oppositional or autistically incapable of deceit.  It's easy to see why Germany wants to put Greece through a world class social reengineering program.

Wow. Good thing we Americans aren't so corrupt. Good thing we don't have vast corporations paying no taxes. Mercifully our corporations aren't hiding trillions of dollars abroad. Our politicians don't use charitable donation scams or generate profits through insider trading that's illegal for all but Congress critters.

No way do we have the kind of widespread fraud and abuse of the weak that can lead to economic collapse.

Seriously though, if Greece is a nine on a ten point scale of democratic collapse and societal bankruptcy, how do we score? Are we a six? Do I hear a seven?

More importantly, how do we get back to a reasonable "four"? Greece is getting schooled by Germany (whose bankers were as stupid as any on earth), but nobody is going to school the US. All of Greece is barely New Orleans; we're too big to be taught.

We are going to have to reform ourselves. Occupy Wall Street can help, but to reform government we need to solve the problem of the Republican Party.

Both our political parties are corrupt, but the Dems are at least connected to science and logic. The GOP is no longer a part of the reality-based community; whatever Romney and the like may really think they have to pretend to be delusional.

We can't salvage our democracy with only one working political party. We need a reformed GOP. Some party has to do the bidding of the powerful -- lest the powerful tear the nation down. We don't need the GOP to become a shining beacon of integrity, but we do need them to be connected to logic and arithmetic and falsifiable predictions.

This isn't inconceivable. I can't imagine voting for a modern Republican, but only fifteen years ago I voted for a Republican Governor named Arne Carlson. Arne is still around, and he represents a faint voice of sanity in the modern GOP (emphases mine, note that "Pawlenty" is considered a "moderate" by modern GOP standards, but to Carlson he's a far right extremist) ...

MinnPost - Gov. Arne Carlson Blog: Bedford Falls or Pottersville?

... the Republican Party went from moderate to what I call “the new Right”. But it was more than a shift in political philosophy. Leaders like Sutton and Pawlenty and numerous others saw the party as representing not only a different and more narrow philosophy but also as having the power to rigidly enforce that philosophy on its elected members. Orthodoxy prevailed over representativeness and the result has been that cooperative governance with Democrats, Independents and Republican moderates is not possible. It is either the way of the “new Right” or not at all.

Politics is no longer a contest of competing ideas with respect for dissent but increasingly the imposition of an authoritarianism that all too often is cloaked in patriotism and religion. In this environment, the party and its beliefs are paramount and elected officials serve the party...

... my memory of Republicanism in Minnesota goes back to a party that was always building a better community … So many of our leaders came out of the progressivism of Harold Stassen while still committed to the conservative virtues of prudent financial management. Policies ranging from consumer and environmental protection to human rights to metropolitan governance bore the fingerprints of an endless array of community oriented GOP Governors from Elmer Andersen to Harold LeVander through Al Quie and on.

In addition, Republicans produced an endless array of truly talented legislators from all over Minnesota who came to our capital city to govern and always with an eye to the future. Simply put, Republicans, like their counterparts, the Democrats, felt that good politics stemmed from the competition of good ideas that produced quality governance.

And in this mix, leaders from every walk of life and every profession from medicine to agriculture participated. There seemed to be a sense of obligation to give something of oneself in order to build a better community for our children….

...The Republican Party both in Minnesota and nationally has a choice to make. Does it want to build a true Bedford Falls with a commitment to the well being of the whole or does it want to lead us to “Pottersville” where the quality of life rests with the privileged few?

We're in a bad place, but we can work our way out. Occupy Wall Street can help with some things, but they can't help with the critical mission. The critical mission is to reform the GOP; and only Republican voters can do that ...

So how do we help them?

Spider brains and the evolution of computation

Brains have a big return on investment ...

Tiniest of Spiders Are Loaded With Brains, Researchers Find - NYTimes

... In the smallest spiders, Dr. Eberhard and his colleagues found, the central nervous systems filled nearly 80 percent of the cephalothorax, or body cavity, including 25 percent of the legs.

“The brain tissue of the nervous tissue is metabolically expensive,” he said. “These little spiders are paying a very large price to keep these brains functioning.”

At times, that price includes a deformed body cavity bulging with brain matter, which may in turn compromise the size of the digestive system, Dr. Eberhard said....

Were spider brains this big 200 million years ago? Across all organisms, are brains bigger than they once were? Across all worlds, where does computation stop having positive evolutionary returns?

The "War on Chrismas" is not entirely delusional

The American "War on Christmas" movement seems thoroughly silly ....

Reminder: Tis the Season Not to Be an Ass – Whatever

...it’s about as silly as it ever was, considering that Christmas has conquered December, occupied November and metastasized into late October. To suggest that the holiday is under serious threat from politically correct non-Christians is like suggesting an earthworm is a serious threat to a Humvee. This is obvious enough to anyone with sense that I use The War on Christmas as an emergency diagnostic, which is to say, if you genuinely believe there’s a War on Christmas, you may want to see a doctor, since you might have a tumor pressing on your frontal lobes.

Seems silly, is silly.

And yet, I agree with TNC that Rick Perry is not completely delusional ...

Rick Perry and the Politics of Resentment - Ta-Nehisi Coates - Politics - The Atlantic

... What strikes me is the sense of being under siege, a constant theme in conservative politics. It is as if time itself is against them. And they know it. The line "I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm a Christian" stands out. Who is ashamed of this? This is a predominantly Christian country, and one of the most religious in the West. People don't "admit" their Christianity here. They proclaim it -- as the president has done repeatedly.

But what if there's something else? What if the conservatives are more perceptive and honest than the moderate liberals? I love Grant and Lincoln, but they were dead wrong in claiming that emancipation did not promote "social equality." Meanwhile the bigots who asserted that emancipation meant that Sambo would be "marryin yer daughters" were right. I wouldn't be shocked if Grant and Lincoln knew this, but also knew that to admit as much would be suicidal...

Yes, to most of the world the US seems to border on theocracy. But I was born into a true western theocracy, and it fell apart in less than 10 years ...

Quiet Revolution - Quebec History

The Quiet Revolution is the name given to a period of Quebec history extending from 1960 to 1966...

... The first major change that took place during the Quiet Revolution was the large-scale rejection of past values. Chief among these are those that Michel Brunet called “les trois dominantes de la pensée canadienne-française: l’agriculturisme, le messianisme et l’anti-étatisme” [the three main components of French Canadian thought: agriculturalism, anti-statism and messianism]. In this respect, Quebec entered resolutely into a phase of modernisation: its outlook became more secular (as opposed to religious), much of the traditionalism that characterised the past was replaced by increasingly liberal attitudes; long standing demographic tendencies, associated with a traditional rural way of life (high marriage, birth and fertility rates), were rapidly reversed ...

Quebec seemed stuck in the past -- until it lurched into the future. Societies can change very quickly.

Consider the case of the 2012 Presidential campaign. The GOP's presidential candidate will be theologically non-Christian (though culturally mainstream Protestant). The Dems candidate will be mainstream Protestant but raised partly in Islamic Indonesia.

That seems different, even if the current candidates aren't as theologically extreme as Jefferson, Adams or Madison. I would not be surprised if the religious attitudes of 2020 America were similar to those of 2000 Britain.

The religious right is right to be afraid, but wrong to think there's a conspiracy they can fight. Their foe is history, and it's hard to fight history. Just ask al Qaeda.

US carrier locking of post-contract iPhones - a critique

AT&T will not unlock an iPhone under any circumstances. Together with their SMS pricing this has odd results (including a glut of former iPhones).

Verizon and Sprint claim they'll allow unlocking, but the reality is more complex  (emphases mine)...

How U.S. Carriers Fool You Into Thinking Your iPhone 4S Is Unlocked - Forbes

... What consumers need to understand is that there are actually four different versions of the iPhone 4S: Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, and Apple. Only the Apple phone, available from their stores or on-line, is fully unlocked and can be used on any carrier. The other phones are permanently locked and cannot ever be used on another carrier in the U.S. Even if you spend $800 for an unlocked phone as I did and dedicate it to a single U.S. carrier, you are locked into that carrier forever if you want to keep using the iPhone. Neither Apple or the other carriers will fully unlock your carrier phone.

Apple declined to return phone calls and emails to discuss this matter. However, the high level technical support supervisor that I spoke with at length indicated that she personally thought that customers should be warned about the different versions of the phones and ramifications of buying a phone directly from a carrier rather than Apple. A senior spokesperson for Verizon told me that all Verizon phones are locked to their network and she did not quite understand the problem. I am willing to bet that Verizon customers would precisely understand this issue, even if she did not.

So if you paid retail for your iPhone 4S and purchased it from Verizon, Sprint, AT&T or Best Buy, you will never be able to use that phone with a different carrier. In my view, this is a scam by these companies. I think the cellular providers should tell their customers up front that locked phones really mean that you are locked into the carrier forever. While all of these phones are iPhone 4S with the identical hardware, the difference is that if you purchase your phone directly from Apple, it is truly a universal device and will allow you to change carriers without the penalty of making the phone worthless.

I would urge the Carriers, FCC, or Courts to enforce the following rules to protect cellular customers in the United States: consumers buying new cell phones must be informed of the existence of any SIM LOCK (also known as a network lock) on their phone before sale; wireless phone companies must unlock handsets upon request, without fee, when a consumer purchases a new phone outright (unsubsidized) without a contract; wireless phone companies must unlock handsets upon request, without fee, when a consumer comes to the end of their contract, or at any time thereafter. Carriers must fully unlock their phones (as does Apple with the iPhone 4S) and not partially unlock the phone to block access to other carriers and deny consumers the right to choose any provider anywhere...

Carrier locking of iPhones is a nasty trick on consumers. It reduces the value of a post-contract iPhone; I wonder if a clever lawyer could sue carriers for theft. Another lawyer might find the shared policies a sign of illegal collusion or price-fixing among carriers.

Senator Franken - this is right up your alley!

See also:

• Gordon's Notes: The Gordon vs. AT&T iPhone war - Conclusion (11/2011) - we dramatically cut our monthly charges.

Did canine distemper arise from measles in the new world?

(I wrote this 9/2011, but I was mistakenly left as a draft until now.)

Six years ago I read that new world dogs (canis familiaris) died in large numbers after the European invasion.

So what killed the Amerindian dog?

I assumed it was some European plague, and I suspected distemper.

I'd guess distemper. Recently I read that wild African dogs are now dying of epidemic distemper. Seems to fit. The Euros carried viruses that killed many of the native americans, it's not surprising that their dogs would have done the same thing.

Recently I read of a twist to this story

Evidence of a New World Origin for Canine Distemper -- Uhl et al. 25 (1): 613.4 -- The FASEB Journal 

.... The historical, epidemiological, paleopathological and molecular evidence supports the hypothesis that canine distemper arose in the New World from MV after the European conquest....

The Europeans brought Measles from the old world. In the new world it produced massive epidemics with astounding mortality. Tens of millions of native Americans died of Measles and other Old World diseases.

As is seen with other plagues, under these circumstances the measles virus jumped species. It went from humans to their dogs. It may have been even more lethal in the dogs of the 1500s.

Why didn't it then go back to Europe and wipe out the European dog? Did the virus adapt to its new host so it became less lethal? Could a historian who knew what to look for find evidence of massive die offs in European dogs in the 16th century?

I suspect we'll find out in the next year or two.

Syphilis - again a New World invention?

Decades ago physicians were taught that syphilis was a New World disease. The Europeans brought smallpox, and Amerindians returned syphilis. This was not a comparable exchange, smallpox and its kin killed most of the Amerindians (and another disease killed New World dogs). Syphilis, even at its worst, was not quite so deadly.

By the 1980s though, when I studied medicine, we were taught that syphilis was probably an Old World disease.

Now the pendulum has swung again ... The French Disease, the Italian Disease, the Christian Disease–the New World Disease?. Seems like it may be a New World disease after all.

See also:

• Conflagration -- the european invasion of the americas 11/2004
• History of the First Peoples - Charles Mann's 1491 11/2007
• Distemper and the death of the american dog 9/2005
• Rat plagues wipe out indigenous rats 10/2007
• Squanto and the non-Puritan non-Pilgrim "Fathers" 9/2007
• Did canine distemper arise from measles in the new world? 12/2011

Netbooks

Dell has ended their Netbook line.

That leaves Google's Chromebooks, which aren't exactly exciting.

I wasn't just a little wrong about Netbooks, I was incredibly, unbelievably, totally wrong. Again.

I mean, this is friggin' ridiculous.

What happened?

I suppose it was the pocket computer. People with iPhones and the Android equivalent are already paying for most of what a Netbook can do. It doesn't make sense to pay for an extra monthly data plan, and a Netbook without net access is kind of a bust.

That leaves Windows notebooks, which are cheap but crummy. And MacBook Airs, which are not cheap but very amazing.

There's still the grade school and perhaps junior high school marketplace, but the iPad and Android equivalents are squeezing there too.

The Netbook looks like an evolutionary dead end. Maybe we'd have taken that road, but the iPhone blew a hole in it by mid-2007. I was writing in 2009; the bloody 3G was out then!

Damnit Netbook, you made a fool of me.

See also:

• Gordon's Notes: Making better predictions: 2011/03, a precursor to this mea culpa. BTW, I also predicted China's bubble would burst before 2012. Not much time left for that to happen ...

Google, Blogger and the Machine

Does anyone reading this still happily use Blogger?

If so, please comment below or comment on this companion G+ public post.

I'm testing a theory, related to this old Marissa Mayer quote:

Two Schools of Thought: The Key Difference Between Apple and Google

... "It looks like a human was involved in choosing what went where,” Marissa Mayer once told an upset team of designers about a product design she rejected. “It looks too editorialized. Google products are machine-driven. They’re created by machines. And that is what makes us powerful. That’s what makes our products great.”...

More when I get my results.

No, I don't need a denominator.

Update: Fixed a bad link.

Will Friedman win Salon's hack list 2011?

Last year Friedman came in third. Will he win this year?

Welcome to the 2011 Salon Hack List

Update: Darn! Friedman has been retired. Too predictably hackish to put on the list any longer.

And you thought the Jobs bio made him seem nasty ...

The Jobs bio makes him look pretty nasty, but apparently some of his nastiest bits didn't make the cut ...

AppleInsider | Steve Jobs refused to talk philanthropy with biographer: 

... any comments that were hurtful to individuals and served no purpose in the book were left out ...

A family doc's perspective on the best way to die

As a former family doc, I loved Ken Murray's essay on how doctor's die.

Is it true?

I suspect it's mostly true of family docs and some surgeons who are older and whose children are grown. I don't think it's true of younger physicians, especially those with children. My physician friend Tom fought his glioma very hard. He probably got an extra 1-2 years out of his suffering, and for his young family that was worth a lot.

I think I'd put myself through a lot to get my young kids a year or two.

When the kids are grown though, my physician wife and I have always imagined the kind of management Ken describes. Like most physicians, we're skeptical about how much medicine can really do for most end-of-life conditions. There's a difference between treatments that are statistically beneficial and treatments that make a really important difference.

After all, we know how the story ends.

Organizing human cognition: Lessons from CERN

There's a hierarchy in big time science schools, and physics holds the crown. (Math majors are in a different league.) Physicists are, face it, smarter than the rest of us -- and they know it.

Our only consolation is that they often work for a pittance.

So, from my perspective as a corporate ant, it's fascinating to read John Conway's description of how physicists organize their collaboration on history's biggest physics project (emphases mine)...

Making the (Higgs) Sausage | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine

For the past year, physicists at the LHC experiments CMS and ATLAS have been analyzing ever–increasing data samples from the huge machine. Rumors are now circulating about what the experiments might announce at next week’s presentations at CERN regarding the search for the Higgs boson.

... As you probably know, each of the two big experiments has over 3000 physicists participating, from all over the world. Many, but by no means the majority, are resident at CERN; most are at their home institutions in Europe, North America, and Asia and elsewhere.

The main thing that allows us to collaborate on a global scale like this is video conferencing. We used a system called EVO, developed at Caltech, which allows us to schedule meetings and connect to them from a laptop or desktop computer, or even dial in by phone ...the experiments have gravitated toward having meetings in the late afternoon, Europe time, which makes it early morning for people like me in California.

.., In CMS, our whole system of producing physics results has a sort of pyramidal structure. Each experiment has a number of physics analysis groups which meet a weekly or biweekly, typically, and have two “conveners” who set the agenda and run the meetings. These convener positions are typically held by senior people in the collaboration such as professors or senior lab scientists, for two years at a stretch, one convener changing out each year. They report to an overall physics coordinator and his or her deputies.

Within the physics analysis groups are subgroups devoted to sets of analyses which share common themes, common tools, or similar approaches. Each of these subgroups in turn is led by a pair of conveners who establish the ongoing analyses and guide them to eventual approval within physics analysis group.

We have what I think is a pretty impressive internal website devoted to tracking the progress of each physics analysis. From a single website you can drill down into a particular physics group find the analysis you want get links to all the documentation, and follow what’s happening. In parallel, there is a web system for recording the material presented at every meeting.

The goal of every analysis is to be approved by its physics group, so it can be shown in public at conferences and seminars. This requires having complete documentation including internal notes with full details of the analysis, and a “public analysis summary” which is available to the public, and which often serves as the basis for a peer–reviewed paper which soon follows.
Every analysis is assigned an analysis review committee of three to five people with experience in the topic, who act as a sort of hit squad, keeping the analyzers on their toes with questions and comments at every stage of the analysis, both on the actual analysis details and on the documentation. After all, if we are not our own worst critics, someone else will gladly fill the role!

In parallel with processing the data that we record, we run full simulations of well–known standard model collision processes which represent our background when we are doing searches for new particles. There is a big organizational challenge in doing these simulations, which run on a worldwide grid of computers devoted to CMS data analysis. We make use of the Open Science Grid for this in the US, the EuroGrid in Europe, and other clusters scattered all around the world, comprising tens of thousands of computing nodes.

I'd love to see comparisons to organizational structures used in aerospace projects. There's nothing like this large scale organization in the industry I work in.

This framework for harnessing cognition reminds me of the original "computers" - humans who did large scale arithmetic calculations prior to the development of log tables. It's easy to imaging who this would map onto a cognitive unit made up of, initially, humans and AIs.

PS. Historical footnote: CERN was where Tim Berners-Lee, working as an independent contractor, led the development of the first web site and browser.

Is Gingrich our only hope?

Bruce Bartlett, a reformed Republican, says Gingrich is our only hope ...

Economic Experts Gather In DC To Explain Why Politics Has Doomed Us | TPMDC

... The most we can hope for is that a complete crazy person like Newt Gingrich gets the Republican nomination, the Republicans lose so badly that they lose control of the House and don’t get control of the Senate and then maybe in a year we can finally talk about doing something rational ...

Rationalists for Gingrich!

On the topic of reformed Republicans, there's a post deep in my backlog about what a reformed GOP would look like. I hope I get to it someday. Briefly, a reformed GOP would be reality-based, and would respect basic logic and arithmetic. There's lots of room for political debate within a framework of reason ...