How the US could get a real (big) carbon tax

The Philippines has been hit by a very powerful storm. Thousands are dead and more will die, suffering will be extensive and long lasting. (Yes, poverty matters, but remember Katrina killed 1,500-3,500 and devastated a wealthy country city.)

Science-based thinkers expect a grim outlook for the Philippines. Sea level will rise, storms are likely to be more powerful, this will happen again even if many move away from the current crowded coastal zones.

Which makes this a good time to talk about a Carbon Tax. Not a trifling Carbon Tax, but a 'sell-the-SUV' and 'wear sweaters' and 'upgrade AC to smart adjust' carbon tax. A Carbon Tax that's politically impossible in 2013 China, USA, Australia, Canada or even Germany.

To be sure, a (Big) Carbon Tax (BCT) isn't about raising money for research - the funds would likely be offset by other tax reductions and by subsidies to people most hurt by cost shifts.. It's about keeping Carbon in the ground longer (maybe forever) by making extraction unprofitable, and accelerating transitions to low CO2 technologies (esp. solar, smart tech energy, etc) by making them cost-competitive ten years sooner than expected.

Nice idea, but impossible.

Except ... things change. Warfare happens. India suffers, and declares if it's going down it will take wealth western cities with it. Massive rogue geo-engineering projects have nasty side-effects that lead to more war, more threats.

Maybe a BCT becomes more palatable. Here's how it might happen -- the key is Border Tax Adjustment - "... import fees levied by carbon-taxing countries on goods manufactured in non-carbon-taxing countries...".

So what happens is China, India and Germany commit to a BCT -- for reasons of self-preservation and economic advantage. They tax American goods and services with the Border Tax Adjustment. The US can either suffer this or can add its own Big Carbon Tax -- and put various compensatory tax reductions/subsidies in place. The BTA goes away, the money stays in the US.

Once you have China, India, Germany and the US the rest of the world falls in line.

Lessons from Photo Stream Unlimited - Typhoon Mobile and is Apple going to make a prosumer camera?

For an old school technology geek, reared on local file stores and data cables and file formats and backups and (ugh) synchronization, these are challenging times. Our life is getting harder as the tech landscape shifts to fit billions of connected devices paired with humans who don't know a .docx from the proverbial hole in the ground.

Remember Cnut and the tides? He knew you can't fight City Hall. The best we can do is figure out which way the wind blows. (Ok, I'll stop now.)

So what does Google's mangling of old school email [1] and weakening of CalDAV support, Apple's ending of iTunes USB sync of calendar and contacts [2], Apple's Podcast.app disregard for iTunes metadata [3], Apple's mobile/Cloud retcon of iWorks [4] and, especially, Apple's very quiet Everpixing [5] of Photo Stream tell us about the wind?

It tells us that mobile has at last eaten the world. We knew this was coming, but we didn't know when. Hello Typhoon Mobile, good-bye the world we elder geeks evolved in.

The new world is transitory -- people don't keep photos any more. They walk away from Facebook accounts with barely a backwards look. It's Los Angeles all over.

The new world doesn't have cables. It doesn't really have local file stores or local backup. It rarely does power or complexity -- pro power is going to get expensive. Do you love your iTunes Smart Lists? Play 'em Taps while you can.

We can't fight this -- heck, even Apple can't fight this. At best Apple may support a rear guard action for its old school paying customers. Google, Amazon and Samsung ain't gonna be so merciful or so motivated. [6]

Maybe we'll meet at a bar sometime and raise a glass to the days that were.

Oh, and that camera? 

Well, if Photo Stream is as big as I think it will be -- just enough memory in the age of transience -- there's a nice little business for a Photo Stream compatible prosumer device that is to Camera.app as the MacBook is to the iPad. It's a natural Apple software/manufacturing disruption move. An iCamera they make that works with Nikon, Canon or Leica glass -- whoever makes the right deal. I'll buy one.

- fn -

[1] I just modified the wikipedia entry to say Gmail is an "email-like" service rather than an "email service". I doubt that will stick, but eventually it will. 

[2] So far on Mavericks. It's effectively ending for Podcasts and iBooks as well. After Apple stops selling iPods all cable sync is going to go.

[3] You can change Podcast titles in iTunes, but if the Podcast is available online those edits are ignored.

[4] Retcon is how comic books dealt with middle-aged superheroes that were born 60 realtime years ago; it's a recapitulation of how Greeks did mythology -- every town had its version of the stories, and they got frequent reboots. In software we once had "updates" that added features and capabilities or managed platform changes, now we have retcons that inherit branding. They come with new capabilities, but also substantial regressions. Apple has kinda-sorta apologized for calling iThing 13 iWorks, but they didn't have much of  a choice.

[5] Everpix was a photo service that claimed to store all images forever for all devices. They were so obviously high risk I avoided them, but it may not be coincidental that they died around the same week that Apple ended its Photo Stream image limit.

[6] Who is it that makes Office 365? Can't remember.

Update: A corollary of all of this is that we're never going to come up with a DRM standard for either eBooks or movies. We'll go instead to a pure rental model.

Bicycling related kickstarters wanted: integrated cam/light, power platform, autonomous vehicle communication

These projects almost certainly exist, either or kickstarter or some design document, but I'll share them anyway. No rights reserved - except proof of prior art where applicable (I'm sure there's prior prior.) If there's a kickstarter for one or the other let me know.

Integrated incident cam and bicycle light with optional smartphone app

• Typical LiOn modern USB charged bicycle light (example Niterider Lumina) with front mounting brackets
• Integrated incident cam mounts above and behind light element
• Optional: companion smartphone app (there are standards for sending data to existing smartphone bicycle apps)

Modular power/peripheral platform with open connector standard

• key is open standards for the power and data connections including Bluetooth to smartphone peripheral
• USB 3 charging (compatible with emerging high power standards)
• power source can be LiOn battery, generator, etc.
• implement on standard bike or eBike
• platform modules include lights, incident cam, etc

Both projects can include support for broadcast/smartphone broadcast notification of planned route, velocity, steering angle, location, etc to compatible semi-autonomous car systems and tracking of autonomous vehicle metadata (incident prevention and reporting).

Wanted: A blog feed that consists of a random sample of all past posts

I've been idly looking for a solution to the blog backlog problem. Lately I've seen others looking for the same thing, so I'm expecting a fix within the next few months.

What's the backlog problem?

The backlog problem is discovering a great blog, but reading only the most recent posts. That is, after all, how blogs were designed to work. Problem is, there's a lot of great stuff in the backlog. I'd like to read that too - the same way I read my other blogs.

What I want is a special feed for every blog I read that's the 'random post feed'. It could be generated by a WordPress extension for example -- it just has to be integrated with the blog's database and publish 1-2 posts a day. [1]

Any day now ....

[1] Google Reader could have done this because Google kept old posts around, but nobody else is going to keep billions of blog posts in an archive. The RSS feed for backlog posts has to come from a random selection of all past posts -- say 1 random selection a day. I've seen mention of using Yahoo Pipes to do something like this, but Pipes can only randomize the urls exposed by a feed -- not all past posts.

April 2014: What Americans and the world must do after the Tea Party's first defeat

Imagine it's April 2014. Winter is fading, the days are getting longer. The Tea Party is in its cave, licking wounds and sharpening knives.

America is not quite in recession, but we're still digging out from the partial default of 2013.  The American dollar has fallen relative to other currencies and we pay more interest for short term treasuries. The falling currency has been a boost to manufacturing, and maybe we're finally getting some of the inflation we need. The state healthcare exchanges are operational and the federal exchange is finally more or less working.

Internationally the past few months have been an education in American civics. There's a bit more understanding of what Presidents can and can't do, and a wariness about the future of the American nation.

At home we have a better understanding of what drives the Tea Party -- decades of static white male income, fears of loss of historic privilege, and a deep fear of minority status and changing social mores. Did I mention fear and uncertainty?

So what should Americans, and non-Americans who are collateral damage in the latest bout of our centuries old slaver war, be doing?

We, everywhere, should be working on America's wealthy and America's corporations. The only way to manage the Tea Party is to strengthen the rational minority within America's GOP. That means funding GOP reformers and fighting Tea Party candidates. The only people who are going to do that are corporate donors, Chamber of Commerce members, wealthy Americans and others who still, barely, have a place in the GOP.

I'm not going to fund the GOP, but someone has to. We all need to put relentless pressure on the GOP's 'rational' donors to fight the Tea Party. We need to be doing that now, we need to be doing that next April.

I need a feed of television commercials

Ok, I don't need the stream of scams that keep daytime television on life support, but I do need something.

The problem is I've gotten very good at hiding from marketing -- including the marketing of goods and services I'd like to know about either for myself or for my family. I don't watch television, I only listen to NPR and BBC In Our Time Podcasts, my brain blanks out Gmail ads, and my hundreds of feeds don't show me ads. When I do notice Facebook ads, they're invariably targeting the wrong person. The only ads I really see are in Silent Sports -- and I buy it largely for the ads.

I live in a weird marketing-free zone.

So I wouldn't mind a service that let me characterize my interests, and that gave me a feed of new product/service announcements and updates, paired with a searchable repository. It would be paid for, of course, by the service owners.

I'm afraid I'm the only market though ...

How to practice your French (or Chinese, English, etc) pronunciation on your iOS device. For free.

Do you have a lousy French accent?

Never fear, it's better than mine. What we need is a victim, a native speaker, who will type whatever we say. Someone who never tires and never complains. Someone who is poor at interpreting foreign accents.

Someone like your iPhone.

Here's the trick for an English speaker:

1. In Settings, General, International, Keyboards enable French (or Chinese, English, etc) keyboard.
2. Go to an app like Notes. Tap world icon to switch to French keyboard.
3. Tap microphone icon and dictate your French phrases. Watch the iPhone get them completely wrong. Keep practicing until they come out right.

It's even easier than doing the same thing on OS X. Handy for kids learning foreign languages. (I'm certain Android does this as well.)

 

(Credit to Talking to Siri by Sadun & Sande for discussing this in terms of Siri control.)

For American adults are poverty and disability the same thing?

[Preface 9/6/13: I am enjoying the app.net discussion thread on this with @duerig and @clarkgoble. When reading this, try substituting TRREP - Trait that Reduces Relative Economic Productivity for the word "disability". Also, please note disability is not inability. In my experience parenting/coaching two children with disabilities I think of managing disability like building a railroad across mountainous terrain. Sometimes reinforce, somethings divert, always forward.]

-- 

Anosmia is not a disability.

Well, technically, it is. Humans are supposed to come with a sense of smell. For most of human existence anosmia was a significant survival problem. At the least, it helps to known when food has gone bad. So Anosmia is a biological disability.

In today's America though, there's not much obvious economic downside to anosmia. Diminished appetite is more of a feature than a defect. There are many jobs where a keen sense of smell is a disadvantage -- including, I can assure you, medical practice. Anosmia is a biological disability, but it's not an economic disability. Not here and now anyway -- once it would have been.

Disability is contextual, it's the combination of variation, environment and measured outcome that defines disability.

What about if I lose my right leg? Am I disabled then? Well, if I delivered mail I'd have a problem -- but in my job an insurance company would snort milk out its proverbial nose if I tried to claim longterm disability.

I think you can see where I'm going with this. Stephen Hawking is an extreme example -- you can have a lot of physical disability and not be economically disabled.

So how can I become disabled? 

Probably not through my "risky" CrossFit hobby,  but my benign bicycle commute is another matter. Until that glorious day when humans are no longer allowed to drive cars, I'm at risk of a catastrophic head injury. An injury that may impact my cognitive processing, my disposition to use cognition ("rationality"), my judgment and temperament -- and leave me as completely disabled for high income work as if I were 85 [1]. At that point, barring insurance, I'm economically disabled and impoverished.

Clearly, acquired cognitive injury can be disabling. So what of congenital cognitive disorders like low functioning autism or severe impulse disorders? Impulsivity, inability to plan, very low IQ ... Clearly disabling. Without income support from family or government, extreme poverty is likely.

Ahh, but what of those born with average IQ, average rationality, average judgment, average temperament? Employment is likely -- but earnings will be limited. To be average in the economy of 2013 is to sit on the borderline of poverty -- and of disability. The difference will be decided by other factors, factors like race, location, and family wealth. An average person who looks and acts "white" and is born to a middle class family in Minnesota may make it into the dwindling middle class (for a time), an average person who looks and acts "black" and is born to a poor family in Mississippi is going to be impoverished.

Which brings me to my question - for American adults are poverty and disability the same thing? Not entirely -- race, residence, and family income have an impact, particularly within some ill-defined "middle range" of "native disability". Not entirely -- but they are clearly related. 

How related? Consider this OECD graph of poverty rates across nations with very different cultures, attitudes and histories:

 

Across Finland, Denmark, Sweden and the US we see a "natural" or baseline (pre-transfer) adult poverty rate of 24-32%, with Swede and the US both at 28%. Not coincidentally, 30% is what I suspect our baseline rate of mass disability is today.

We can and should deal with poverty-enhancing factors like racism, unfunded schools and the like. That will make a difference for many -- and, if all goes well, we might get the US baseline poverty rate to be more like Denmark's. We'll go from 28% to 24%. Ok, maybe, in a perfect world, we get our baseline rate from 28% to 20%. Maybe.

To really deal with poverty though, we need to understand what real disability is. Economic disability in 2013 isn't a missing leg, it's poor judgment, weak rationality, low IQ, disposition to substance abuse. To conquer poverty, we will need to conquer disability - either with Danish style income transfers or with something better.

I think we can do better.

- fn -

[1] Social security is simply a form of insurance for age-related disability with an arbitrary (but pragmatic) substitution of chronology for disability measurement.

See also

• The Post-AI era is also the era of mass disability 12/2012
• Mass disability and the middle class 9/11
• Unemployment and the new American economy - with some fixes 1/2011. There are things we can do. Ok, maybe not the US, but maybe China.
• ADHD, CDD, and Related Conditions 2002. I just came across this. This was one of the last old-school web pages I did before I started writing blog posts. It anticipates a lot of what I've written since.
• Disability and poverty - Wikipedia - yes, this isn't original :-).
• Various Supports for Low-Income Families Reduce Poverty and Have Long-Term Positive Effects On Families and Children — Center on Budget and Policy Priorities 7/2013 

 

Will we get a $5000 custom app development business?

There are a lot of apps I want that that I can't find, apps like a personal-corporate search tool, or a corrosion-resistant wiki, or adding a graph navigation (link) layer to a plain text repository.

I know enough about building software that I can, fairly quickly, make up an initial set of requirements that I'm reasonably sure are a good match to readily available toolkits and technologies. I can quickly revise them to match timelines and resources. It's a bit of an odd knack but it's one I have.

There are architects I know who can, in an hour, lay out how to build to those requirements -- including specifying platform options and toolkit alternatives.

The first step is free for me. For $1K-$2K for 1-2 hours work I can find good people to do the second step.

Things get tricky when we try to turn this into code. Anyone who has done outsourcing knows that there's a gap between the theory of Ugandan MOOC grads wanting to work for $20/hour and the reality of high school quality coders who work for a year before moving into management. Not to mention little details like testing.

Open source only works if the app is something the developers themselves want to use ... and that's a special case.

So for $2K I can only get to the pre-coding step given today's methods for organizing paid work ...

The corporate wiki I want

The modern publicly traded corporation is to data as water is to iron. It is a challenging environment for use of anything but the most corrosion-resistant materials: .doc, .ppt and .xls. It's not a good home for things like Wikis.

So we need a corrosion-resistant Wiki. This is what I think we need:

• Minimal dependencies, maximal configuration simplicity. This probably means file based, no database dependencies.
• No expertise for setup and operation - if you can use basic Word and files you can implement and move the Wiki in under 1 hour.
• Rapid and perfect portability. Rapid moves, no broken links.
• WYSIWYG (roughly) and a native syntax that works. Probably markdown.
• Strong search API
• Cross-platform (shudder. Does this mean Java for the environment?)
• Low cost or open source/free. (Freemium model ok for scale)
• Maximal link preservation (Confluence, I can't believe how readily you break external links. This is simple stuff.)

There are probably other requirements, but I only have five minutes. Those are a good start.

 

This wiki doesn't exist today, but I am certain it could be built. The next time I'm unemployed it's on my list (along with a lot of other things, alas)

See also: 

• Wiki impressions: XWiki

Evolutionary economics is due for a reboot

Jupiter's red spot is a transient thing. One day the storm will dissipate -- though probably not in our lifetimes.

Life is a transient thing; a deviation from general entropy flows. One day life will go away.

NFL subsidies are a kind of emergent trap, one day they will go away.

Our universe, lives and economies are rife with transient exceptions. In the long run they go away, but we don't live in the long run. In our time frames the exceptions are the rules.

These exceptions don't appear in micro-economics, macro-economics, or even behavioral economics. Macro tells us average temperature, it doesn't describe the tornado bearing down on our house. 

So we need something radically new. Something like evo-Econ or eco-Econ or Canopy Economics; a discipline that focuses on self-organizing emergent phenomena, that recognizes that natural selection is inevitable in a complex adaptive system.

Did I put enough buzz words in there? Because I'm not dumb enough to think these are new ideas. Ecological economics is the application of economics to ecological topics, so not what I'm thinking of, but Thorsten Veblen coined the term Evolutionary Economics in 1898. Judging from the wikipedia article Evo-Econ has veered off in several different directions over the past 110 or so years -- but sometimes it tracks closely to what I'm describing here.

It's due for a renaissance today.

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.

New age data loss: what do we do when backup isn't enough?

A few weeks ago my primary drive began to fail. This was painful because the recovery process exposed lots of rusty plumbing, but I was never worried. I have onsite and offsite backups, multiple iterations of each, using two different technologies (Time Capsule and Carbon Copy Cloner).

I feel pretty good about data loss due to drive failures or boneheaded mistakes.

I don't feel good about the iTunes 11.1 making my media disappear. If not for a chance post encounter I probably wouldn't have discovered the loss for months -- at which time recovery might have been impossible. In this particular case the media files weren't lost -- but iTunes 11.1 couldn't recognize media kind metadata assigned by an earlier version of the app.

Similarly Aperture and iPhoto have been known to lose track of video and images; both have added features to look for orphaned files thanks to past experiences. Users have to know to run these procedures however.

Even worse are sync errors. Apple's Discussions forum are rife with reports of data loss or corruption related to iCloud use. This is bad when it's obvious, but far worse when it goes undetected.

We need new approaches.

We need a utility that keeps a record of deletions, and has rules to notify us of unexpected deletions. That's doable, I'm looking forward to buying a copy.

I don't know what to do about data invisibility arising from application database corruption or bugs like iTunes media kind metadata conversion failure. That's a lot more subtle. Given Apple's poor record of managing these problems (I can think of several things they could do) I wonder if they'll need someday to be legally liable for gross negligence leading to data loss. In the meantime, I suppose we could Voodoo stick pins in something -- or rant in our blogs, which is probably about as effective.

Facebook's real problem -- people sharing photos and stories

Andrew Leonard writes about Facebook's awful ad targeting, and their efforts to retarget ads and posts. That made me wonder why Facebook is determined to drive away me, my friends and family, and my neighbors.

It's either incompetence or design. I suspect the latter. Facebook doesn't make any money off us now, and I suspect they gave up hope when their farm games died.

Facebook wants a passive audience consuming celebrity endorsements and product placements. The TV audience of old, or the Twitter audience of today.

People sharing stories and photos are a distracting waste of bandwidth.

Amerisclerosis? Why US underemployment (and probably inequality) persists.

Brad DeLong excerpts Olivier Coibion, Yuriy Gorodnichenko and Dmitri Koustas: Amerisclerosis? The Puzzle of Rising U.S. Unemployment Persistence: "The results suggest that only cultural factors can account for the rising persistence of unemployment in the U.S., but the evolution in mobility and demographics over time should have more than offset the effects of culture."

I can't tell from the excerpt what is meant by cultural factors. It could be "declining labor mobility, changing age structures, and ... decline in trust", in which case the term has a technical meaning rather than the usual way we think of culture.

The "decline in trust" is weird for a non-specialist, I assume it too has a technical meaning.

Declining labor mobility is a bit of a black box; for example if automation were concentrating employment opportunities in high EQ/IQ positions labor mobility would be more genetic than cultural.

I continue to follow these discussions from a non-specialist perspective. I don't know how this can be tested in economic frameworks, but I continue to think we live in a world where the rate of change, largely driven by globalization (India/China) and information technology, has outstripped our ability to adjust and adapt. Perhaps we'll catch up if/when change stabilizes.

Beyond that, I think the rise of massively powerful corporations that dedicate wealth to legal and financial manipulation rather than innovation, combined with an increasingly aged (and, in the true sense of the word, conservative) electorate, is worsening America's ability to adapt.