Advice to China: Experiment with Qualified Voting

There is a widespread perception that China’s leaders are on the wrong side of history.  They are often portrayed as clinging to an outmoded, authoritarian concept of government that must someday, inevitably, become transformed into a more enlightened and democratic arrangement.  This post suggests a perspective that may be compatible with those leaders’ record of achievements in other (e.g., economic) matters, and that may help to get China ahead of the curve.

In the U.S. and elsewhere, discussions of voting have long been preoccupied with discrimination.  The biggest fights of the past two centuries have had to do with the proposition that people should not be prevented from voting just because of their sex or skin color.  As noted in another post, there has been far less attention to the problem of voting by people who have a faulty or nonexistent grasp of candidates and issues.

As Vladimir Putin famously retorted to George W. Bush, Russia is not likely to aspire to the kind of democracy seen in Iraq during its worst days.  Democracy does not guarantee good government.  Democracies, including that of the U.S., have actually served up many departures from good government.

Authoritarian governments are not per se bad.  As China’s leaders have demonstrated in certain regards, it is possible to have a benevolent dictator, a philosopher king, or some other ruling individual, group, or entity that produces many positive achievements.  The problem with non-democratic arrangements is that you can’t change or get rid of them when they become corrupt, ineffective, or abusive.  It is fair to note, though, America would likewise benefit if less of its government’s power were in the hands of bureaucrats who do not answer to the public.

Within governments as large as those of China and the U.S., there are very many people and issues on which informed citizens could be registering an educated opinion.  Government might be much improved, in such places, if the push to get everyone to vote were balanced with greater determination to increase the number of voters who actually understand issues facing their locality, region, or nation.

In China and the U.S. alike, it would surely take years to develop and refine processes for educating voters in the issues and testing their knowledge.  China seems to have an advantage, over the U.S., in being relatively well positioned to gradually devolve certain forms of decisionmaking to eminently qualified voters:  China might be able to do so with less risk of committing, or appearing to commit, discrimination based on biased or disputed concepts of voting competence.

In short, it appears possible and advisable for China’s leaders to reframe the democracy issue.  Rather than perpetuating an impression of being dragged into a democratic future against their will, those leaders should work toward gradual implementation of sensible democratic arrangements.  Gradual implementation calls for proactive steps to defuse revolutionary pressures.  Efforts should begin to define the qualified voter, to train voters to render informed opinions on persons and issues, to test their knowledge, to study training and voting processes and outcomes, and to tweak those processes.  Needless to say, such study would draw upon experiences in the U.S. and in other democracies, for purposes of recognizing flaws and errors that China would seek to avoid.

It could be appropriate for China’s leaders to announce a goal of having 10 million Chinese citizens voting on a good assortment of candidates and issues within the next five to ten years, and having 100 million voting on a wide selection of people and topics by 2025 or 2030.  Such an approach could provide a reassuring balance of stability and change.  It would likely improve the quality of government, and would also deliver a plausible reply to Western assumptions regarding universal suffrage.  In addition, a well-designed program of study and improvement, in the area of voting, could give the U.S. and other democracies useful guidance and incentives as they grapple with their own problems of governance.

Scenario: Obama, Romney, Hillary for President

This is my early prediction of the outcome of the 2012 presidential election contest.  This prediction is based on the assumptions that the electorate tends, most of the time, to choose the better of the two major party candidates — and that I know which candidate that would be.  Like most of the posts in this blog, this is an idea piece, dashed off in short order to convey some thoughts.

My prediction is that Obama would defeat any of the available Republicans except Mitt Romney.  There appears to be a chance, at the moment, that the contender in November 2012 will be Ron Paul, but I think that will pass.  I don’t believe the public at large (or even the Republican Party) is, or should be, ready for a libertarian president.  But it would be interesting to see what would happen if I turned out to be wrong on that.

I think Obama will lose to Romney, if that’s the matchup, because both are fighting for the same centrist turf, and this time Obama won’t have the same level of support from those who believed he would bring change — whereas Romney would have the support much of the center and almost all of the right, unless maybe if Ron Paul runs as an independent.  I’m also not certain that, in practice, Romney’s policies would be much more conservative than Obama’s.  From his time in Massachusetts, it actually appears Romney could be more liberal, and also more effective, on some important issues.

Going into the Democratic Party convention (Charlotte, NC, Sept. 3-7, 2012), it presently seems that Romney and Obama could have a close race.  Given Obama’s current popularity, though, continued economic sluggishness (or worse) would hurt him, as would other major adversities.   There is also a good chance that, after the primaries, Romney will move to the left, positioning himself as the real agent of change.  People criticize Romney for flip-flopping, but that’s the point:  he’s an adept politician.

In June 2008, after the Democratic primaries, I speculated that Obama offered Hillary a deal.  If she would play along with him, and if Bill would tone it down, Obama would make Hillary the vice presidential candidate, and would reward Bill with a position of some sort.  I was wrong on both counts, though in a sense I had it right with Hillary:  her appointment as Secretary of State has probably made her more visible and powerful than she would have been as VP.  Apparently it did not take a deal to get Bill to quiet down and let Obama do his thing.

On January 1, 2009, my prediction was, “Obama Won’t Pull It Off.”  I was referring, there, to the economy.  He was already coming across as a centrist in a revolutionary situation.  That prediction was on the mark.  We have a much more visibly revolutionary situation and mood in the country, now, than we did then, and Obama has substantially missed it.

There may have been more to the deal with Hillary in June 2008, or in any event there may be little choice but to make a deal with her in September 2012.  If Obama finds himself as badly embarrassed and out-of-touch with the electorate next summer as LBJ in 1968 – that is, if Obama appears certain to lose in November — he may consider it best, for himself and/or his party and the country, to defer to an alternate candidate.  It presently seems Hillary would be the most likely alternative, and my guess is that she would beat Romney.

So here’s my extremely early prediction.  On the grand level, Obama continues to be a lackluster leader, and I think that’s what he will continue to be through next year.  Mitt Romney will survive the Republican primaries and will then enjoy a relatively dynamic position vis-a-vis Obama.  In other words, he will have a lot of ways to make Obama look bad and himself look good.  By late summer, Obama will be facing the choice of a crushing defeat or a gracious and possibly pre-planned handoff to Hillary.  And she will win.

I give this entire scenario about a 16% probability of playing out as described here.  That is, its odds are 75% x 65% x 80% x 70% x 60%.  Specifically:  75% says that Obama remains weak, 65% that Romney wins the primaries, 80% that he looks vastly better than Obama by August, 70% that Obama will hand off to Hillary under such circumstances, and 60% that she will beat Romney.  At 16%, it’s obviously not a sure thing.  It just seems like the single most likely sequence of events at this moment, shortly before the Republican primaries begin.

Needed: Personal Digital Librarian

My computer, like many others, holds many digitized articles, mostly in PDF format.  I manually arrange them into folders and subfolders.  If I want to find one, I have to rely on my memory and on file search tools to retrieve it.  Sorting and retrieving takes time, leads to some duplication, and sometimes fails.

It would be helpful if, as in online music libraries, article metadata or other characteristics were automatically detected (or, where necessary, detected by manual entry of something like the Digital Object Identifier) and identified in terms of an online categorization system.  My digital librarian would notice that I have the article by Smith.  At my option, perhaps this would only happen if I placed the article in a certain sorting folder.  From there, maybe the personal digital librarian (PDL) would suggest certain related articles, drawing perhaps on what’s available online for free or through my existing paid subscriptions.  It might then move the article to the location, within a folder tree in the Reference section of my computer, where some professional librarian somewhere has decided it belongs, perhaps adding links and/or keywords to a reference tree and/or search engine so I can find it in the future.

At present, many professional journals tend to be available only through expensive subscriptions that only a relatively major research library can afford.  The PDL could facilitate economies of scale, bringing the price per article down significantly, if it helped ordinary users to become aware of only those individual articles that were directly on point with their suggested interests.  The PDL might, in other words, put the maximum number of potential readers in direct touch with what journals are producing, thereby potentially steering the priorities of journals and their writers toward what is actually needed in the field.

So This Is What World War III Looks Like

Last time around, Germany wanted to take over Europe, and Japan wanted to take over Asia.  We were isolationist, protected by our oceans.  Let them solve their own problems.  But then Japan interfered with the surfing in Hawaii, and that meant war.  And suddenly – well, after a couple years of screwing around — we were marching across Europe and bailing out the Chinese.

This time, the musical chairs have stopped at a different point.  Now we wish Japan could stand up and be mighty.  And they could, if this were a military war.  But it’s a financial war, and they aren’t up to it.  We want Germany to invade Greece, become an ally to Italy — indeed, take over Europe, make the whole place function like the German war money machine.  Now, as before, we say:  Let Europe solve its own problems.

Germany, this time, is not interested.  They’re running their finances like a shrewder Hitler would have run his war:  keep it tight and focused; be careful.  And so we are approaching that Roosevelt moment when the American public suddenly recognizes that the wave sweeping the world is actually not going to stop in midocean.  Once again, we are on the cusp of a massive volte-face as seriously enormously major bad possibilities present themselves.  We are on the edge of war.

This time, China is going to pull an America.  Russia is out of the picture; now it’s our turn to bear the brunt of the German (non)onslaught for a few years.  Instead of wading into the thick of it, China is going to sit out a couple of rounds.  Why invest in Europe’s misery today, when they can buy Europe’s gratitude for pennies on the dollar tomorrow?  In the meantime, let the Soviets Americans bleed themselves white on their front lines.

Well, from an American perspective, it was good for Europe that we waited out as long as we did.  We went into WWII relatively fresh and without terribly much anger or hatred.  We were gracious toward Europe and the Japanese.  We helped them rebound.  They were no longer going to be superpowers, but under Pax Americana they still did really well.  It would take decades before they would be heavily Americanized, and by that point they wouldn’t even really mind.

I wonder if China is thinking about this.

Advice to Russia: Make Siberia Your Canada

It’s tempting to try to control everything, and to believe that empires last forever.  But that’s just not how it works.

I’m reading an article on the Russian Far East, and I am again reminded of the dramatic contrast between the emptiness of Siberia and the population and resource demands of China, next door.  It is not likely, and probably won’t be necessary, for the two nations to go to war over that imbalance.  Money and population may be capable, by themselves, of converting eastern Russia into a China-oriented realm.

One scenario would have Siberia become a de facto, if not de jure, extension or satellite of China.  In this picture, China gradually comes to wield increasing influence over the development and priorities of that part of Russia.  The situation here would be like that of some parts of the southwestern U.S., where many people see Mexico rather than white America as their point of reference.

A somewhat different scenario is that Siberia would come to resemble Russia’s answer to China:  a heavily Chinese place, in terms of culture, but with a clear awareness of its own difference from China.  In this scenario, the contrast is more like the difference between the U.S. and Canada.  They may look and sound like us, north of the border, but they have tended to have a rather different sociopolitical environment.  Indeed, on many issues, they have taken pride in not being like us.

It is not likely that ethnic Chinese in Siberia will tend to indulge deep nostalgia for Moscow and Old Russia.  At the same time, they may also appreciate an opportunity to avoid the worst parts of life in China.  It is not inconceivable, for example, that Chinese dissidents could one day view an escape to Siberia as the path to freedom.

Russia, itself, may not be able to deliver a political culture that would foster any such development.  But the people of Siberia themselves may be able to do so, particularly if they are helped in that direction.  In the best case, Russia could transform Siberia into a semiautonomous region that looks to Moscow for protection against absorption into China — a long-term friend with a special relationship, that is, that becomes in some ways an effective counterweight to China in the Far East.

I don’t know when the ideal time for such a move would be.  There’s probably not much danger that it will be done too soon; I’ve never heard anyone suggesting the idea, and it’s very unlikely to happen anytime soon.  Doing it too late could mean making a futile attempt to reshape an already developed political and economic climate.

It would be ironic, of course, if the notorious Siberia of Stalin’s gulag would one day become a haven for dissidents from anywhere or, possibly, everywhere.  But in some ways Siberia is the last great wilderness on this planet.  It could yet become a New World.

Things to Do Before Killing Yourself

Moved to my other blog.

Scenario: Occupy Wall Street Regroups Over Winter

Cold weather is coming.  It seems likely that the size of the crowd in NYC will shrink soon.  The protests may have spread to other cities, but this movement is growing at a gradual rather than revolutionary pace.  The concerns have not been resolved, but the traditional outdoor mass protest approach is going to have to wind down soon.

It is not likely that the owner of a building on Central Park South or in lower Manhattan will allow the protesters to use it as their snow shelter, emerging to engage in marches and then retreating indoors for hot chocolate.  Some winter redoubt (e.g., San Francisco) could function as the movement’s outdoors Valley Forge.  But aside from token presences here and there, what seems most likely is that Occupy Wall Street (OWS) is going to become a web- and TV-based production for the next half-year, assuming it survives that long.

It does not appear that the coming winter will be unusually cheery.  There will surely be a fair amount of bad news.  There will probably be an occasional bit of very bad news.  Conceivably, there could be a flashpoint.  If the movement is capable of retaining public attention through creative midwinter activities (and perhaps even if it’s not), April may see it develop into a serious force.  One factor making this a real possibility:  there’s a presidential election next year.

The riots of 1967 were a precursor to the riots of 1968, also an election year.  Some of the most notorious events took place at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August 1968.  Then, as now, there was a mixture of causes, including especially race and anti-Vietnam War movements.  It is interesting, in that light, to read current discussions of how OWS and the Tea Party actually have a number of things in common.

There’s always the possibility that Obama, or one of his Republican challengers, could discover an inner demagogue and come out swinging, giving a growing mob something to cheer about.  What appears more likely is that Obama is working on becoming today’s LBJ — a deer in the headlights, in other words.  From today’s perspective, the 2012 Democratic Convention will be no more a celebration than the 1968 convention was.

At this point, it’s not that OWS has become a compelling movement attracting millions.  It’s that there doesn’t appear to be anything in motion that would prevent it from becoming that, next year.  It is going to need time to become huge, and it is going to have time.  The primary question seems to be whether it will mutate into a more potent form.  It could.

Proposed: The Alternating Six-Year Presidency

Politics, at its best, is the art of the possible.  Good or bad, there’s no getting away from it.  But that doesn’t mean political behavior can’t be relocated away from situations where it does not yield good outcomes.

The election of the American president is a huge, distracting, expensive, and corrupt process that is capable of putting a complete idiot into the White House.  People are apt to entertain some sympathy with that statement regardless of their political leanings.  You look at some of the outcomes and you have to wonder how so much time, effort, money, anger, and anxiety can produce such mixed results.

In the 100 years from 1912 through 2011, we have had 17 presidents:  Wilson (D, 8 years), Harding (R, 2 years), Coolidge (R, 6 years), Hoover (R, 4 years), Roosevelt (D, 12 years), Truman (D, 8 years), Eisenhower (R, 8 years), Kennedy (D, 3 years), Johnson (D, 5 years), Nixon (R, 5 years), Ford (R, 3 years), Carter (D, 4 years), Reagan (R, 8 years), Bush Sr. (R, 4 years), Clinton (D, 8 years), Bush Jr. (R, 8 years), and Obama (D, 4 years).  That’s an average of 5.9 years per president.  Granted, death has terminated a few presidencies prematurely.  The average would have been somewhat longer without that.  Still, after all our election-year struggles, on average we are still quite close to the outcome we’d have had if, as in some countries, our presidents had been elected for single six-year terms.

In addition, during the past century, of those 17 presidents, eight have been Democrats and nine have been Republicans.  That’s what you’d be likely to get from just flipping a coin.  Moreover, the victorious party has changed back and forth pretty regularly.  There haven’t been any really long runs, any instances of one party remaining in power for 30 years or more at a stretch.  Except for Reagan and Bush Sr., the only times that either party has held the presidency for 12 years or more was during the extraordinary decades of the 1920s through the 1940s.  It seems unlikely that that would have happened if the Republicans hadn’t so thoroughly tarnished themselves by leading us into the Great Depression, and if World War II hadn’t created such an unusual pressure for steadiness and solidarity behind the incumbent.  In general, the pattern of the past century suggests that, after a certain point, people want change.

In theory, a shorter term makes it easier to dump a loser before he can do too much damage.  But there’s a problem with that theory.  If there’s a serious risk that the president will turn out to be a loser, then why make him/her eligible for election in the first place?  In other words, the best way to protect against an incompetent president is to improve the process by which people are identified and promoted as potential presidents.  Give us ten years of watching the person working in various positions on the national level (as e.g., a governor, a National Security Advisor), and there will rarely be a need for a four-year safety valve.

Besides, many people in either party are inclined to doubt that the four-year valve has been working effectively.  The advantages of the incumbent have been such as to enable him to achieve re-election despite some prospect that we would have been better off without that.  For purposes of achieving their best and then moving on, one six-year term would have been plenty for Nixon and Bush Jr., and probably about right for Reagan and Clinton.  And if Obama were now halfway through his six-year term, we would not already see a nation gearing up for another tiresome election battle.

It has been argued that the pursuit of re-election keeps a president focused on what the large majority of the public wants.  But it is also a matter of tremendous distraction and manipulation.  Besides, what people want is a complex matter.  The public has congressional representatives whose job is to attend to public opinion.  That’s one priority.  It is not, unfortunately, a perfect all-purpose priority.  There are times and situations in which public opinion can be manipulated; there are many situations in which the public cannot be told, or is not interested in hearing, the full truth behind a nasty situation.

People elect the president to be a leader, not an ass-kisser — to lead into the unknown, not to follow and tell people whatever they want to hear at the current moment.  Again, if you’re concerned that the president will take off on some wild tangent, then require a ten-year record of national-level experience before s/he can become a candidate.  People with that experience, be it George Bush Sr. or Hillary Clinton, tend to have learned lessons about the prudent use of power.

What many voters experience, come Election Day, is that the important decisions have already been made.  The people who could have been great presidents are not on the ballot; instead, we are often left with characters who, we feel, surely cannot be the most experienced and competent candidates that could have been found in this nation.  In the spirit of moving the political focus to more appropriate areas of involvement, the election system should be steering public attention to the selection phase.

As it now stands, presidential candidates are selected in a process that emphasizes the ability to be appealing to voters over a short period of time, in places like Iowa and New Hampshire.  This arrangement allows a nobody, with luck, to win the presidency.  That is absurd.  Someone should be able to come from nowhere to win election to Congress, no doubt, or to become a governor or the chief executive of a corporation.  But that’s just the starting point for a presidential candidate.  The next step, having achieved some such position, is to hold it and to demonstrate an ability to do amazing things in it.

So let’s suppose we did have a six-year alternating presidency.  Obama, a Democrat, was elected in 2008; therefore we know that the person elected president in 2014 will be a Republican.  This turns our focus to the more important question:  which Republican?  That is a question for voters — all voters, including Democrats — to decide, ultimately; but they deserve to choose from the best names possible.

Here’s one scenario for how that might work.  The ballot in 2014 includes the names of four Republicans, plus whatever candidates might be put up by the Green Party, the  Libertarian Party, and so forth.  If ever those parties move up from fringe status, the scenario presented here might have to be adjusted; but in 2014, that would not likely be an issue.  There would be a total of four major-party candidates on the ballot, rather than two, because sometimes people change their minds with new information.  Here, again, there is a focus on preserving meaningful choices.

How would those four Republican semifinalists be chosen?  Two would be nominated by the Republican Party; two would be nominated by the Democrats.   This would tend to mean that there would be two moderate Republican semifinalists on the 2014 ballot, nominated by Democrats, along with two more right-wing Republican semifinalists, nominated by the Republican Party.  The public would still be guaranteed to get a Republican president in 2014, but would have the option of choosing a centrist Republican who might not be terribly different from a centrist Democrat on many issues.

To a large extent, each party would arrive at its own way of identifying its two Republican semifinalists.  For instance, the Republicans might choose their two semifinalists from a quarterfinal slate of five Republicans.  One among those five might have been nominated by business leaders; another might have been nominated by religious leaders.  However chosen, the Republican primary election in spring 2014 would cut the list from five down to two.  Similar processes would occur on the Democrat side, perhaps with one Republican quarterfinalist being nominated by university professors, another being nominated by labor representatives, and so forth.

This process could have the beneficial effect of putting Democrats more in touch with differences among Republicans, and vice versa in 2020.  It is not unrealistic that members of each party should care about, and have some influence in, the continuing broad relevance of the opposing party, rather than letting it become either a useless collection of extremists or an equally useless monolith of plain-vanilla centrism.  In short, the general public would tend to be kept more in touch with a variety of viewpoints, reducing the mutual incomprehension and hostility that now plague presidential elections.

To back up one step further, if an interest group weighting K-12 teachers, university professors, and other educators knew that they were going to be able to select a candidate that might become the next president, they might be expected to take an interest in making a well-researched choice among the various Republicans whom they could tolerate as the next president.  That is, rather than leave the selection of primary candidates entirely to a crazy hash of political and financial influences, there might be a rather intelligent and earnest attempt to develop their information and prepare for the start of primary season in, say, November 2013.  At that point, they and the other Democratic interest groups would give the public the information on which they based their selection of one of the five quarterfinalists nominated by Democrats.  Between then and the primary election in spring 2014, the media and the public would have an opportunity to digest this information and sharpen the choice among those five quarterfinalists.  Similar processes would meanwhile be underway in the Republican party, regarding their own set of five Republican quarterfinalists.

To summarize, the purpose of this proposal is, as stated at the outset, to make the selection of the American president less political and more effective.  The general idea presented here is that the public would choose the president from among four semifinalists of the same party (Republicans, in 2014), with two of those four being selected in the Democrat primary in spring 2014 and the other two emerging from the Republican primary.  Each of these major-party primaries would help voters to choose from among a larger number of (in this account, ten) Republican quarterfinalists nominated by leading interest groups in the two major parties.  In net terms, this arrangement could be structured to depoliticize presidential elections, to steer such elections away from the distortions of national media and money, to give the public greater input into the process, and to base candidate selection upon hard information rather than upon showmanship.

Proposed: Person of the Year: Mohamed Bouazizi

I would bet that Time magazine will already have plans for this.  But in case they don’t, it seems the person of the year must be Mohamed Bouazizi, the fruit seller in Tunisia who set himself on fire last December and died on January 4, 2011.

Bouazizi, age 26 at death, was protesting bureaucratic harassment and the confiscation of his goods.  Five thousand people marched in his funeral procession, many chanting a vow to avenge him.

Bouazizi’s self-immolation is credited as starting the revolution in Tunisia.  That revolution succeeded in forcing Tunisia’s rigged president to step down, thus encouraging a successful revolution in Egypt and protests elsewhere.

That movement, known as the Arab Spring, seems to have been an influence behind the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations that began in New York and have since spread to dozens of other cities.  It is not presently clear how broad or sustained those demonstrations will be, or what ultimate influence they will have.

One thing is clear, however.  Mohamed Bouazizi, giving his life in desperate protest, changed the world.  The most important aspect of that change has been that, after a very long hiatus in the U.S. and elsewhere, ordinary people have rediscovered that, like him, they can do something to change society.  For that, I would like to thank him.

Needed: Intelligent Representative Democracy

Democratic systems — notably but not only the American one – have been dysfunctional for a long time.  Current dissatisfaction with such systems provides an opportunity to push for reform.  This quick note suggests a few changes to improve the quality of democratic government.

1.  Prohibit ignorant voting.  If you don’t know what a person or an issue is about, you should not be voting on him/her/it.  Admittedly, deciding whether someone is a competent voter may be as difficult as deciding whether s/he is a competent parent.  Despite such difficulty, people (and laws) can and do draw lines, provide training, and take other steps to reduce incompetence.  It is reasonable to require voters to understand certain fundamentals about what they are voting on.

2.  Require politicians to meet basic qualifications.  Again, while the qualifications will surely be controversial, the core idea is not.  People who run for office do need to be competent.  They should not be elected merely because they have strong financial backing and can hire marketing experts to help them become popular.  To serve the public well at any level of government, and especially at the most visible national levels, a candidate needs to meet, and maintain, at least some minimum degree of intelligence and experience.

3.  Reduce uninformed policymaking.  This follows from points (1) and (2).  If a public official is not smart and experienced enough to understand a proposed law, and has not bothered to become sufficiently informed to pass a simple test on its contents, s/he has no business voting on it.  The question should instead be left to others (e.g., fellow congressional representatives) who do qualify.

4.  Empower informed individuals.  To further develop the foregoing points, questions of law, government, and policy should generally be decided by people who are positioned to make good decisions.  Too often, judges and juries decide matters that lie beyond their training, and that attorneys present to them in distorted terms; regulators impose poorly informed regulations; politicians propose counterproductive laws; and as noted above, voters rely on emotion and rumor rather than knowledge to decide complex matters.  Instead, the issues in such situations should be clarified and narrowed (if not also decided) by people who do understand such matters.  Again, it will not always be easy to figure out who has that level of understanding.  It will take a while to develop acceptable guidelines.  Nonetheless, some such effort is essential if we are to avoid the alternative of running the country by the seat of our pants.

In offering these suggestions, I reject the idea that simplistic and universal voting is a kind of magic.  It has not worked well at all, in many countries over a period of many years.  More accurately, voting is like computing:  garbage in, garbage out.  For purposes of good government, the quality of votes is at least as important as the number of votes.

Scenario: After the Nanosecond Empire

It seems empires ain’t what they used to be.  Various ancient and even medieval ones (centered in e.g., China, Rome, Turkey) lasted for centuries and were essentially unshakeable within their primary domains.  Developments in transportation and other technologies that have made modern empires (e.g., Spanish, British) more global also seem to have made them more vulnerable.  For whatever reason, they seem to have been trending toward shorter durations and more complex bases of power.  It does not appear, for example, that a nonviolent independence movement, successful in India in the 1940s, would have been particularly effective in ancient Rome; nor was it possible for anything like a Nazi Germany to emerge from the ashes of previous war and nearly bankrupt the Caesars within the space of a decade.

America’s version of empire has been simultaneously the most global and yet the least obvious.  With few exceptions, it has indulged only limited and brief physical control of colonies (in e.g., the Philippines) and yet has enjoyed worldwide influence.  That influence has been based on weaponry to some extent, as with all empires before it; and yet the primary purpose of the weaponry seems to have been to safeguard control via money.  Capitalist imperialism could be said to have contributed to a kind of freedom, worldwide, to anyone willing to help Americans live wealthier and more comfortable lives.  That’s not the same as a simplistic and more ancient urge to control territory for purposes of ego or defense.

If there is a trend in this, it seems that the world’s next major empire will be even more brief, globally pervasive, complexly vulnerable, and idea-based.  To invent an example, an empire could conceivably be created by an aristocracy (e.g., scientists, or the super-rich); its capacity for physical coercion could be based on new technologies (e.g., neurological implants); and global allegiance to it could emerge from a widespread perception that it provides a route to a better life, just as the present global orientation toward money seems to depend, in part, upon the belief that commercial modernity provides a better life than the various medieval circumstances of chaos, banditry, theocracy, and warfare that are widely believed to have preceded it.

Such an idea-based empire could be brief and heavily contested, in the sense that different aristocratic cliques (e.g., scientists or super-rich people with divergent convictions or objectives) could find themselves engaged in recurrent palace warfare — in struggles that, however murky, could have enormous consequences for the rest of humanity (with e.g., the flick of a switch, when a competing clique does attain a tenuous ascendancy).

At the same time, to the extent that such control struggles did become concentrated within the palace, it could develop that idea-based empires have been in the process of becoming more long-lived — at the very time that physically based empires have been fading faster.  If an empire is understood in terms of its ideas (e.g., modernity) rather than its nationality (e.g., British, Russian), one could speculate that the money phase of empire has been growing more firmly established for centuries, and that a post-money phase, building on such a trend, could endure for millenia.

One can imagine, for instance, that eons of human and prehuman coexistence (within e.g., hunter-gatherer tribes) may someday seem to be the norm toward which medieval society was attempting to return — that, in other words, a future medievalistic global society may view Europe’s Middle Ages as a relatively brief and unfortunately interrupted first step, in a seemingly inevitable return to a more enduring communitarian worldview (within which a sufficiently sophisticated ruling class might prudently make itself fairly invisible).  There might be overlords; they might continue to extract from the populace; but they might do so in such a delicate way as to leave unruffled the sense that life just goes on forever, in a very peaceful and reassuring manner.  Modernity, individualism, money — these current ideas could come to be seen as elements of a single empire under which we now live, to which Americans, Chinese, and everyone else contributes in varying degrees.  And all of these ideas may come to be seen as no less primitive and distant than the Middle Ages now seem to us.  It might not even be especially difficult to reach that point.  For instance, global environmental catastrophe, by itself, could convince future generations that the ideas upon which we have based our world order were simply absurd.

At present, it does not appear likely that China will become a dominant global superpower.  Anything is possible — for instance, Chinese scientists could someday develop and use a highly contagious virus that exterminates non-Asian humans — but present information suggests, rather, that China, like the physically based empires before it, is moving toward an ever more limited, vulnerable, and complex form of empire.  Its potential adversaries are more linked than were those who confronted any prior empire-in-waiting; its own citizens (or at least the influential ones) are probably more informed about the possibilities, limits, and costs of empire than were the citizens of any prior empire; and at the same time China does not presently display the internationalism that has been an intrinsic part of the U.S., with its ancestry hailing from so many different countries.  China’s route to empire seems likely to be a throwback to a physically based attempt to battle it out, inch by inch, against a world full of well-equipped adversaries.  Its money — not its capacity for steel, coal, and cement, except as financial rather than military resources — will be its primary asset in that struggle; and while that money will go far, it does not appear that it will go as far as American money did.

Without denying the past and continuing importance of physical power and, in more recent centuries, of financial power, for purposes of building empire, this post suggests that the path to comprehensive and enduring world dominance may run through the realm of ideas — that, in other words, the next large development in imperialism may be a relatively gradual if not surreptitious process emerging from collective human experience, guided and conceptualized — if not frankly manipulated and marketed — by knowledgeable observers of such processes.

Advice to Obama: Endorse a Constitutional Convention

I just saw an interesting quote, apparently posted by a Republican in 2008:

The majority of U.S. voters just elected a dedicated leftist as President. Republicans are at their weakest right now! This is a horrible time to try such a crazy scheme. We cannot control the debate right now! Don’t for one second doubt that delegates to a Con Con wouldn’t revise the 1st Amendment into a government-controlled privilege, replace the 2nd Amendment with a “collective” right to self-defense, and abolish the 4th, 5th, and 10th Amendments, and the rest of the Bill of Rights. Additions could include the non-existent Separation of Church and State, the “right” to abortion and euthanasia, and much, much more.

I’m not necessarily in favor of all of those things, and I sure don’t think Obama has turned out to be a “dedicated leftist.”  But I’m thinking, you know, this person has a point.  Now is precisely the time when people who are disgusted with the malfunctioning of our effectively nonrepresentative government should be calling for a constitutional convention.

The advice to President Obama is just this:  the politics of reconciliation require two willing parties.  You haven’t had that.  I do think Republican Party tactics are much of the problem, but I’m not convinced that Democratic politicians have provided an especially worthy alternative.  Your interest in mutual progress is great, but it depends upon conditions that do not exist.  To get to where you want to go, you will have to create those conditions.

President Obama, it preliminarily appears that a constitutional convention would be a helpful step toward creating an American political environment that would value your approach to politics.  Without this or some other comparably drastic measure, however, you are destined to be seen as a failed president.  You’ve tried the right approach at the wrong time.

Contrarian Position: We Need Fewer Jobs

In some of these contrarian posts, I am working with ideas that I am not necessarily convinced of.  This present post is not of that nature.  In this post, I am advancing a summary of arguments that I have been exploring for some years now.  That doesn’t mean I have reached the point of absolute certainty.  I haven’t published anything in these particular areas.  I still have a lot of learning and work yet to do.  This is, nonetheless, at least a summary of the direction in which my learning thus far leads.  It is not as organized as a publishable statement would be, but hopefully its general points are clear enough.

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It is possible for almost everyone to agree on something, and yet for almost all of them to be wrong.  Some agree on it because they want to be in agreement with everyone else, but don’t necessarily know what they’re talking about.  Others have looked into the matter in some detail, and can make a plausible presentation of their views on a lay level; but then an expert comes along and explains why that plausible lay viewpoint has long ago been overhauled or discredited.  Experts, in turn, variously agree and disagree on matters, but in many instances the orthodox expert view likewise becomes superseded or irrelevant with new learning and changed perspectives.

In that spirit, let’s look at the contemporary jobs hysteria.  First of all, there are some kinds of jobs that we pretty clearly don’t need more of.  Regardless of whether there’s a market for assassins, suicide bombers, torturers, or self-made widows, most of us are apt to draw the line at a certain point.  Derivative of that, we would ideally not be creating more jobs for criminal defense attorneys, prison guards, and construction workers who build prisons.  We also don’t ordinarily hope for more illness, even though it would mean more work for nurses and funeral homes, nor for more car accidents, despite their positive impact on car sales.  On balance, we would also be better off if we were not creating jobs that would entail damage (to e.g., physical health or the environment) that we will then have to go back and repair, or that may prove to be permanently irreparable.

From there, it’s not a far stretch to say that we also would probably be better off if we hadn’t generated so many jobs for the bankers, lawyers, contractors, and realtors who created the mortgage meltdown of 2008 and thereabouts, as well as the government employees, marketing specialists, computer programmers and people in other lines of work who aided and abetted that crisis.  In this and other situations, doing your job properly — as a diligent regulator, an ethical attorney, or an honest banker or realtor — is apt to dampen market enthusiasm and suppress the creation of jobs, as compared to what can happen when money flows fast and crazy.

That general principle holds in a variety of situations.  We don’t need professors who hand out degrees to students who haven’t learned much — even if mom and dad are willing to pay a fortune for the privilege; even if the school and the degree look very impressive on paper.  We don’t need so many taxi drivers, if efficient mass transit is the more logical solution in a given city.  With all due respect for the pleasures of refined taste, we don’t truly need retailers who sell more expensive stuff that does nothing more than the cheap stuff does, nor do we need the sense of pseudo-superiority that accompanies such merchandise.  I’m not saying there should be a law against that sort of thing; more likely just an education against it.  The focus here is just on what we really need.  A case can be made for anything; but a careful analysis might suggest that we need those jobs about as much as we need people to dig holes and then fill them again.

In a different category, there are jobs that aren’t needed because someone or something else can do them faster, better, and/or cheaper.  Younger people, people in other countries, people who aren’t unionized — there are all sorts of people who now do much of the work that would once have been done by relatively skilled, senior, often unionized labor in the U.S.  Scholars have been anticipating for decades, as well, that automation would render human employees increasingly superfluous, and that has been happening in ever more sophisticated tasks, ranging from the supermarket clerk to the assembly line worker to the knowledge worker.  In other words, we don’t need jobs that can be done by a more affordable person or machine.

Let me put it his way.  Suppose you, personally, had the combined knowledge of job-elimination experts across dozens of fields of employment.  You understand the latest supermarket automatic shelf-stocking technology; you know all about the most up-to-date automated pizza-making equipment.  Suppose you also had the power to go through our economy and identify jobs for elimination.  You’ll turn Pizza Hut on to that pizza technology; you’ll send jobs offshore; you’ll identify and resolve bottlenecks to eliminate all kinds of unnecessary jobs.  Suppose, moreoever, that you have a passion for this work, as well as a budget that allows you to offer rewards to people who can identify unnecessary jobs, and to provide grant funding to employers who need a little nudge to switch to the latest technology.  Over a 10- or 20-year period, could you eliminate millions of jobs from our economy, without having a significant adverse impact on the availability of goods and services from the consumer’s perspective?  I think you probably could.

But should you?  At present, we don’t need to answer that question, because in a sense this is the process that has already been underway for many years.  What I have just described as a sort of super Anti-Jobs hero (or villain) is what employers have already been doing on their own.  The real question is whether we should try to speed up or slow down that process.

The answer to that question depends on your scope and timeframe.  If your concern is with the local situation today, you’ll reasonably be interested in creating jobs, even useless ones.  If, on the other hand, you are thinking of the best long-term outcome, certain conclusions seem inevitable.  There has rarely been full employment in the first place; jobs are vanishing; they are going to continue to vanish, as productivity and automation make people increasingly superfluous within the workforce context; and therefore it will be unavoidable, sooner or later, to rethink and redesign the whole concept of the job.

Within that latter, long-term perspective, a couple of observations seem appropriate.  Plantation and wage slaves of the 19th century could find themselves working 90 hours per week.  The end of plantation slavery in 1865 required the Civil War; but for blacks and whites alike, the reduction of working hours would require many further battles, fiscal and sometimes physical, over a span of generations.  A half-century ago, the eight-hour day and the five-day, 35- to 40-hour workweek turned out to be the high-water mark in that struggle.  Overall, including especially people who have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet, the total number of hours worked per year has actually been trending back upwards in the United States.  (See U.S. Statistical Abstract, 2011, Table 1354; Duffy, 2010, p. 155; Rosenberg, 2009, p. 75.)  Whole categories of valid nonwork experience have been or are being significantly eroded:  the retiree, the housewife, the idyllic childhood.  Moreover, many jobs today require intellectual, emotional, or other engagement or distraction during the worker’s supposed leisure time.  People who are working are often overworking.

This does not entirely make sense, given that a long-term reduction of need for human labor increasingly means that many people will then be completely unemployed.  From a societal perspective, it seems more logical that, as productivity increases and as the need for human labor declines, the typical workday would be scaled back in the direction of the four-hour workday.  Employers who fought against the 19th-century effort to achieve a reduction to a 60-hour workweek were probably not terribly different than those who would now fight a law reducing the maximum to, say, 30 hours per week.  Such opposition would be based on seemingly sensible calculations from their perspective.  Again, such a reduction may not be feasible politically in the short term; it may be economically inadvisable for purposes of e.g., competition for jobs with countries like India and China.  Yet over a period of decades, the alternative is a steadily shrinking number of people who have good jobs and a growing number of those who don’t have any jobs at all.  At some point, even the relatively short-term political and economic realities of mass unemployment and frustrated expectations across numerous countries are likely to become more compelling.

There is another factor to bear in mind.  Some jobs are truly enjoyable.  They are the sort of thing that the employee or self-employed individual would do for free, if s/he could afford to.  The more common experience, unfortunately, is that jobs provide acceptable but not great experiences for those who hold them.  People are taught to do these jobs, and not to complain too seriously or to imagine much better for themselves — and thus to pass their working years in a second-rate manner wherein, as they look back, it was not what they hoped their lives would be about, but at least it paid the bills and raised the kids.  And then, for millions of people, the job is a more abhorrent experience:  tedious, disgusting, upsetting, or physically destructive, often at rates of pay that do not even meet those basic needs of paying the bills and raising the kids.

The large majority of jobs worldwide are far from being the sort of thing that a person would deliberately try to create, if s/he were seeking the best life experiences for the people who will perform them.  The prevailing doctrine is, rather, that employment is necessary for money, it brings other benefits, and so we need to let employers tell us which jobs are going to exist and what those jobs are going to consist of, even if the results are pretty miserable for a lot of people.

That logic has some merits and also some dangers.  We see the merits all around us:  employers create a country of material wealth and varied pleasures.  We also see the dangers.  Employers are granted a level of power, comparable to the historical power of the judge or the priest, to tell people what they can and cannot do in their lives, as well as what they should believe is right and wrong; yet unlike the priest or judge, the employer is not typically governed by a humantarian ethic.  Hence, where they can, employers will overwork us, as just noted; in fact, they have done so for centuries, with many unfortunate long-term effects upon our families, communities, and selves.  Power tends to corrupt, among employers as much as among anyone else; thus employers indulge the same sorts of micromanagement, vindictiveness, caprice, and other undesirable behaviors as anyone else would, if they had such great power over individuals.  We demonize the Nazi doctors who conducted torturous experiments on their prisoners, and who were then able to go home to a nice dinner and to play with their children; yet that was just a particularly nasty illustration of what people are capable of, when power exceeds responsibility.  There are comparably horrendous examples in workplaces around the world today, wrought not by racist fanatics but by mild-mannered employers who attract the respect of their communities at the very time when they are putting employees at risk of serious physical injury and death.  Deflating the mystique of the employer would also check the bizarre idea that employers can reasonably siphon off a very substantial portion of the proceeds from our long years of hard work, in order to make a few people ever richer.

There is another problem with the logic of the workplace.  People sometimes get into a macho mode where they feel proud because they are able to work so hard for so long.  The same feeling arises in those who play well at sports:  there is a certain pride in endurance.  Games aside, though, there is nothing admirable about the ability to display stamina while producing things that are stupid, useless, or destructive.  Working hard to produce land mines — or, for that matter, to sell people stuff that they don’t need — does not make you a better person.  Like “white line fever,” where a person falls into a sort of trance after too many hours of driving, the glorification of work for its own sake does not make sense — not when there are so many other things that need to be done.

What else needs to be done?  The list is endless.  Consider some options on the level of actually living your own life.  Read a book and learn something.  Get some exercise.  Take time to cook a healthy meal.  Have a real conversation with a child.  Make a new friend.  Help someone other than yourself.  Sit still and think about your life for once.  As they say, nobody on their deathbed ever says, “I wish I had spent more time at the office.”  You may be in the grip of that fever now, but snap out of it.  You are needed elsewhere.  The idea that your employer knows where you are needed, better than you do, is very unlikely if not purely absurd in most cases.

Granted, we are not eager to return to the hardships and limitations of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.  But let’s not completely overlook the fact that primitive humans were able to exist for millions of years without working, on average, much more than four or five hours a day.  We, with our technology, could easily survive and thrive on much less — and we could do it, as the hunter-gatherers did, without having to spend our days in enormous bureaucracies, under the control and surveillance of people who function as modern-day slavemasters.  Economic output is now sufficient to provide people with the basic necessities of life without very much work at all.

Would a life with greater leisure be a good idea?  Not if the leisure is wasted, or feeds into anxiety.  But if leisure of the kinds just mentioned were encouraged and validated, the results could be very good for people individually and for their communities and societies collectively.

They say work is good for you.  Yet that depends on the kind of work.  It’s not good for you to lose fingers, to come home crying, or to lie awake at night worrying about your job.  There are, in fact, many things about many workplaces that are not good for you, including the negation of some things just listed:  in many jobs you won’t be getting exercise, helping friends, having real conversations with people, and so forth.  Again, there is often a question of which comes first:  doing what’s good for you and/or other people, versus doing what’s good for the employer.

Having a steady job does bring psychological benefits.  For one thing, you have the security of knowing that you will have food, shelter, medical treatment, and other necessities of survival and comfort.  Or I should say you *may* have such security.  Employers commonly act as though it were a special favor to provide these basics to the members of the employer’s community, or even to the employer’s own employees, when in fact communities have provided some such assistance to their members in need since the Stone Age.  Even plantation slaveowners and military commanders have tended to realize that you have to treat your people as an asset, and take basic care of them, if you expect them to continue to function.

In fairness, employers are driving toward a valid if implicit point.  In a really free market economy, they would be free to pay no more than the market requires, in order to obtain the labor they need.  Their implicit point is that there are simply too many people for the jobs that need to be filled.  In this perspective, if the people of the world are not willing and able to control their population to the point that there are not enough workers for the job (at which point wages would rise, so as to attract applicants), then, from a market perspective, the employers can hardly be blamed for failing to pay enough to enable their employees to survive:  there are others who are willing to take their place.  In other words, the market is rationally trying to eliminate the surplus by starving unnecessary people.  The employers thus establish two points:  (1) if you continue to improve productivity without controlling population, you will inevitably have too many people for the available jobs; and (2) the market, left to itself, will deteriorate into a vicious cycle (i.e., declining population yields declining demand, which yields reduced output, which yields reduced employment, which yields starvation and further declines in population).  In other words, the market, left to itself, will trend in the direction of kill most of us — and itself as well.  Since people are apt to steal, riot, and revolt as necessary to obtain the basics of survival, the market — that is, the employer’s short-term viewpoint — is not a reliable guide to what employers or others should contribute to public welfare.  Both the survival of society and the functioning of the market require external intervention.  Most surviving governments in most places have recognized this to varying degrees.

There certainly is, and should be, some satisfaction in knowing that you are being paid properly in exchange for performing a needed service.  But this satisfaction can come in many ways.  It does not require a job that many people will not be able to obtain in any case.  For example, people derive significant satisfaction from providing volunteer services (e.g., firefighting, adoptive parenting) and from other kinds of publicly encouraged and usually un- or under-compensated performances (in e.g., religion, sports, the arts).  At the same time, many people make a lot of money for work that delivers little satisfaction; many others are paid, not necessarily very well, for work that actually erodes their self-esteem.  There is, in short, no necessary connection between paid work for a private employer and psychological gratification.

Of course, if you structure your society in such a way that nothing else is considered as prestigious as having paid employment, then obviously other kinds of occupations — even occupations that are more individually and socially beneficial — will struggle to obtain comparable respect.  Again, though, this is something that can change.  There have been many communities and societies in which contribution to the common welfare has been considered the best form of activity.  It is obvious at present that the market has become socially dysfunctional — providing houses that sit empty due to the mortgage crisis, for example, at the very time when increasing numbers of people are homeless, and converting food to fuel while people are going hungry.  There are people who want to be useful, who have much to contribute, but for whom the market has no answer.  At such times it becomes especially obvious that people who are willing to commit themselves to work for the public good — on infrastructure projects, for example, and in education – should be provided with a basic social safety net.  While the arguments of employers should be considered along with all other opinions, by this point American employers have demonstrated an excessive, almost religious faith in the market and, as such, have rendered themselves no more entitled to the benefit of unsupported presumptions than are the proponents of any other faith.

When I say that we need fewer jobs, I mean it is good and natural that there should be fewer traditional paid jobs offered by employers.  This is an expected outcome of contributions to productivity, often underrewarded, made by many researchers and others over the years.  The economy has developed capabilities and capacities that have vastly increased profitability by rendering much traditional employment unnecessary.  People are now increasingly free to do other things, and there are many other things that need to be done, beyond what the labor market can accommodate.  So in this sense, we need to continue to reduce the need for people to work at traditional jobs and to incur the many drawbacks that often accompany traditional paid work for an employer.

In summary, the labor market is doing part, but not all, of the work of a super Anti-Job hero, or something like it, that would go through our economy and find as many ways as possible to free people from unnecessary paid employment, so as to make them available for more valuable contributions to society.  Employers — to whom society has long given the privilege of choosing the cream of the crop, along with countless other benefits and supports, and who have enjoyed enormous profits as a result — are simply not in a position to complain about their obligation to contribute to this effort.  There is much to be done, and in many ways they are not doing it.  We are long overdue for arrangements in which nonprofit and governmental agencies and social entrepreneurs join traditional employers in receiving corporate welfare, as they strive to focus workers on serving the public good.

Proposed: Middle Age Starts at the Median Age

Wikipedia tells me that middle age has been defined in different ways, starting somewhere between 35 and 45 and running on to somewhere between 50 and 65.  I’m not too clear, yet, on the line between middle and old age.  But since I’m 55, I think I have probably at least entered middle age, and may therefore qualify to have an opinion on when it starts.

It seems like a mistake to move middle age too far from the middle.  The median age of Americans in 2011 is 36.9 — a year or so higher for women, a year or so lower for men, but overall about 37.  In other words, a person who was over the age of 35 in 2010 was among the older half of all living Americans.  People younger than him/her outnumbered people older than him/her.

Keying the start of middle age to the median age makes sense over the long haul.  Someday, people may live 200 years.  Calling them middle-aged at 35 wouldn’t fit very well.  Likewise, in some times and places people haven’t lived much over 35.  Right now, in fact, the life expectancy at birth, for a child born in Swaziland, is below 40 and may be as low as 32.

Certainly people are able to age, in non-numerical terms, at very different rates.  People who get married and have kids at age 13, or who run marathons (or have kids) in their 60s and 70s, can force some reflection on what aging is all about.  But my vote — influenced by my sense of a common experience of changing attitudes and priorities in one’s 30s in today’s America — is that middle age should be considered to start at the median age, currently about 37.

One side note:  when I turned 37, in 1992, the median age in the U.S. was around 33.  By my rule, I’d have had to go farther back, to around 1988, to find the point where I crossed over into the older half of the American public.  Interestingly, that’s just about the time when I decided I’d had enough of working in law firms in New York.  A year later, I was on the road to Colorado.  It felt like liberation rather than crisis but, either way, it was definitely midlife.

Needed: Head Refrigerant

I’m not sure this is an entirely great idea, but here goes.

They say your brain puts out a lot of heat, uses up an inordinate share of your body’s calories, and so forth.  Apparently humans are also able to outrun faster animals (e.g., dogs, horses) over long distances in warm weather because our hairless bodies are better at cooling themselves.

This all sounds reasonable enough.  But it seems, then, that exerting in hot weather is likely to make your head intolerably hot long before the rest of your body has a problem.  So you could be overcome by heat, or at least experience reduced performance, just because your head is hot.

We can’t wear (or afford) astronaut-style spacesuits to control full body heat.  Besides, you wouldn’t want to run a marathon in one.  But refrigerating your head could be a different matter.  Carry an energy source in a light backpack, put on your freon hat, and you’re set.

I realize the batteries to power a standard refrigerating unit, and the weight of the unit itself, could call for a pretty heavy backpack.  There may be ways around this — using other cooling technology, having an alternate battery pack on fast recharge nearby, putting the battery pack on the floor, maybe even tethering yourself with a 120V power cord (if you’re working in a small space and a cord wouldn’t get in the way).

I don’t know if this would actually improve performance.  I don’t even know if it’s been studied.  This question is left as an exercise for the reader.

Scenario: An Opening on the Left

Maybe that protester carrying the sign had a point.  The sign said something like, “Government – keep your hands off my Medicare!”  In two regards.  First, the person was clueless, and therefore is apt to be easily led; and second, the person’s sentiments were decidedly socialistic, regardless of how the Tea Party (with whom s/he was affiliated, as I recall) may be painted.

I’ve heard suggestions that, actually, the Tea Party is a rather leftist movement.  Given the political absurdities we’ve seen in the past several decades, it is conceivable that a charismatic leftist, mouthing the right formula for God, guns, and glory, could begin to draw support for a devolutionary socialism in which Social Security, Medicare, and other sources of financial support for the have-nots come to be seen as rather apolitical – as givens, something like the currency, the military, and voting itself.  Indeed, we may already be there, lacking only the charismatic leftist.

Nobody questions these things – voting, I mean, and the need for a military, and at some basic level the need to facilitate survival for the vast majority of the public in hard times.  Demands for anything resembling laissez-faire capitalism will be simply disregarded – they may actually be a good way to persuade people to try to kill you – if push comes to shove and too many of us are seriously at risk of disability or death due to disease, exposure, or starvation.

These conditions are not yet ripe; hence, we don’t yet have the left-wing demagogue who would ride any such wave.  But the midterm elections of 2014 could provide an opening for such a development, if a double-dip recession does unfold.  My sense, at present, is that the first dip of the Great Recession – which many people seem to have construed as  a pause on the way back to financial stability and growth – may instead prove to be a mere glimpse of the real free-fall.

Should something like that develop – and at this point, I’m giving it 51% – the cries on the left may be so sharp, by 2014, as to yank Obama out of his rightist reverie, back to his roots and, possibly, his passion.  The prospect persuades me to bump the odds of his eventual perceived greatness from 15% up to 20%.

My point here is that, by 2016, the country may be as consciously prepared for an evolved, subtle socialism as it has been at any time since the 1960s.  In that event, Obama may hand the mantle to a leader, emerging perhaps in 2014, who will have both the ability and the motivation to drive toward a fundamental change in public perceptions of the social contract, and of the national and local government that supposeldy derive therefrom.

Scenario: Obama Becomes a Great President

As noted previously, I don’t think President Obama’s leadership has been good for the country, his party, or himself; I’m not confident he has it in him to change that; and for those reasons I would rather see him defer to Hillary Clinton in next year’s presidential election.  But there is a scenario in which he, being himself as we have come to know him, could yet come to be seen as a great president.

In the scenario I have in mind, the Republican Party continues to present itself as the party of goofiness.  In November 2012, the public holds its nose and re-elects Obama, not so much for his positive achievements as for the absence of a credible Republican alternative and for the fear of what Republican policies mean for the public in a steadily worsening economy.

In that case, my previous comparison of Obama to Jimmy Carter fails.  Carter lost to Reagan in 1980 because the country wanted to be led by a movie actor who knew how to look presidential — who, as part of that, played the role of the leader much better than Carter did.  This time around, a reader of the tea leaves could suggest that the country is less inclined to elect someone just because he looks presidential — not that any of the Republicans in the game at present necessarily do.

I’m not entirely confident of this argument.  I think a strong Republican leader, emerging in the next six months, could make Obama look pretty lame.  I’m just not seeing much sign of that at present.

At any rate, if Obama squeaks through in 2012, the more apt historical comparison will then be, not Carter, but rather Wilson, the only president who had a PhD.  Neither of these two professors, Wilson or Obama, was or is a great politician.  But with a second term in hand, Obama could move beyond being a mere cheerleader.

He could, for example, mature into a degree of conviction and determination regarding particular issues.  Even if he approaches them from an intellectual rather than political mindset, he could nonetheless come to be perceived as — no, he could actually be — a president whose reasonableness and intelligence eventually heralds the emergence of a new, saner era in Washington politics.

I don’t see that happening on Obama’s own energy, though it’s possible.  It is more likely to happen if his wife or his future chief of staff or vice president finds a way to lead him into a more functional understanding of himself and his place in history.  I’m giving this possibility about a 15% chance at present.  But it does have a chance.

Needed: The Free Speech Billionaire

Nothing does more to keep America mired in corruption and dismay than the fact that we cannot speak freely about things that need to be brought into the light and talked about.  This is true across many fronts, but a particularly noticeable one has to do with the risk of being sued in a civil action for defamation (i.e., libel or slander).

Of course, nobody wants to be falsely accused, smeared without reason, and left without any way to clear their name.  Sadly, though, the same jurisprudential gridlock that deters people from speaking frankly — for fear of being subjected to a lawsuit backed by little truth but much wealth — also prevents them from using the courts to defend themselves.  Whether as plaintiff or defendant, litigation in the name of truth-telling is prohibitively expensive (not to mention interminably stressful) for the vast majority of Americans.  And as things stand now, there is little prospect that courts or legislatures will be significantly reforming this situation in the foreseeable future.

One solution to this situation could emerge if someone with substantial funds, ability, and determination were to devote him/herself to this issue.  Bill and Melinda Gates have demonstrated how a fortune can be leveraged to stimulate progress in areas such as education and health.  Someone with a commitment to the truth — not Truth in a grand philosophical sense, but simple everyday truthfulness — could provide an enormous positive impetus on behalf of those millions of people who strive, in various ways, to set their part of the collective national record straight.  One goal could be to encourage people to bring out their issues early, before they have ballooned into something unmanageable and destructive.

Such a proposal would obviously require some careful thought and planning.  What I present here is only a sketch for discussion purposes.

Suppose I have seen or otherwise encountered some kind of bad behavior.  I want to speak up about it.  In fact, I am so determined to set out the truth on this matter that I would risk losing my job and otherwise going through hell to say my piece and make it stick.  Unfortunately, in the present arrangement, even this sort of extreme determination may be insufficient for the task.  I may not have the money to win, if I’m speaking against a wealthy party who then sues me for defamation.  In that case, after sacrificing everything, I may have achieved nothing.  It’s not surprising that people instead choose to become implicit accomplices to dysfunctionality, and often even convince themselves that they are right to do so.

What is needed, in such a scenario, is not simply a rich uncle who will completely bankroll my freedom to say whatever I wish.  That could make me as much of a wrongdoer as the people I am speaking out against.  Power tends to corrupt; and even if it didn’t, everyone is going to be wrong sometimes.  It would be better if there were some relatively accessible intermediary who would consider backing me up, as a rich uncle would, but only if I can put up a decent defense of my viewpoint.

Such an intermediary, seeking an accurate statement of what actually happened in the case at issue, would presumably not just take my word for it, even if my word seemed to be supported by documentation.  The better approach would seem to be something like this:  Party A tells the intermediary that Party B did something bad.  The intermediary reviews the documentation and other support provided by Party A.  Assuming it looks like a legitimate issue, the intermediary contacts Party B to see if he/she/it is interested in presenting a reply.

The task of sorting out the facts in an individual case could be handled relatively inexpensively.  Two telecommuting college graduates employed by the intermediary agency, not acquainted with one another, could receive the documentation from Party A, along with any other potentially relevant information about the parties that they might be authorized to gather (e.g., credit check, Google search).  They might start with an assignment to write up what seems to have happened, along with any questions or inconsistencies they have encountered.  The presence or absence of substantial agreement between the two reviewers could guide their supervisor’s decision to contact Party B, to call upon a third preliminary reviewer, or to take other steps.

In this scenario, the commitment of the intermediary would be to the truth of the matter, not to either party.  An investigation could go either way.  If Party B presents a reply, the intermediary’s continuing review might lead to the impression that, actually, Party B was in the right.  In that event, the intermediary might go back to Party A with the new information, to see if he/she/it has anything to add.  This process could continue for some time, as additional questions and insights emerge.

Eventually, though — and quite soon, in many cases — the picture would be pretty well sketched out.  There would be various ways to proceed from that point.  One possibility would be for the intermediary to write up the facts and conclusions that came from its investigation, and then leave the parties to do whatever they wished with that writeup.

There would be other possibilities.  The intermediary might charge fees on a sliding scale and/or require a commitment, from all parties, to reimburse it for its expenses in digging out the truth, and might pursue such reimbursement especially aggressively if one party has deliberately obstructed or resisted the pursuit of the facts.  Where a party refuses to provide such reimbursement, with or without a prior commitment to do so, the intermediary might initiate or back a lawsuit against the party that appears to be in the wrong.  The intermediary may be positioned to function as a witness at trial.  There may be ways in which the intermediary could lobby for changes to laws, so as to increase its potential reimbursement and otherwise facilitate its truthseeking efforts.

Just as one must follow certain rules in health insurance (e.g., make your copayment, get precertification before expensive procedures), dispute resolution insurance may require parties to follow empirically supported approaches to conflict situations (e.g., begin by expressing your grievance directly to the party in question, rather than spreading the story to everyone else or just letting the matter fester in silence).  Documentation of such approaches may be expected in Party A’s preliminary complaint, and recommended if missing.  At some point, it may be possible for people to sign up for something in the nature of free speech dispute resolution insurance, giving them some assurance of a real right to speak freely, provided they have followed certain recommended procedures.

Regardless of whether the intermediary remains the sole or dominant agency providing such services, or transitions into a competitive market environment, one goal might be to develop a partner of the legal system.  The court would become a confirmer of free specch disputes resolved elsewhere, the enforcer of the intermediary’s claims for reimbursement, and a backstop for intractable cases that have not responded well to ordinary measures.  Meanwhile, the court would be freed from the obligation to deal directly with endless numbers of individual cases, long waiting upon an opportunity for justice, that could be more effectively handled elsewhere.

Such an arrangement could facilitate progress toward the ideal of a justice system whose governmental and nongovernmental participants, acting in concert, could at last provide prompt and effective attention to grievances, thereby opening doors for the public to identify and improve many situations in need of improvement across society.

Proposed: Jesse Ventura as Interim President of Libya

Reports at the moment suggest that Libya’s Muammar Gadhafi is about to be ousted.  Assuming that happens, the conversation turns to the question of who will replace him.  Libya, like Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Afghanistan before it, is divided among multiple groups that do not necessarily get along well with each other.  As in those other places, there is some prospect for violence and a need for possible further international intervention.

Such situations can emerge when the previous strongman (e.g., Tito, Hussein) is eliminated and no one is positioned to take his place.  Groups jockeying for control may consider it in their interests to prevent anyone from any other group from becoming dominant, particularly where it appears likely that the other group will then abuse its power.  This sort of situation can breed corruption and upheaval.

What may be helpful, in such situations, is a proactive rather than reactive international force temporarily supporting an imposed leader whom the clashing parties are likely to consider relatively nonthreatening, while the country gets itself together and stabilizing aspects of society are given time to gain some traction.  Efforts of this nature have not been especially successful in Afghanistan or Iraq; then again, the people who have attained positions of dominance in those places have the reputation of doing so disreputably, and of abusing their positions as just noted.

A somewhat different approach would be to provide preemptive international backing for someone who is very unlikely to want, or to be supported in, any long-term tenure in the position.  In passing, I suggest Jesse Ventura because (1) he is not a typical politician — he became Minnesota’s governor despite not being either a Democrat or Republican, and did not seek reelection; (2) he is on the record against torture; (3) he seems to have been reasonably competent in negotiating among political interests; and (4) he does not seem to have much interest in promoting one religious faction over another.

There are doubtless others who would be better suited for the position, perhaps from relatively neutral or non-western countries (e.g., Switzerland, the Philippines).  The point, in any case, is that it could be helpful to anticipate situations like those arising in Libya, Iraq, and elsewhere by assembling a relatively neutral organization, reminscent of the Red Cross / Red Crescent societies, complete with relatively disinterested leader figures who would be prepared to render political disaster assistance on short notice.  In some cases, a few days of stability at the outset could make a tremendous difference in facilitating a transition to a suitably representative government during a time of upheaval, and in preserving life, liberty, and property over the longer term.

Scenario: The Residential Real Estate Market Fractures

In the 1980s, I was warning that water was going to become a major concern in the coming years.  This was not due to my brilliance; I just reported what I was reading in assorted articles that seemed to make sense at the time.

In 2005, likewise, I was reporting that the residential real estate market was seriously slowing down — not because I was some kind of real estate expert, but simply because there were reasons to doubt that people would continue to be able to pay steadily higher prices for a place to live.

Like many predictors, I was going in both directions with some of my speculations.  Nobody really knows the future.  You just try to piece it together as new information comes in.  You always are at risk of reversing your opinion later.

In January 2004, I had some predictions that still seem accurate.  For purposes of making money, of course, timing is the whole thing.  Someone who had bet on me back then might have seen their money sit stagnant for years on end.  But for purposes of long-term planning, it may be less important to get the exact timing right.  It’s more a matter of anticipating what problems may be coming down the pike, and making arrangements to counteract or adapt to them.

One of my predictions, in January 2004, was that wages would continue to decline — that, in terms of incomes, “workers in the U.S., going down, will meet Chinese, Thai, or other Asian workers on the way up.”  Globalization made that relatively predictable.  This led to another prediction:

The value of your house will not rise, in nominal terms, if nobody can afford to buy it, or to pay the taxes on it needed to cover governmental deficits, or to pay dramatically higher rates of interest on a mortgage. It has often occurred that the houses that rise most rapidly in value are those that are marketed to the wealthy; it may be that middle-class housing becomes too expensive to acquire and maintain at current real prices. … If people come to see that they must take drastic measures to sell a home to buyers who have less money than before, there could be a selling competition in which housing prices are slashed deeply.

And that’s what happened.

So let us look at the housing market today.  For simplicity, let’s say there are two ways to see it.  On one hand, we may have been living through a dramatic correction in which the real estate market has been digesting all sorts of bad news about employment, incomes, credit, and the economy in general.

The idea of a “correction” suggests that the housing market will eventually finish processing this information.  It will adjust itself to the realities that it should have been gradually absorbing for at least the past ten to twenty years.  (My legal practice in the early 1980s included some work in the area of mortgage-backed securities, so some of this has been building for a generation or more.)  Then, in this scenario, the real estate market will find its feet and go back to work, providing long-term gains to homeowners, just like before.

On the other hand, this may not have been a correction.  This may have been the first shock in a complete, earthquake-style remaking of the real estate world.  In this scenario, what we think we are going back to is no longer there.  The only question is how long it will take us to get to the point where the fog clears and we see that plainly.

In this latter, revolutionary rather than evolutionary perspective, too many of the old rules are being rewritten entirely.  For instance, maybe the highways we have taken for granted are becoming too expensive to let tens of millions of people commute to work from suburban, exurban, and rural settings.  The government, even if it does not go bust, may have no fiscal alternative but to let many of those roads lapse into a potholed state of semi-disrepair.  Even if you, personally, can make the trip from home to work in relative comfort, thanks to your super-macho four-wheel-drive monster truck that rolls over decaying roads with ease, there’s a question as to how many potential buyers will be similarly positioned, when the time comes to sell your house out in the hinterlands.

As I noted in October 2007, it’s not just the highways — it’s the water mains, the electrical lines, and all the other infrastructure that supports the dispersion of population out into the suburbs and beyond.  Likewise, cars are going to be more expensive to build if the underlying economics deteriorate.  The things that cars are made of — steel, for example, and aluminum, and plastic — become more expensive as raw materials (e.g., iron, petroleum) become more expensive; and those raw materials will almost certainly become more costly as millions upon millions of people in Asia and elsewhere start to buy cars.  Even those cars that are manufactured in the U.S. will become more expensive if the dollar loses value, to the extent they consist of parts manufactured outside the U.S.

There has also been, and continues to be, an enormous shift away from the world’s former reliance upon the U.S. as its financial center.  Despite financial upheaval, in October 2008 I could still observe a degree of global confidence in the U.S. that is no longer quite so evident.  There does not seem to be the same need for a superpower.  American specialness — whether seen in New York City or Hollywood or Harvard — is increasingly contested by smart, hard-working people from Shanghai to Rio to Copenhagen.  There is not likely to be a return to the global dominance that made it so easy to create wealth in the U.S. a half-century ago, and that seemed (thanks especially to easy credit) to be continuing right up to 2007.

Over a period of decades, there is also a great deal of potential for the remaking of values.  American individualism has many advantages.  Unfortunately, it also brings a lot of alienation, loneliness, and destructive behavior.  People around the world are becoming more urbanized.  Some who might have opted for the comforts of the individualistic suburban life in a prior era, when they could afford it, may instead find themselves appreciating the social advantages of learning to live in closer proximity to other people.  That may become the only thing they can afford, but in some ways it may also be more fun.  The American Dream, with its house with the white picket fence, may gradually be reaching the point of seeming antiquated, as perhaps all dreams must do someday.

If apartments and other forms of clustered habitation become more dominant, the automatic preference for a single-family dwelling may come more into question.  This seems especially likely to happen if increased reliance on apartments brings improved laws and practices for the benefit of apartment dwellers.  In many places, renters have often been at a disadvantage vis-a-vis landlords.  A more professionalized, regulated, or otherwise ethical rental environment may thus exert further downward pressure on demand for houses.

So that’s one part of the revolutionary scenario, where the old market for residential real estate endures the financial equivalent of an earthquake.  Another part of the revolutionary scenario involves water-driven regional upheaval.  The vague 1980s prediction that water will be an issue is gradually being unzipped, as years pass, into a number of more specific consequences.

One consequence that is becoming more evident involves the drying-out of the Southwest and other regions of the U.S.  My prediction in June and July 2006 and again in November 2007 was that people would be moving in larger numbers, during the years to come, from places like Phoenix and Los Angeles to more northerly and midwestern locations.  It now appears that some of those alternate locations are in line to experience their own droughts, though perhaps not as soon.

We could see a large-scale drought-driven exodus from the Southwest — potentially involving millions of people — within as little as a decade.  People won’t stay long when drinking water grows scarce.  One question is whether they will be interested in relocating to another place, albeit cooler, where drought is still a long-term risk.  What seems more likely is that, to the extent they can afford it, people will want to sink roots in places that seem to have relatively deep water supplies.

Of course, there are long-term possibilities that seem like science fiction now.  Fusion reactors could power the pumps and desalinators that could fill pipelines and canals from the Pacific all the way to the Rio Grande.  Atmospheric tricks could change everything.  But we aren’t there now, and it’s not clear when or if we will be.  The most likely prospect at present is that there won’t be enough water for all the people who would be born in or move to the desert Southwest, and therefore those people are going to have to go somewhere else.

Previously, it may have seemed that anywhere would suffice — that people could get all the water they need, almost anywhere in the relatively lush, cool, green states to the north and east.  Now that’s not such a sure bet.  Abnormally dry conditions have been cropping up all along the Atlantic, and even in places like Wisconsin, Michigan, and New Hampshire.  Human nature and markets being what they are, it could easily develop that a town on the shore of Lake Michigan finds that it has all the water it needs, whereas another town just a few dozen miles inland can barely afford to pay for shipments through its pipeline to the lake.

Lake Michigan is a Great Lake.  There are thousands of other, smaller lakes around the country.  Some may be fed from springs, and some communities may draw their water from aquifers or other subterranean sources, that are not at risk of industrial pollution or drying out.  (Along those lines, it seems like the water filtering industry would be a good long-term stock market bet.)  In the revolutionary scenario, one might expect a great deal of upheaval, starting within a few years and continuing for some time, as the science and the facts of water availability are sorted out.  It may eventually be easy for anyone to see why Community A has adequate water, while Community B does not.  But at present, most of us don’t see that sort of thing very clearly.

It seems there could be a lot of relocation, upheaval, and irritation, over a period of years, as the public tries to wrap its head around a world in which something as basic and taken-for-granted as water becomes a complete wild card.  Ironically, established urban neighborhoods in a hustle-bustle place like Chicago may experience much less of this upheaval than a seemingly placid community out in the boondocks.  At any rate, the risk of complete upheaval is not apt to persuade people to invest in the thoroughly inflexible asset of real estate.  To the extent that people don’t simply move into apartments, I’d expect, instead, to see a boom in portable residential structures, and in places to park and live in them.

To sum up, I have sketched out two developments that suggest revolutionary rather than evolutionary change in the residential real estate market.  First, I have suggested that the demand for and affordability of single-family dwellings may decline as it becomes unaffordable and/or undesirable to indulge the highly individualistic and in some ways antisocial vision of the old American Dream.  Second, I have suggested that the stability — indeed, the immobility — of residential real estate could appear risky if not foolish in a world where the necessities of life may require mobility.  I have made that case especially with the example of water, which has the potential to redraw the map of American population, though much the same point could have been made, more subtly and over a longer period of historical time, as changes in the job market over the past three decades have required large numbers of people to pull up roots, abandon their friends and extended families, and go live in other places.

Contrarian Position: People Should Vote Less

It is certainly great to be able to get rid of a president or other national leader who doesn’t deliver the goods.  But in other ways, voting is a bad idea.

One problem is that people vote on things they don’t understand.  This is not good.  Imagine if we handled surgery and engineering that way.  Should we make an incision here?  Use this kind of bridge design?  Oh, I think so.  Sure, why not?

Of course, in a representative democracy, we’re often voting for people rather than issues.  I don’t understand government financing, but I’ll vote for Joe Blow, who says he does.  Then Joe — typically, a lawyer or some other glad-handing type of person — gets into office, doesn’t actually know much more about things than you or I do, doesn’t remotely have the time to read up on all the various bills that are presented to him, and inevitably relies on advice he gets from paid lobbyists.  So then I get upset because government makes decisions that seem to go in the wrong direction.

If I don’t have the ability to understand the issues and/or don’t want to spend the time to become knowledgeable about them, I should not make decisions about them.  We say that voting is a right, not a privilege, and in some ways that’s true.  But we also wisely remove ourselves from voting on important things.  We leave key governmental financing decisions to the Federal Reserve Bank for , for instance, which has been deliberately insulated, to some extent, from political (i.e., from your and my) control.  We leave battlefield decisions to generals, and postal distribution decisions to the Post Office.

Voting makes sense on the very general level.  We should be able to vote on whether we want to be happier, safer, richer, and more environmentally friendly.  But the specifics on how we achieve such things should be left to people who know what they’re doing.  We should have plenty of controls to insure that those who make the decisions actually are (and continue to be) knowledgeable, that they’re not political stooges, that their learned discussions are open to all reasonable perspectives, and so forth.  But we should not be micromanaging the “how” of it — the details that we don’t have a clue about.  Basically, I should not (and in many settings, as a matter of fact, I do not) have a fundamental right to inject my random opinion into people’s efforts to solve problems and make the world a better place.

We see some support for this perspective in China.  Let there be no doubt:  their non-democratic government is going to make major mistakes sometimes.  But so will ours.  Their government can remain in power only by forcibly preventing people from protesting too much.  Ours does that too, in some ways, but not on the same level.  Their government controls free speech; here, we leave that to individuals who can respond to your statements by firing, suing, firing, arresting, ridiculing, or otherwise harassing or penalizing you.  Without denying the drawbacks of their approach, China’s leaders have shrewdly manipulated the currency and successfully shepherded their country through an extremely impressive period of rapid growth.  India, their democratic and in many ways comparable neighbor, has fared poorly by comparison.  This is, itself, a complex matter.  Nonetheless, China’s progress is thought-provoking.

One other point.  Voting is considered positive because it gives people a feeling of being personally involved in their government.  In other words, it’s a sort of therapy.  It helps people feel good about things, without necessarily making real-world facts better.

Half of the eligible voters in the country — more than a hundred million people (i.e., nearly as many people as there are in the entire country of Mexico) — don’t bother to vote in our national elections.  This is a pretty resounding vote in itself.  Half of the country (indeed, a slight majority) seems to doubt that their vote matters at all, and large majorities doubt that their vote is important in state and local elections.

Meanwhile, those who do vote give us presidents who are not necessarily good leaders.  They give us congressional representatives that, quite often, the voters themselves find dissatisfying.  At this writing, polls indicate that only 14% of Americans approve of the way Congress is doing its job.  Isn’t this kind of crazy?  We vote for people, and then don’t like what we’ve done, so we blame them — and then we go back and do the same thing over again, a couple of years later.

If you want people to feel that they are personally important to political processes, you have to make them important in fact.  Being part of an electorate of 200,000,000 eligible voters is not going to achieve that.  But if you put them in a group of 100 people who have input on issues involving their own block or micro-community, chances are you’ll see their voting participation shoot way up.  If they don’t participate on the local level, it’s because they think the state and/or national governments are the only really important ones.  If voting participation and political empowerment are your goals, you have to devolve decision-making power down to the very local level.

I’ve addressed two points here.  First, people should not vote on stuff they don’t understand.  For purposes of dealing with big-picture, national-level issues, they should choose a system that permits votes to be made by people who know what they’re voting about — not by politicians whose expertise is in being popular.  The general public should retain power to sketch out how the system will best represent their interests.  That’s where their opinion is valuable.  Second, voting in national elections is good for generating lots of energy and hoopla, positive and not so positive, but it doesn’t get most people engaged, and doesn’t yield results that we are usually happy with.

The solution is not clear.  This is not a post about the solution.  This is a post about the problem.  Voting, as presently understood, is problematic.  Some revisions are needed.

Advice to Obama: Save Your Legacy

Barack Obama is on track to become remembered as another Jimmy Carter.  Which is OK, in a sense.  I thought Jimmy Carter was a good man, and a better president than he got credit for.  He was just weak.  Not as weak as the contrast with Reagan made him seem, and in some ways much better for the country than Reagan was.  But weak in appearance, and therefore in power.  And in a president, that’s fatal.

So now we have Barack Obama, giving us a new demonstration of Carter-style MEOW (Moral Equivalent of War) leadership.  He’s not a fighter.  He keeps talking compromise when what he means is surrender.  Maybe that’s why we didn’t want him bowing down to the Chinese leader.  It was just a bow, in itself no worse than a sneeze.  But the fact that a president would do it — that was the worrisome part.  It was like an advance peek into ineffectuality.  You can’t stand tall if you’re bending over.

Month after month, Obama demonstrates that he is just not into this president thing.  Again, he’s not alone in that.  Bush was the same, with his busy vacation schedule and My Pet Goat and the impression that Dick Cheney was pulling the strings.  But the Bush Administration was somehow able to get things done nonetheless — again, as with Reagan, often to the country’s detriment — and the Obama Administration just isn’t.

One thing Carter did well was to remain a good man after leaving office.  Leading Habitat for Humanity isn’t quite on a par with leading the free world.  Yet in a way, that was exactly the point.  Ultimately, Carter was not a glory hound.  Like Bill Clinton, and in some ways like Richard Nixon, but largely unlike Reagan and the Bushes, Jimmy Carter stayed in the game long after the sun set on his presidency.  He has been an active and often highly visible humanitarian on multiple fronts — not only in Habitat, but also on any number of peacekeeping missions and other activities over the years.

In the 2008 election, Barack Obama was great at giving speeches and getting people excited about change and hope.  That game won’t go the same way, the second time around.  He cried wolf, and now we know he didn’t mean it.

At best, the U.S. economy is headed toward another unpleasant winter, with avoidable deaths for thousands who are cold, hungry, and sick.  At worst, as I warned during the early months of the Great Recession, one bad winter could take us back to the Great Depression in earnest.  We are almost at the point where we desperately need a great leader, and Obama is not it.  He just doesn’t have the fire and determination.

What Obama might have the ability to do, however, is to decide on some objectives that will be good for the country even if they are bad for his re-election.  Unfortunately, it is beginning to seem optimistic to think that he might actually listen to his own party and get serious about jobs and other social needs.  As a second-best, if he wants to continue to be essentially a moderate Republican president, he could at least make himself known, like Fed chairman Paul Volcker in the early 1980s, as the man who decided on something that had to be done, and did it.  Volcker gave us severe recession in order to defeat inflation.  Volcker stood firm and won that battle.  As a result, he has been respected for a generation.

I am pessimistic that Obama can do anything like that.  But not completely pessimistic.  Sometimes it is easier to focus on an objective and pursue it doggedly.  Having already used up much of his political capital, he may find that he really has very little to lose by becoming, for example, the president who finally began to reform Social Security or the military-industrial complex.

When I recommend that he save his legacy, I mean that now would be a good time to start laying the groundwork for his career after the presidency.  He has undoubtedly meant well, in his emphasis upon political cooperation and, where feasible, consensus.  Those are admirable objectives for a different America, past or future.

The mission at hand, as recommended here, is to move away from mere speechifying and complaining, and find a way to make consensus concretely appealing and meaningful in the long run.  There is, perhaps, one issue — Social Security, defense spending, or something else — where Obama can commit and position himself for a deep struggle, continuing long after 2012.

I hope Barack Obama will choose such a target, choose it well, and pursue it effectively.  I hope this positions him as an excellent vice president with portfolio on Hillary Clinton’s 2012 ticket — not because she is the greatest, but because she has proven competence.

Done properly, this sort of transition could give Obama a long and admirable career in the future, doing Jimmy Carter one better.  Worse things could be said about former president Obama than that he was not only a mediocre president, and a good man, but also a great success with respect to his chosen issue.

2120 Hindsight: A Special Person

July 18, 2120

Dear Alex,

It’s been too long since I last wrote.  I’m feeling kind of blue, and I missed you and wanted to talk to you about things.

I guess the big news is that Amy died today.  It was typhoid fever.  She caught it yesterday sometime — I didn’t see the instruments myself, so I don’t know for sure — and she died this morning.

They say she caught typhoid from the water.  Obviously, rich people like Mom and Dad aren’t going to filter sewage for the other 95% of the town.  “It’s too damn much!” Dad says.  Which may be true.  I don’t know.

The folks believe that everybody should be created as I was.  You come out of the laboratory, they hook you up to the instruments, add the juice, and in a couple of months you’re “fully formed, completely immunized, neurologically fine-tuned,” like they say in the ads.  So then, no worries about typhoid.

I try to tell the folks that it’s expensive to have kids like they had me.  All that programming and chemical work aren’t cheap.  People like Amy’s family don’t have the money for anything like that.  “Then they shouldn’t have had kids,” Mom says.

And she’s right.  But accidents happen.  The hospital screwed up their account.  Amy told me she wasn’t supposed to be created, but then, one fine day, her parents got a call from the hospital, telling them that their brand-new 14-year-old daughter was ready to come home.  Not much you can do at that point, other than sue the hospital for wrongful life.  Everybody knows Judge Alice is on the hospital board, so not much hope there.

What was amazing about Amy was that she survived.  She was a total budget baby.  She thinks — I mean, she thought — that the hospital broke the law in releasing her in the condition she was in.  She had diseases and problems that nobody has anymore.   She suspected that, actually, she was ordered by another rich family, but the hospital screwed up the order, so they dumped her on some random poor family instead.

Most of the kids thought Amy was just hideous.  Their parents too.  I mean, getting diseases like that.  It was ridiculous.  But she, being the person she was, found something positive in it.  She felt this was actually something a person could learn about.  Can you imagine?

So she went around asking questions, and came up with the theory that her case was a really big screwup at the hospital.  She believed that she was accidentally programmed with illegal genetic material from the early 21st century.  That, she said, was why she lived through all those diseases:  she was functioning like a person who would have had to face a world like that.

But I’m going on about nothing.  I don’t mean to bore you.  I guess this is my way of saying goodbye — telling stories about her.  It’s kind of funny now, but it was embarrassing to be her friend, when she went around bothering people with her questions.  Maybe her theory was right — sometimes she really did act like a person from the Wild Years.

Well, so anyway, that chapter of my life is over.  She was with us for three years.  Some of my friends stopped talking to me when I decided I liked her, despite her being unwashed and sick.  Maybe they’ll come around again, now that she’s gone.  Mom and Dad were OK with it — they feel that a young person should experience other cultures.  They probably also figured that she’d die before she could have any real impact on my career.

I guess what’s bothering me is that Amy was so different.  Maybe that’s why they don’t use that genetic material anymore.  This kind of person is troubling.  There was something really special about her.

Not to get sentimental about it — people die all the time — but I’m having this problem that, you know, I’m afraid I will never meet someone like her again.  It’s a really weird, uncomfortable feeling, and I just don’t know what to do.

I guess that’s all I wanted to say.  I hope you’ll get this letter soon.  Imagine — in the Wild Years, you’d already have received it.  We’d probably be arguing by electronic message.  Though I have to admit, it would be nice to have instant contact with you now.

Thank you for listening to my little problems.  Whenever you write back, please be sure to tell me what’s happening in your case.  We’re all waiting for the day when they let you back in Canada again.

With all my best –

Kerry

A Clear Mind: Finding Beauty in Life

As previously observed, life is a fundamentally harsh, ugly affair.  Survival — continued participation in life — tends to be awarded to those living creatures that prove most adept at eating other creatures and/or seizing, for themselves, the resources that other creatures need.

And yet, despite the ugliness of life’s mandate to promote one’s self, group, and species over all others, people commonly strive to see beauty in life.  This could just be a matter of making the best of a bad situation, since staying alive generally seems to be the only sensible option.  But whatever the reason, there is a tendency to selectively glorify the good and downplay or cope with the bad.

Not surprisingly, people see beauty in things that sustain life:  good food, for instance, and healthy bodies, and warm weather.  What is more intriguing is that people also see beauty in some things that deny or work against the ugliness of life.

Food is, again, an example.  People who have excellent food supplies can find it quite normal to dress up the stuff on their plate until it hardly bears a trace of the look, smell, or feel of the actual creature.  While maintaining a positive view of food itself, we generally don’t celebrate the fact that we manipulated, stole from, or killed some living thing to get it.  One could say much the same about other nasty survival-oriented acts:  we appreciate their contribution to our strength, security, and comfort, but aren’t necessarily proud of what we’ve done.

Complacency is a different example.  People don’t want, and may not typically be able, to maintain hypervigilance throughout their lives.  Almost as soon as they gain a sense of strength and security, they began to develop in ways that jeopardize it.  Physically and otherwise, they find it easy to grow soft and weak, lose agility and sharpness, fall into predictable routines, rely on assumptions and wishful thinking, and otherwise make themselves more vulnerable to predators and parasites.

They may develop in that way because they are focusing their energies on some other priority; yet there, again, the same point holds.  Given the opportunity, and especially with the passage of a generation or two in relative security, people begin to value all sorts of things that are not helpful, and in many cases are detrimental, to life’s project of growing stronger and becoming more a formidable predator.

Such developments would not occur if we were driven solely by the grim life force that requires us to exploit other living things for our own benefit.  Indeed, it would not be possible to describe life as “ugly” if our values were entirely steered by life itself.  Such a statement would seem like a contradiction in terms.  We would consider it obvious that life, and the entire assortment of acts that sustain it, all have intrinsic beauty.

It appears that our concepts of beauty, and our priorities in life, are sometimes influenced by values that vary from and even contradict the demands of the life force.  When we feel secure enough to take life for granted, we evidently find it easier to pay less attention to its demands and to focus on other values instead.  This raises questions of what those other values are, and where they come from.

A Clear Mind: Whistling in the Dark

The purpose of life is to perpetuate life.  In its pursuit of that objective, life is a fundamentally ugly enterprise.  Yet living creatures have no appealing alternative; it looks like death brings an end to everything, and there is the possibility of an even worse situation after death.

In this sense, the pursuit of beauty in life is like sailing into the wind.  It’s harder and slower than sailing with the wind, but it can be done.  The prevailing breeze says that life is an ugly affair; but the direction in which living creatures want to go is just the reverse.  Given life as the lesser of two evils, people (and sometimes, it seems, other creatures) respond to life’s ugliness by selecting instances of beauty from it.

If sailing into the wind is all you ever do, after a while it starts to seem normal.  You may cry when you’re born, and for good reason; but soon you learn that being miserable isn’t very rewarding.  Instead, people learn to look for the positive.  It becomes a habit, to such a point that people actually consider it negative and perverse to carry on, as I have done in these several posts, about the essential darkness of life.  Seeing darkness means not seeing light, and the light of life is what human traditions typically espouse.

Much creativity is required, when the attorney builds a case that runs against the obvious facts.  It becomes necessary to ignore, downplay, or postpone the discovery of a great deal of evidence, and to mischaracterize or obfuscate plain truths.  In similar spirit, people stitch together their imaginary tapestries of life’s beauty by selecting elements that suit their circumstances.  The resulting pictures vary greatly from one another, yet each advocate is convinced that they know how life can be beautiful.

Two examples make the point.  On one hand, some people find that life is treating them relatively well.  People in this situation often conclude that the bad parts of life happen to other people because those others aren’t doing it right.  They are stupid, or lazy, or weak, or unenlightened.  There is something wrong with them, anyway.  In this perspective, life is ugly for those who mishandle it — as if the successful person, him/herself, were not surrounded by larger predators and smaller parasites, looking for an opportunity (and not necessarily playing by the same rules).

On the other hand, many people who aren’t doing so well bring God into the equation.  It is God’s will that something bad happened; or God is going to sort it out in the end, putting those successful people in their place and giving these sorry individuals a better afterlife.  In this perspective, those who have the hard lives are not inferior; they are, in fact, saints, and they will experience a fantastic life forever, after they die — although, on closer inspection, they aren’t typically too eager to get there, or to see their loved ones head in that direction.

The purpose of such theories seems to be to show that their proponents are on the right track.  The wealthy person may see him/herself as being more intelligent or talented; the God-fearing person may consider him/herself righteous or faithful; but however characterized, the conclusion is the same:  this person has figured out how to experience a beautiful life.  The theory achieves the mission, which is to piece together bits of evidence to prove that the wind is actually not blowing directly in one’s face.

The wind of life tends to be harsh.  But sometimes it carries beautiful things to us.

A Clear Mind: The Beauty of Life

In seeking to perpetuate itself, life becomes an ugly affair.  Living creatures deceive, steal from, hurt, and kill one another, in countless ways, in order to survive.

But not everything about life is ugly.  It is great to be alive, in many times and places, for many people and other creatures.  You can see them play, the dogs and cats and sometimes other animals as well; you can guess that they wouldn’t do this if they were miserable.

Sometimes, to be sure, the things that make life rewarding are ugly in themselves.  People are sometimes happiest when they are experiencing predatory success, such as after a good meal, or upon seeing that a competitor is unhappy.  But life can also be beautiful because of experiences that don’t arise from harm to other creatures:  a nice, hot shower, for instance, or a glorious sunset, or the face of someone you love.

People often find that having and raising a child is one of the most beautiful and rewarding things in life.  They sacrifice a great deal — sometimes, their own lives — to help that child survive and thrive.  This is what one would expect:  life perpetuates itself, not only within individual creatures, but also across generations.  From the perspective of a chicken, though, human parents and children celebrate the arrival of another generation of predator, indifferent to all the direct and indirect hurting and killing that the child will do during its life.

The alternative to life and death is the barrenness of nonlife.  To stop giving birth to new generations of predators, human would-be parents of the world could abstain from having children.  Yet that would not solve the problem.  Other living creatures would take up the slack.  The hurting and killing of life and death would go on without human participation.

If, someday, someone invents a weapon capable of eliminating all life from the planet forever, there would remain the question of whether to use it.  Living creatures seem almost unanimously against it; they want to continue to live.  Even if complete annihilation were painless, it would deprive all those creatures of all those life experiences to come.  They seem willing to take the bad with the good.  Evidently they think life is worthwhile on balance.

Or maybe they’re just afraid of the unknown.  If every living creature knew beyond a doubt that a new and better life awaits them after death, maybe they wouldn’t hang on to this life so tightly.  Humans surely wouldn’t.  Why bother?  If this life deals you a bad hand, you fold and wait for a new round to begin.  Or if you decide to stick it out, it’s just for the fun of it, to see how far you can get with what you’ve got.

Unfortunately, we don’t know that there is a good afterlife.  So what might have been a relaxed, amiable game of cards becomes a battle of high-stakes poker.  Worse, the game is rigged.  Eventually you are certain to lose everything.  And as far as we know, once the game is over, you will never have anything again.  There’s always a slight fear — sometimes a great terror — of losing life under these circumstances.  The best you can hope for is a gradual, evasive retreat, somehow holding onto the farm and your shirt for as long as possible.

Life is thus a bit like slavery.  Some in this situation are able to move toward better conditions; some aren’t.  Either way, it may be ugly, and it may require you to do ugly things; but there’s no real alternative, short of suicide.

Life is beautiful in the sense that it contains many great experiences.  They are great because we are able to focus very locally on the pleasant parts.  A full belly makes world hunger much less worrisome.  The prospect that our kids will kill countless creatures is of remote interest; what we really know is that, today, we’re proud of them.  While death is with us always, ready to step out of the shadows in an instant to meet up with us, we are nonetheless usually able to imagine that it remains far away.

With Sympathy for Martin Niemöller

First they eliminated the dischargeability of student loans in bankruptcy -

But I did not complain, for I was not a bankrupt student borrower.

Then they jacked credit card interest rates and fees sky-high -

But I did not complain, for I had no credit card debt.

Next, they faked the bailout for underwater home mortgages -

But I did not complain, for my home’s value remained stable.

And now they have come to inflate the dollar and wipe out my savings -

But there is no one else with savings left to complain.

A Clear Mind: Perpetuating Life

Almost everyone decides to perpetuate life.  They don’t necessarily decide this consciously.  They find themselves alive, and it seems natural to continue in that state.  In fact, it is pretty hard to stop.  They may have never even thought about it.  If you ask them why they continue to live, they may wonder what’s wrong with you.

Staying alive means participating in life’s arrangement for the use of water and other essentials.  This arrangement is not especially pleasant.  The food you eat is food that some other human, animal, or other living creature will not get.  When people perpetuate their lives, they take jobs and spouses that other people would dearly love to have.  For that matter, the seeds and eggs that you consume are potential living creatures that will never get a shot at life; they are food that some other creature won’t get.  The ants under your shoe on the sidewalk, the insects that want to eat the grain in the field, the bacteria that die when you wash your hands:  intentionally or not, staying alive means hurting and killing other living creatures.

It’s easier to feel compassion when the creature being killed is cute, intelligent, or otherwise appealing.  But compassion does not determine what is actually happening.  Regardless of what humans may feel, the cockroach seems to consider it very important to produce offspring.  No matter how lovely or obnoxious a creature may be — no matter how much other creatures want it dead – it wants to live.

In their struggles to perpetuate their preferred form of life, living creatures use a remarkable variety of strategies.  They develop bigger teeth, sharper claws, and other weapons to become better killers; they camouflage themselves to deceive predators; they steal from one another; they cheat.  The one that gets the resources survives.  It doesn’t matter how he/she/it gets them.

It’s an ugly situation.  Yet people are able to find beauty in life nonetheless.

A Clear Mind: The Starting Point

Many people treat their religion’s scriptures as their starting point in life.  But why do people differ on their views toward a religion’s scriptures?  Likewise, for nonbelievers, which book should one read, or which question should one ask first?  For believers and nonbelievers alike, these sorts of questions come before a person adopts a viewpoint.

It is tempting to think that someone’s conscious philosophy is his/her starting point.  A person says, “I think, therefore I am,” or “Jesus died for your sins,” and that may seem to be their starting point.  Or a person emphasizes kindness, or truth, or some other virtue.  These sorts of priorities certainly can influence much of what a person does.  But they are only part of the starting point.

This series of posts, on the theme of “A Clear Mind,” started with a certain topic.  That was the starting point, in the sense that it was the first to be discussed.  But it did not have to be first.  I could have started somewhere else.  What I say, and what I decide to say first, are influenced by my whole collection of beliefs, emotions, reasoning abilities, past experiences, future possibilities, and other mental and physical resources.  Everybody has a somewhat different starting point.

Nobody can fully articulate their starting point.  There’s just too much material.  At different times and in different situations, different resources come to mind, and their relative priorities change.  People are forever having to explain that when they said such-and-such, they meant it within a certain context.

People start at a certain point; they have thoughts and experiences; and they move toward an ending point.  They may still say the same things as before, but now they have some additional experiences or knowledge.  It’s still the same person, but the same person is a bit different.

The topics that people prioritize — the things they choose to say first — are of course very different, from one person to the next.  Generally, they tend to prioritize topics that relate to their interest in perpetuating life, as they experience it.  So if someone wanted to question everyone’s starting point, it could make sense to start by questioning the decision to perpetuate life.

A Clear Mind: Scriptures

Many religious beliefs — notably, beliefs about various gods — arise from the words of written scriptures. In religion, as in politics and other areas of life, interpretation of texts can be difficult. These difficulties can lead to disagreements about what the texts mean.

Historically, in religion as in politics, disagreements about texts have often led to fighting, hatred, and even war.  Reasonable people on both sides find themselves in unreasonable positions.  They do this because they think texts provide certainty.

But texts do not provide certainty.  First, on a technical level, many factors can complicate textual interpretation. The Christian Bible provides a good example. That Bible is available in many translations that disagree in a variety of ways. Many books of the Bible were written long after the events they describe, on the basis of fading memories and stories handed down.  Throughout the history of Christianity, believers have disagreed on which texts should even be included in the Bible.

Even without such technical problems, there are problems of interpretation.  Consider the U.S. Constitution.  The original document still exists; it was written in English; anyone can find out what its original words were. The kinds of technical issues found in the Bible are not significant in constitutional interpretation.  Yet countless battles have been fought over what its various passages mean.  People have their preferred views.

Many Christians want the Bible to be a direct communication from the Holy Spirit.  Indeed, they want people to treat it as though its contents were like a law passed by Congress: those contents should be determined precisely, interpreted correctly, and applied in exactly the way that was originally intended.

But where did this notion come from? The Bible, itself, does not say this. To the contrary, the Bible quotes Jesus as warning against treating religious scriptures as the religious lawyers did. It quotes Paul as saying that the letter of the text is deadly. One of the Bible’s four books that describe the life of Jesus begins with a clear statement that the word of God is not a written text: Jesus himself is the divine Word.

The effort to make the Bible into a perfect, holy text does not reflect well upon the gods (specifically, the Father and the Holy Spirit) who supposedly influenced or controlled its writing.  The problems noted above suggest that the Christian gods were not competent to produce an authoritative scripture.  They needed help from bickering translators and widely divergent interpreters.  If you believe the Christians, God was not even smart enough to provide a Table of Contents, so that people could be sure which manuscripts should be included, and a simple introductory statement that these precise manuscripts do constitute his precise word.

What seems more likely is that, if there exists a God like the one that Christians worship, he was perfectly able to provide a written guide for his followers, like the one he gave to Moses, if that’s what he wanted to do. He did not do that. He had good reason. Written texts were not the way to go. After all, in the Christian view, the text that God gave to Moses did not work out so well: the Jews were completely off-track by the time Jesus arrived.

If God had any doubts about how texts work, he could have looked around and observed the Roman lawyers, or he could have looked ahead to the American ones. He would have realized that texts lead to disputes. A built-in system of disputes could be appropriate in the case of something like the U.S. Constitution, which incorporates an expectation of strife in the checks and balances among its several branches of government. But built-in conflict does not seem to be the starting point for the unified church that New Testament writers envisioned.

These remarks are focused on Christianity. The Christian religious text is the most familiar religious scripture for me and for most Americans. Similar observations can probably be offered for any religious text. Texts generate conflict.

In this case, texts also do something else. The effort to make the Bible out to be a holy book means that God gets the blame for its imperfections and for the horrors committed in its name.  If a human can anticipate the problems that texts produce, God certainly could.  God could not have doubted that his way of producing a written text (if he inspired the Bible) would lead to the worst that humans could do.  The God that supposedly prioritizes love is thus made guilty of hate.  Those who believe in the Christian God may see the potential for blasphemy here.

Texts can be useful in many ways.  But the decision of which priorities to follow — or, if you prefer, which Bible passages to emphasize — depends on where you are trying to go, and on your starting point.

A Clear Mind: Gods

For most people, spirituality seems to be linked with a belief in divinity.  This link is not always obvious.  As an example, a person who rejects the possibility of any conscious, personal gods that transcend nature is not necessarily an atheist.  If s/he believes that s/he has a spiritual connection or oneness with the universe, s/he might be a pantheist.

In many nations, people tend to believe in gods that are conscious, personal, transcendent beings.  They usually believe this because that’s what their parents taught them.  Once a child has been trained to see the world in a certain way, s/he can find it difficult to see things differently.  Even so, other beliefs can sometimes become more persuasive or appealing.  Christianity is an example of a kind of belief that has superseded the received wisdom of many other religions.

Within a religion or culture, people tend to believe in a larger number of gods than would be absolutely necessary.  In this regard, belief is not like science.  Science emphasizes parsimony.  That is, it strives to weed out extraneous explanations.  If both Theory A and Theory B explain a phenomenon, but Theory A does a better job of it, then scientists tend to discard Theory B.

By contrast, belief is more like life itself.  Life is forever producing surplus kinds and quantities of creatures, and endowing them with endlessly variegated features.  Species of beliefs, like species of plants and animals, are constantly evolving, interbreeding, and otherwise adapting to and altering difficult conditions.  Using Christianity again as an example, the gods include not only Lucifer and other angels, and the immortal saints honored in some denominations, but also the several plainly distinct persons of the Trinity.

In Christianity and other religions, belief is further fragmented — again, like life itself — among countless sects.  Indeed, it is fragmented down to the level of the individual believer, sitting in the pew, who quietly accepts or rejects ministerial pronouncements on a sentence-by-sentence basis.

Incompatible beliefs are a bit like species that could not coexist in precisely the same place and time, but that can persist indefinitely when each has its own distinct niche.  That is, mutually contradictory beliefs can survive for a surprisingly long time within a single believer or belief system.  The trick is just to keep incompatible species or beliefs from coming into direct conflict with one another.  The objective of belief, it seems, is not to achieve logical consistency; it is to populate every rocky outcropping of existence with as many species of belief as it can possibly accommodate.

Organized religions typically try to state precisely which gods exist and what they are all about.  So-called primitive religions are not like that.  They often indulge their relative freedom to invent or detect a variety of gods.  The so-called primitives may actually be ahead of the game here.  If the gods are like the beliefs about them — if they are like life itself — then there probably are quite a few of them, and they probably come in many varieties and behave in all sorts of ways.

In other words, organized religions may suppress what appears to be a natural human tendency to treat gods as any other species, with their own diversities and adaptations.  Christianity and other religions focus attention on a limited number of gods, and place restrictions on how those gods behave.  This activity calls to mind the efforts to channel and dam a mighty river, and the great damage that such unnatural constructions can cause in the long term.

Things might be different if one could prove that Gods A and B exist, but God C does not.  There does not appear to be any such proof, or even the hope of any such proof.  Otherwise, scientists would be hot on the trail.  As it is, a scientist who says s/he is looking for proof for the existence of gods will be laughed out of the room.  They are two different subjects.  Mixing “belief” and “proof” in the same sentence misses the point:  belief in the supernatural perseveres precisely where scientific proof is weak, and science is strong in precisely those areas where belief is defenseless.

People tend to believe, or at least to hope, that there is a supernatural dimension to their existence.  This is a sensible response to the many ways in which science cannot yet, and will probably never be able to, resolve real-life concerns that people encounter.  It is an adaptive response, consistent with the nature of life.  Belief in the supernatural does not seem to be scientifically supported, but that can be construed as a weakness of science, not of the belief.

So we have a standoff:  nobody will be able to disprove the existence of an invisible god living in my shoe; but no matter where it lives, it does not seem to have any power in the real world, except through what people believe about it.

The belief in one god is called monotheism, and the belief in multiple gods is called polytheism.  As just noted, many of the world’s religious tendencies (including those in most of Christianity) are polytheistic.  The question of monotheism or polytheism is not something to fight about, except if one has a vested interest in the doctrines of a particular religion.  There’s no proof, one way or the other; it’s just a matter of beliefs, mostly formed in childhood on the basis of how one was raised, and influenced thereafter by what seems most reasonable.

Some people may conclude that what seems most reasonable is (a) to admit that one cannot know for sure whether there are any gods at all and (b) to suspect that, if there are gods, there are probably a variety of them.  The person who does not profess to know for sure about gods is commonly called an agnostic, so this apparently reasonable position could be called agnostic polytheism.

For various reasons, many people are opposed to the kinds of thoughts expressed here.  Some are afraid of the consequences that could ensue if they were to endorse such thoughts.  They could offend someone by doing so; they could go to Hell; they could feel lost without the familiar guidance of their faith; they could feel foolish for changing their minds about beliefs to which they have devoted so much time, money, hope, or effort.  One particularly important factor, influencing many people to favor an organized religion, is that the religion gives them an authoritative written text that tells them what to think.

A Clear Mind: Spirituality

Many people see the world as a mix of the natural and the supernatural.  Science studies the natural parts — the things that can be studied in the physical universe.  In doing so, science has explained many things that were previously considered supernatural, eliminating much absurdity and damage caused by superstition.  But there are, and probably always will be, many matters that science does not handle so well.  Supernatural beliefs often try to fill in the gaps and to provide some perspective on science.

In such statements, “supernatural” means something above or apart from the natural universe studied by science.  It does not necessarily mean “spiritual.”  People do sometimes speak of a person’s soul or spirit as a supernatural entity, physically located inside or otherwise accompanying him/her through life, and perhaps continuing to exist after physical death.  But in another sense, the spirit of a thing is related to its essence.  Someone who speaks of “the spirit of freedom” is probably referring, not to a ghostly soul, but rather to a political condition.  Spirituality, as many people understand it, involves an awareness of, or attunement to, the essence of life in general, or of human life in particular.

In this sense, spirituality refers to individual or possibly group experience.  As such, it is not necessarily part of a “science vs. the supernatural” kind of discussion.  One person could hate science; another could be an atheist; yet both could have a comparable spiritual experience with a beautiful sunset or a hallucinogenic mushroom.  On the other hand, a person could be religious, in the sense of endorsing or being affiliated with some form of organized religion, and as such might formally adopt supernatural beliefs, and yet have little involvement or interest in spirituality.

As these examples suggest, there are many possibilities.  Very commonly, though, people have both a spiritual orientation, toward some aspects of their experience, and a supernatural orientation, in the sense of believing or at least being open to the possible existence of divine beings.

A Clear Mind: The Supernatural

Science tends to deny paranormal phenomena, searching instead for testable explanations of mysterious events.  Many nonscientists find some scientific accounts unsatisfactory, and instead rely on traditional explanations.  Traditional explanations often have a supernatural component.  For instance, a bad event is often attributed to the Devil, or bad karma, or angry gods.

Science has rendered many traditional explanations less persuasive.  Severe weather is linked to atmospheric conditions or global warming; sudden death is traced to cardiac arrest brought about by a bad diet and lack of exercise, not to the Angel of Death.  The understanding provided by science leads to many precautions that protect people from such developments.

Yet in a larger sense, science has inadvertently made a traditional orientation more appealing.  Nowadays, it’s not just a matter of a nasty thunderstorm signaling God’s wrath.  Over the past half-century, we have recurrently had to face the prospect that much of the human race could be wiped out — by nuclear war, by a pandemic sweeping across all continents in a matter of days, by global environmental collapse.

For the most part, these consummately frightening possibilities have been created and/or enhanced by science itself.  Science could have done a far better job of protecting against such prospects, but that’s not where the money was.  Science tends to be a relatively value-free enterprise, serving the values of the political and economic forces that fund it.   Often, those are values that traditional orientations struggle against.  So now we have a situation where it will be difficult if not impossible for science to put the genie back in the bottle.  It can seem likely that hope must come from a higher source.

Rejecting the supernatural aspects of traditionalism would be easier if science did have comparably appealing perspectives.  It may be true that a landscape will tend to seem beautiful, to the human observer, if it is the kind of place that primitive humans would have found hospitable.  But if that is assumed to be the only reason for its beauty — if, more generally, beauty itself is treated as a self-serving and therefore potentially ugly trait — then many people are going to feel that science is missing something important.

Such an assessment would be supported by some evidence.  Science does not have a good track record where landscapes and beauty are concerned.  For instance, the physical environment of the Americas was in far better condition before European science arrived.  The world feels far richer when the stones, the trees, and the wind have supernatural associations.  Life’s experiences seem more important if one’s individual experiences are believed to be somehow connected to something larger.

A Clear Mind: Science

Many people attribute some human experiences to the realm of the paranormal.  They feel, in other words, that a particular experience — déjà vu, for example, or an instance of unusual psychic ability, or a seeming miracle, or some other exceptional event — is not very well explained by science.

Scientists do not typically favor paranormal beliefs.  They have good reason.  Superstition ruled humanity for thousands of years, with dreadful results:  stupidity, abuse, pain, and death.  Science has achieved things, in the past century or two, that superstition never could have achieved.  A simple experience of dental pain, unaided by modern dentistry, will quickly teach the value of some of those scientific achievements.

Science requires evidence.  Most superstitions fail this requirement.  The scientist sets up the instruments, asks the questions, gathers the data, and then examines the results.  If the faith healer, psychic, or magician cannot produce the claimed paranormal results under test conditions, then the scientist concludes that the paranormal claims are not supported.

That word, “supported,” is important.  Science is cautious about this.  It is not that the study absolutely disproves the claims; it is that this particular study does not provide good reason to believe them.  Of course, if people keep trying to test the claims under various conditions, and keep failing to find evidence in support of such claims, eventually people will tend to conclude that the claims are bogus.

When doing research, it is possible to ask the wrong questions, or to test in the wrong way, or to otherwise design a study poorly.  A good study can succeed where a faulty one fails.  It can take many years to improve upon previous studies, testing a phenomenon in different ways, and achieving different outcomes, before a settled conclusion begins to form.

Scientists tend to be committed to scientific explanations.  For the most part, this is because they believe that good research is why science has achieved so much.  If something odd is happening — with déjà vu, or with the heartrate of a person who has taken a certain medication, or really with pretty much anything — some scientist is apt, sooner or later, to study it.  And with luck and hard work, eventually a better understanding will emerge.

That, however, is not the whole story about science.  Another part of the story is that there are corrupt scientists, and inept scientists, and ideological scientists.  Scientists have biases.  They make assumptions.  Science is still miles ahead of anything else, when it comes to discovery and explanation.  But there have been many times when the learned experts have been terribly wrong.

Not all scientists have the same reaction to claims of paranormal phenomena.  Some consider such phenomena worth investigating.  Others do not.  Instead of displaying an “anything is possible” openness to the evidence, they seem closeminded — convinced in advance, that is, that the person cannot possibly have experienced what s/he claims to have experienced.

Such rigidity can generate a feeling that a potentially important kind of knowledge is being suppressed.  It may also reflect an outdated concept of science.  In the past century, scholars of quantum physics have reached some very odd conclusions and speculations.  For instance, they have proposed that there may be parallel universes, and that an atom can simultaneously spin in two opposite directions; they have devised atomic-level experiments that produce different results, depending on whether anyone is watching.  Because of such illogical outcomes, leading quantum scientists have remarked that the world is weird — that it is not as simple and real as it seems.

Scientists should certainly continue to search for conventional explanations.  For instance, they should continue to test the theory that déjà vu results from mis-synchronization of brain circuits.  Meanwhile, researchers should also be open to the ever-present possibility that something more bizarre is occurring.

So far, in many minds, science has not done a good job of explaining many paranormal phenomena.  Non-scientists often have a greater openness toward the possibility that the universe is not as cut-and-dried as the scientists seem to think.  Lacking superior scientific explanations, people often default to the traditional way of viewing such phenomena; that is, they continue to attribute paranormal events to the supernatural.

A Clear Mind: The Paranormal

Speculations about nonlife are completely beyond our experience.  We simply do not, and apparently will not, know much (if anything at all) about prelife or post-death phenomena.  A few individuals have had experiences that convince them personally.  But for humanity as a whole, we are very far from having solid knowledge that there even is any such thing as conscious existence before birth or after death.

Paranormal phenomena occurring during our lives are a different matter.  Almost everyone has probably had at least one experience that seems rather uncanny if not downright otherworldly.

For example, people sometimes encounter remarkable coincidences.  Something unusual happens at precisely the right or wrong time or place.  These are often explained with the observation that even the most unexpected outcome will occur sometimes, if you provide enough opportunities.  With billions of people having trillions of experiences every week, by sheer coincidence there will be a certain number of bizarre events.  And that — mere coincidence — may well be the explanation in many cases.

But not everyone will be convinced.  Some “coincidences” happen too often, or seem to be informed by an extraordinary kind of knowledge or ability.  For instance, a person might have a disturbingly realistic dream that correctly predicts some future event, or might experience déjà vu in circumstances where he or she could not possibly have known, in advance, precisely what someone was going to say or do next.

It can seem, in such situations, that one is experiencing something with special significance.  These experiences set the stage for a conflict between a belief in the paranormal and the views of science.

A Clear Mind: The Position of Life

There may be a post-death existence, but we have no reliable knowledge of it.  Likewise, there have been claims that some children have memories of previous lives.  Do some or all humans, or other living creatures, have a prelife existence?  We don’t know, though of course we can guess and imagine.

What we know is life, from conception and birth to death.  We don’t know it perfectly; sometimes we don’t know it well at all.  But we know it far, far better than the realm of nonlife beyond those boundaries.  What we have out there is almost entirely guesswork.

We could speculate that, for instance, the prelife-life-postlife sequence is just one of many upstream-downstream sequences that function as exceptions to nonlife, like islands that briefly part the massive river and then are left behind.  Such a speculation might give us something to wonder about.  But if it conflicts with more practical knowledge based on things that we do know from actual experience or other learning in life, it is generally best regarded as a weak and potentially damaging guide.

We probably should not disregard such speculations completely.  To say that we do not know the big picture is not to say that there is no big picture, nor to wall ourselves off from learning any clues we might encounter.  But where there is not very solid proof of a claim about nonlife, we are best advised to proceed carefully and skeptically.  A similar caution seems appropriate when people talk about paranormal phenomena.

A Clear Mind: Life After Death

Death marks the end of life.  Many believe, however, that existence continues in some form after death.  Life, seeking to perpetuate itself everywhere and forever, encourages hope and effort in that direction — to extend life as long as possible, and to try to secure a favorable post-death existence.

Unfortunately, we do not have direct knowledge of any such state.  The closest we can get is, for instance, the occasional report of a person who, at the point of death, claims that he or she saw a bright light or otherwise experienced something from beyond the grave.  This sort of information is very sparse and limited.  Whatever the details of the experience, scientists may now or eventually be able to provide a plausible explanation.  That has happened with many other things that once seemed supernatural.

If, on the other hand, a report of a certain kind of post-death experience does resist scientific explanation, it could lead to many possibilities that are not necessarily what a person might want to believe.  For instance, few people have such experiences; perhaps few will have any post-life existence.  Or the bright light may merely herald the impending death of the soul, coming shortly after physical death.

People often assume that, in a post-death existence, they would appear at their best — not as they were when they died, when the disease or injury that killed them had destroyed their ability to function.  Then again, not everyone wants to reappear in anything like the body they had in this life, which may have been haunted by significant defects from birth.  Even without defects, there is the problem that people consider some bodies more beautiful or functional than others; there is, in other words, a possibility of jealousy and dissatisfaction in heaven.

Some beliefs favor the idea that what survives death is not a physical form, but rather a spirit or consciousness that carries on in some way.  Here, again, there is a problem in those cases where disease or injury to the brain has damaged or destroyed a person’s consciousness.  In some beliefs, horrible people with odd beliefs will fare better than wonderful people with common sense.  It is unclear whether the process would exclude other living creatures that have highly developed brains, or remarkable abilities, or admirable social propensities (e.g., monogamy, loyalty, self-sacrifice).

It is possible to imagine answers to these unknowns, and to other difficulties that people have recognized, as they have thought about various proposals for what might happen in an afterlife.  But the mere ability to guess at possible solutions — even if they did not generate new difficulties — is not the same as finding out the actual situation.  Imagination is not knowledge.

We are living creatures, and as such our knowledge is life-based:  it is limited to what can be seen from inside the box of life.  We have detailed knowledge about many aspects of the transition from life to death — about what causes it, how to avoid it, what death does to the previously living organism, and so forth.  We have no such knowledge beyond the death boundary.  There may be a post-death existence, and there may not.  We simply do not know; and unless our generation is somehow privileged over those that preceded us, during our lifetimes we will not find out.  With or without the insight or confusion provided by non-knowledge beliefs, we have no alternative but to position our lives on the basis of what we do know.

A Clear Mind: Death

Living creatures experience life as a competitive struggle.  Eventually if not immediately, those that fail in this struggle die; and through age or sickness or injury, all living creatures are eventually likely to fail in this struggle.

From the perspective of the living creature, death is the opposite of life.  But from the perspective of life itself, as an ongoing state experienced by a constantly shifting cast of countless creatures, death is more like the alternative to life.  If you do not belong in category A, you are shifted to category B.

Life and death have an arrangement worked out.  Life focuses on keeping those creatures that it can keep.  To do this, it sacrifices those that it cannot.  Where there is not enough food, water, or other essential resources for two, one will die.  Death is life’s partner in allocating the available resources to those creatures that will make the best use of them for purposes of living.  Death for some facilitates life for others.

From this perspective, the real opposite of life is not death; it is barrenness, where there is no death because there is no life.  Death is more like a limit that life constantly strives to push back, so as to keep larger and more numerous living things alive for longer periods of time.  In sporting terms, the difference between death and barrenness is that death is the opposing team, from which life’s team is trying to capture territory on the playing field, while barrenness is the universe outside of the playing field.

Life constantly strives to keep growing beyond all limits.  To extend the analogy, life is the kind of player that wants to change the rules and the boundaries during the game.  In particular, life encourages the belief that death is just a dividing line — that life actually exists on both sides of that line.

A Clear Mind: What Life Is

The purpose of life is to perpetuate life.  Life can be seen as seeking or achieving other things as well, but none are as consistent and integral to life as its focus on perpetuating itself.

No person or thing can achieve all of the things that he, she, or it would like to achieve.  There are always limits.  Life, like everything else, must prioritize.  Some seeds, for instance, fall into cracks where the birds cannot find them, and are blessed with rain and hospitable soil, while others face much more difficult beginnings.  This is the case for people too, as they are born into different nations, cultures, and families.

Life is not very kind to creatures that land in difficult circumstances.  In fact, life tends to be downright ruthless toward them.  The little tree that is struggling to get some sunlight and water is overpowered by the larger or faster-growing sibling.  Life is not any kinder to people who become sick or injured.  Societies, simple or complex, can find themselves unable to carry those who cannot take care of themselves.  Life, left to itself, will tend to eliminate the weak and failing ones.

It might seem that, no, life actually wants people to be healthy; it wants all little seeds to grow up to be big trees.  From the perspective of a single species, this may seem obvious.  But life is not viewing the situation from our limited human perspective.  Life has alternate plans for your blood cells and carbon molecules, if you aren’t going to be using them effectively.  There are all kinds of germs and insects that want to feed upon you, so as to participate in life in their own ways.  Life, dedicated to its own perpetuation, is willing to help them do that.  From the perspective of life, maggots are fantastic.

You and your society can postpone your own transition into insect food.  But even if people figure out a way to eliminate old age and just keep on living, they will still be vulnerable to viruses and injuries.  Life, forever pruning out its own weak spots, will forever await their moment of vulnerability.  Life keeps the winners, and allows the losers to proceed into death.

2120 Hindsight: Drones

Mike Harrity wore a Drone World T-shirt to school today.  I thought the other kids were going to lynch him for sure.  I don’t know why he does this screwy stuff, stuff that he just knows will piss people off.

Or, actually, I guess I probably do know what he’s thinking.  I don’t know him very well, but from some things he’s said, I would be willing to bet that he just wants to get back to the old days, to a simpler world.  I’ve seen him in the Recreator a couple of times, sinking into the data from some past community of 50 or 100 years ago.  He’s kind of a simpleminded guy, too much lead in the brain or something.  Put on the T-shirt, get into the Recreator, go back to a world when people thought drones were cool.

I know there were people who used to feel that way.  I’ve been in the Recreator a time or two myself.  People were so incredibly naive about drones.  “Hey, let’s build a cool mini-airplane that will fly around and spy on people, drop bombs on them.”  Yeah, and then what happens when the offshore Chinese wizards micronize them and sell them around the world?  Well, of course, bad guys get them.  Oh.  We didn’t think of that.

My parents told me that Grandma and Grandpa lived for years, when they were kids, being afraid to move, never knowing whose microdrones might be watching.  It only took one wrong move for some crazy person to decide that someone was a threat and must be eliminated.  And then the drone would fly, dose them, and they’d be gone.  It’s a miracle anyone survived those years.  No, not a miracle.  It’s a testament to the power of raw fear.

Needed: What They Think of You

It would be helpful to have a webpage on which you could invite others to say what they consider your strengths to be.  Not weaknesses, directly, since some people would hesitate to criticize friends and others might overdo the criticism.  A carefully selected set of choices among strengths might do a better job.  A fairly good picture might emerge from 50 or 100 questions in the form of “Which of these better describes Ray?”  Sample pairings could include quick/cautious, articulate/listening, and stable/flexible.

You could categorize the people whom you invite to share their reactions.  Possible categories include friends, acquaintances, romantic partners, and business associates.  You could allow selected individuals (e.g., potential employers) to view selected results (e.g., reports from verified business associates, perhaps matched by email address to your list of professional references) by using a temporary password.

Results of the questions could be analyzed automatically by a program like the ones that some online dating sites use, where they leverage your answers to various questions into a whole presentation of who you are.  It would be possible for vendors to compete for the opportunity to provide such interpretations.  For instance, it may develop that you think (or have heard) that Company 1 does an especially good job of interpreting these data, so you might subscribe to Company 1 to interpret data from your “What do they think of me?” website.

You could actually use your “What do they think of me?” website as a source of input from specific groups, or on specific topics.  For instance, for a fee, you might give ten randomly selected individuals a temporary pass with which to view your Facebook page, or your personal webpage, and then indicate what kind of person you seem to be.  You could ask your friends, or random strangers, or selected knowledgeable individuals, to provide an appraisal of something you’ve written, or of a video you’ve posted, perhaps showing your performance in some kind of activity.

In short, this webpage could be a sort of Facebook, oriented not toward pleasant social interactions with friends but, rather, toward the serious side of your interactions with a wide variety of people in your world.

A Clear Mind: The Purpose of Life

The purpose of life is to perpetuate life.  That may not seem like much of a purpose, and in fact it’s not.  But that’s what life is ultimately about.

Living things are largely preoccupied with getting food, water, shelter, sex, sleep, love, friendship, happiness, and everything else that goes into a long, rewarding, successful existence.

Living things most commonly want these things for themselves, but to varying degrees they also want such things for their offspring or others.  They may love their children, or other living things, to such an extent that they will sacrifice their own interests, and even their own lives, to perpetuate the lives of those other creatures.  Overwhelmingly, though, the mission remains the same:  in one way or another, to perpetuate life.

This simple purpose has some implications for what life is like.

Needed: Permatrivia Website

I have some miscellaneous stuff.  Maybe someone would want it.  But how can I connect with them?  I’m not in a situation where I can hold a yard sale – nor would I, for this junk.  On a larger scale, there are endless landfills containing unknown mixtures of useless, recyclable, and perfectly good items, slowly deteriorating, or perhaps not.

What’s needed is a distribution network through which this stuff can find a home.  This network would begin with data entry equipment (basic computer, UPC scanner, camera) at the landfill site, made available to people depositing stuff and/or to urchins who make their living (especially but not only in developing nations) picking through it in search of treasures.  The equipment would probably function best in concert with software that would simplify the categorization process, so that the urchin would not have to spend the time to identify each item manually, but could instead focus on digging out and scanning relevant items.

Items of potential worth would then be placed into a transportation system.  To maximize the payoff for identifying and redeeming useful items, this transportation system would probably function somewhat slowly and haphazardly, though it might make use of empty dumping vehicles that normally deadhead back to their origins after dropping a load at the landfill.

The use of color-coded or SKU-tagged plastic crates or other devices may simplify the process of moving items with some value to the next stop, and sorting them there.  That next stop could be a mere field or empty lot, though these days in some places there are empty warehouses and other industrial and commercial buildings that, at least until their purchase or other repurposing, might produce a trickle of income, not only to their owners, but also to any other urchins who might wish to sort, stack, or otherwise arrange those crates, incoming from the landfill, for their eventual distribution to clearing warehouses in destination cities.

Each step in the redemption process — the discovery of the item, its placement into transit, its sorting, and so forth — could supply tiny (or, in the case of the occasional more valauable discovery, not so tiny) amounts of income to these various participants.

The concept of the Permatrivia website is that, as long as there are fields, plastic boxes, warehouses, or other places to store things, it is conceivable that some use may eventually be found, in one place or another, for many items that now wind up in landfills, provided they can be identified at sufficiently low cost and rescued before they are damaged or decayed.

The trash collection process itself admittedly damages and crushes many potentially useful items.  People save a tiny fraction of that stuff by sending it to nonprofits (e.g., Goodwill Industries, Salvation Army).  Except for voluntary drop-off efforts, reaching into the garbage collection process would be a much more ambitious matter.  The concept expressed here is essentially that it makes more sense to preserve something, as long as it has potential value, than to ruin it and then use it to pollute the landscape.

Needed: More Useless Projects

Uselessness has no place in our economy.  And that is why our economy has begun to have less of a place in our lives.

Globally, the economy has become so tremendously efficient that it hardly even needs people anymore. First, it converted American jobs into foreign jobs; then it started converting foreign jobs into robot jobs.  So employees, per se, have become less central to the U.S. economy – and they have come to accept this about themselves.  Consumers, too, have been downscaled.  Through remarkably efficient processes, the economy has been converting their borrowing ability into liquid assets and moving those funds into the bank accounts of well-positioned individuals.

People are important, in the economy, to the extent that they contribute to the bottom line.  The purpose of business activity is to generate and accumulate wealth in the hands of its most successful practitioners.  Persons who do not contribute to this effort – indeed, many who do contribute, albeit not efficiently enough – are discarded.

It is always nice when some of the resulting wealth trickles down, but that is never the central purpose or effect of such processes.  To the contrary, the disparities between the best- and worst-compensated employees in America have ballooned in recent decades, even as many workplaces retain their notoriously unpleasant and dysfunctional ambiance.

To be sure, the most sought-after employees often encounter workplace opportunities, respect, compensation, and conditions that make their jobs personally rewarding.  For vast numbers of people, however – numbers that no politician could ignore, if the political aspects of the matter were openly acknowledged – this is not the case.  Very commonly, people do not want to be at work.  They want to be somewhere else – with their families, perhaps, or playing video games, or outdoors having fun.

It is possible to interpret that as a mere desire to waste time.  But do people really have an inborn inclination to fritter their lives away?  What seems much more common is that people have a sense of where they are needed and wanted, and they respond positively to that.  Their families need them; their friends appreciate them. If they spend too much time watching TV or obsessing over romance, sex, marriage, affairs, and divorce, perhaps it’s because this is how they cope with difficulties in life – in which case the most productive focus would be upon the causes, not these symptoms.

In any event, such pastimes – partying, family life, sex – are not the only ways in which people choose to spend their time.  They also engage in productive, non-market activity for the sheer pleasure of it – for, among other things, that same belief that what they are doing will be appreciated.  People who might be capable of staying stoned all day instead find themselves quilting, studying Arabic, and puttering around in their gardens and garages.  Their travels reinforce their senses of spiritual and social participation in a grand country and a remarkable planet; their hobbies teach them bits of history or computer science or botany.  If there is something they need or want to learn or create, they learn or create it.

It would be one thing if the market economy were consistently excellent at putting people to work in the most efficient manner on the most badly needed tasks.  Plainly, it is not.  The market economy converts corn to fuel for automobiles while people starve to death.  It pays a pittance to teach children, while rewarding people who circumvent import-export restrictions in order to sell materials of addiction and butchery.  The market economy gives us plastic surgeons when we are short of family practitioners; it gives us ruinous divorce proceedings when innocent people can’t afford a lawyer to keep them out of prison.

One of the market’s strengths is its adaptability.  If someone needs something and is willing to pay for it, it will be provided, sooner or later.  Then again, adaptability implies the absence of a plan.  Adaptability, always a virtue, tends to be less absolutely essential when one can see ahead and plan accordingly.

The plan has always been somewhat unclear, in the world’s growth-and-development game.  For instance, apparently it’s going to be a while until all of the people in India have had a chance to become properly useless in middle- or upper-middle-class terms.  Indeed, it now looks like the mechanized agriculture needed to feed them may take many of them directly from being dirt-poor (in an American pioneer sort of way) to being dirt-poor (in an unemployed, postindustrial style), without any intervening century of farmsteads, burger joints, used car lots, and AM radio waves across the distance.  They say that India is leapfrogging the U.S. in some aspects of development, and I believe it.

But while the world has been building all this tremendous productivity, there have always been the nonconformists who have been unwilling and/or unable to play central roles in it.  Some have been too conservative to take the risks; some have been too liberal to consider the risks interesting enough to take.  Back in the 1970s, for instance, instead of spending their time wheeling and dealing, these kinds of people were tucking the kids into bed at night, tinkering in their garages, and studying abstruse subjects like Gaelic and Chinese.

The funny thing about those kids being tucked into bed is that many of them turned out really well.  Some of those silly garage tinkerers invented essential ingredients of the personal computer.  And some dabblers in the Chinese language wound up on the boat with Richard Nixon, as he set sail in search of a new route around the Soviet Union.

Normally, there’s not much call for tinkerers, dabblers, and others who follow their own inner compass instead of doing what “everyone knows” is appropriate or rewarding.  We refer to these oddballs as, well, oddballs – as eccentrics or hobbyists.  But then, suddenly, normal times end, and now they are oddballs no more.  The planes hit the World Trade Center, and instantly the oddballs who studied in Arabic language and culture become “linguists” and “specialists.”  It took them years to be prepared for such a moment.  What if they been sensible and had gone to business school instead?

To take another example, the economy melts down and we are suddenly scratching our heads and wondering how we could ever have bought in, collectively, into a scheme so egregiously abstracted from realities. We were too busy laughing at the pessimists.  They were “iconoclasts” and “Cassandras.” Now, suddenly, they are “foresightful” and “visionary.”

Savvy traders are fond of saying that you should buy low, sell high.  When everyone else is getting on the wagon, it’s time to get off.  But if the traders had been really good at following their own advice, a lot of them would have made very different and less orthodox personal and financial decisions, in the months and years leading up to autumn 2008.

Getting off the overly crowded wagon can mean that, when everybody knows you should go to college and study engineering or dentistry, perhaps you shouldn’t go to college at all, or at least not in the usual or expected time, manner, or place.  Maybe it means planting barley instead of corn; maybe it means thinking twice about how to build a nest egg, or whether to build one at all.  Maybe it means that, as you follow the accepted wisdom, you find yourself persistently chasing the wrong kind of romantic partner or, heaven forbid, the wrong kind of religion.

If the purpose of life is to be successful and right in almost everything, then most of us have no purpose – and, in fact, we can’t stand those who are.  Creativity and learning are not about looking good or impressing people.  When you dare not explore or experiment because you will be criticized for failing – when it becomes wrong to fail, or to be off-track or out of sync – then normalcy is approaching the peak of its own self-destructive cycle.  At that point, the people steering the wagon may be the least inquisitive, the least creative, the least tolerant of heterodox or critical thinking.  And then it really is wise to get off.

There are things that you and I need to do with our lives.  Every now and then, we become aware of such things.  We can suppress them.  In the interests of conformity, we often do suppress them.  Thus we train ourselves to be more focused on dreams and abstractions, shared by the supportive group, than upon the realities staring us right in the face.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “I have a dream.”   And that was true, in one sense.  But in a larger sense, what he had was a reality.  A dream can be any crazy thing.  Dreams are typically not sources of solid guidance.  But King’s reality resonated with the masses.  He had an understanding of how society could be better, and he was inviting people to help him create it. As George Bernard Shaw put it, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”  In King’s case, one person’s unorthodox perception turned out to be what millions wanted.

Nowadays, millions of people want to be useful.  They want to be wanted and needed.  They are looking to employers for that.  But this is not the purpose of traditional employment.  The purpose of traditional employment is to make money for the people who own and run businesses.  When employers can make more money by shifting their processes to low-income workers in India and, ultimately, to robots, they do.

It is no longer reasonable – in fact, it has been unreasonable for a long time – to treat traditional employment as the source of one’s meaning and purpose.  Your meaning and purpose come from who you are and what you do.  As you become more confident in yourself, you may become more aware of what is unique in your experience and perspective.  Nobody else can fill your shoes.  There are problems (usually little, but sometimes big) that only you can see.  There are things that need to be done, that only you can do.

The world would be a much simpler place if the Wright brothers had paid attention to simple wisdom:  if God intended man to fly, he would have given him wings.

Needed: Swiss Gold Standard for Good Government

Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf says, “Africa is not poor.  It is poorly managed.”  A rich country like the U.S. could, in theory, go in and set up systems and guidelines for good government.  But the credibility of the U.S. has been strained, and the American experience in Iraq has eroded the desire and trust in American nation-building efforts.

This is not the case with Switzerland.  That country could lend its imprimatur to a world-class set of best practices in nation-building, implemented by Swiss-trained administrators overseeing qualified multinational employees within a Halliburton of the nonprofit world.  Start small, by setting achievable goals to upgrade the capabilities of a nation that has some prospect of succeeding (e.g., Ghana); build experience and reputation; develop contacts and resources; and in a few years, move on to a slightly bigger challenge.  Within two or three decades, this organization could have a half-dozen success stories under its belt, and may have had an outsized impact upon the goals and processes that shape new and struggling nations.

Exercise: Big Wheel Skate and Scooter Options

I needed to find a new form of exercise.  Biking was good, but I really liked running across fields and on trails through the woods.  But I had a sore heel, probably from running too many long distances.  I’d also had some minor knee problems.  I wondered if there was some other way of getting an experience like running, but without the impact.  I had previously been a skater, and I wondered whether there were skates that would do the trick.

A search led me to a thread that led to a lot of ideas and possibilities.  First, I saw there were skates with oversized (e.g., 90mm, 100mm) wheels.  A search for the latest and greatest of these led to shopping results indicating that four-wheeled 100mm inline skates were currently going for around US$250 new.  (PowerSlides could be more.)  It sounded like skating with those skates would be a little different from what I had been used to, though I believed that the bigger wheels might make for a smoother ride.  Even with those larger wheels, though, it seemed pretty clear that these were not for any serious off-road use.

The LandRoller seemed to be a potential improvement on mobility, in that its larger wheels looked like they would work on at least some hardpacked dirt and grass. They definitely did not seem to be the answer for real cross-country mobility. AllTerraSkates and maybe some others offered the possibility of more radical big-wheel offroad skate designs, but after spending 10-15 minutes trying to get information out of several screwy webpages, I put that inquiry on hold for the moment.  Possibly the most impressive skate solutions I saw were from Skorpion.  These were four-wheel parallel (i.e., not inline) multi-terrain skates, with shock absorbers, that could attach directly to your shoes, if your feet weren’t as big as mine.  A pair would cost only about $140.  They still were going to be limited to hardpack, though.

With skates, there was always the problem of braking.  It was possible to drag the skate (also called powersliding) or to lean back onto a rear brake pad, if the skate had one, but neither of those options would be of much use if I was cruising along a dirt trail and suddenly came to a sharp drop.  I’d had my share of dangerous high-speed open-road skate brakeless adventures.  One alternative would be a Razor scooter, where you could just jump off if things got dicey.  I wasn’t sure whether pushing a scooter would stress the knee; presumably not the heel.  Just in case, I found what looked like some off-road scooters, also called microscooters, so that was one possibility, if I could accept exerting only one leg at a time.

The scooter concept led toward devices that were like cross-country skis on wheels, such as Rollerskis.  While these, like the skates above, would work on a dirt road, their wheels looked too small for offroad work, though.  For braking, they were recommending either snowplowing or speed reducers.  The latter would apparently reduce speed at all times, not just when going downhill.  The main purpose of these seemed to be to give people a ski-like experience on the road.

A Victorian Gamer webpage led more toward what I seemed to be looking for.  It showed a drawing of the Pedespeed.  These were basically a single wheel that, as shown in a video, the user would attach to foot and calf, one wheel per leg.  A search for what some were calling the Pedespeed Uni-Skate (or, as in another video, for Diagonal Centripetal Rotation Cycles) led to the snazzy and expensive-looking (not yet available) Chariot Skates.  Their video showed that these very big (bicycle-size) wheels would roll over all sorts of stuff, potentially at a hellacious speed.  Single or two-leg powersliding (i.e., T-stopping) was a braking option, but it seemed tire wear could get expensive, and you might also set your wheels out of alignment.  Slaloming would be one speed-reducing possibility, space permitting.  Another video suggested using the gloved hand on the wheel for braking.  They said they had experimented with handbrakes but ran into difficulties.  Uphilling on rough terrain seemed to require herringbone (i.e., duck) stepping, each foot pointed outward to prevent backrolling.  A webpage with close-up pictures suggested you’d likely get some chafing on your calf from the strap there.  Not having tried them on, my thought was that one or more additional straps might help to alleviate that.

I noticed that some big-wheel skate and Rollerski users were using ski poles.  It seemed possible that a sufficiently lightweight kind of skate, with poles, would provide some mobility options in difficult terrain — that you could lean on your poles to get your feet over obstacles.  Poles would also provide a place for mounting handbrakes.  But unless the brakes used wireless connectors, which could be expensive, the cables would pose a risk of getting tangled in things, though perhaps snap-disconnects would mitigate that problem.  Another option would be electrical brakes mounted in the hubs rather than on calipers, as some utility trailers use.  Brakes could theoretically be triggered automatically, as some trailer brakes are, if the poles or the skates themselves detected that the user was exceeding potentially pre-programmed tolerances for shifts in angle, balance, acceleration, or erraticity (e.g., flailing).  Handheld non-pole grips could do the same thing, but without the advantages of poles.  Uphilling would be easier if you could lock the brakes.

The Chariot Skate wheels looked pretty thin for real offroading.  Optional mountain wheels might be heavy but, if not, could be useful.  Replacing one large wheel (plus the tiny trailing one) with two smaller wheels connected by a cross-country ski binding could reduce weight, but at least the front one would have to be pivoting, like a bike’s steerable front wheel or the front wheels on grocery carts.  Having ridden a few grocery carts on high-speed downhill runs, I wondered whether it would be possible to combine skates on the feet with a leanable two-wheeled device out front, somewhat emulating a Segway – if, in other words, the user could lean on something like a hand-truck, perhaps tethered or more rigidly connected to the skates (like on a scooter), that would provide forward balance like a KickStrike Scooter (conceivably, locomotion, as in those hand-pump railroad conveyances) as well as braking options.  Such an arrangement could also provide some space for cargo.  Of course, if money were no object, electric motors in the hubs, as on some bikes now, could also be welcome for uphilling, though presumably there would be a weight issue.

After viewing these possibilities, I went back to the offroad scooters.  An ordinary little Razor would have serious problems offroad.  I was interested in the much more bikelike homemade scooter I saw in one video.  It seemed that pushing such a device uphill and shoving through assorted terrain could provide more of an upper-body workout than running or skating (at least without poles) would deliver.  I might quickly get tired of that, but at the moment it seemed like a viable possibility.  A review of images of what I was looking for led through a variety of wacky possibilities, including four-wheel mountain bikes and the StairCycle and various tourist options for riding fat-tired scooters down mountainsides in Austria and the Czech Republic.

Closer to the mark, I found ads for the Mibo Dextro (only €750), the Kickbike Cross Max (€419), and the Concept No Fear Scooter (currently unavailable).  $1K for a scooter?  Anyway, these were all in Europe.  A search in Amazon (US) made me wonder whether the American name for a scooter might be “kickbike” or “footbike.”  A Google search for those terms suggested that these were probably brand names.  A search at Walmart seemed to indicate that “scooter” was the right term after all, and also that, in the US, scooters were mostly for kids.  The Footbike (US) website presented several models, notably a Footbike Express ($138) for “smaller customers” and a Footbike Trail ($430) with the an alloy frame.  Kickbike‘s offerings (available at Sears) included the Sport G4 (€349), the Cross Max (€419), and the Sport Max (€419).  Mogo Scooter, another name that turned up, was available at Amazon (in apparently only one model) for only $165, but with mediocre quality, poor packaging, and lots of damage in shipping, judging from customer reviews.  An eBay search turned up one other brand name, Toucan, which offered several models (apparently only through Canadian and European retailers) for up to $260 (for the large model I would probably get).

At this point, I seemed to have explored some of the most likely quasi-running alternatives to running exercise.  From those reviews and elsewhere, it did sound like a scooter would be a good workout.  I would be limited on the kinds of trails I could travel:  it would be a hassle, as distinct from a good workout, to get a scooter up sharp climbs or through tangled woods.  I could imagine it being more pleasant than a bike on some trails:  biking would take me through some terrain too quickly and easily; the experience was too different from walking.  This would provide a way to get around town too, though apparently some of these models did not provide a kickstand or a good place for cabling to a post or bike rack when going indoors.  I had gotten into trouble from speed and from bad motorists when biking — getting hit, driven off the road, etc. – and in that sense this might be better; bikes did not seem as conducive to just getting off and walking in a tight spot.  Biking, for me, called for dedicated bike trails or at least safe bike lanes, and those were hard to find.  Storing yet another large device, in addition to the bike, was not ideal; in this sense skates were a better solution.  Spending $350+ was not what I had originally intended.

In my search for an alternative to running that would still enable me to engage the same kinds of terrain, I was thus tending away from skates, of which even the most rasty (with the possible exception of a mountain Chariot) would still be limited to trails and which tended to have braking issues and therefore real risks of impact and/or twisting injury to leg and elbow joints.  Biking wasn’t out of the picture, but it was limiting too.  I wondered whether it would be OK to use a scooter on trails where bikes were unwanted.  I figured a scooter would probably be more mobile than a bike on soft dirt, since I would apparently (not yet having used one) have the option of just pushing it along while I ran beside it, without having a pedal to hit me in the shin.  It seemed possible that using a scooter would be more conducive to stopping for calisthenics, which I was never able to persuade myself to do when running or biking because I was always trying to get somewhere.  I was not sure whether a scooter would provide really solid exercise, given the option of climbing onboard and riding; then again, I had seen research indicating that interval training was at least as good as continual training; maybe I would work harder in those bursts between rides, especially if it was fun.  I decided to look around and see if I could find a used scooter that I liked, just to try it out.

I’m Not Staying Long Enough in This Midpart

I’m not staying long enough in this midpart.  I’m at a place in years where friends have kids and they have kids in turn.  It’s not clear when this started, exactly.  I became aware of it only recently.  It’s a nice thing – rather remarkable, actually, to hear the name of Nancy Frumpkin, and to wonder whether this would be a daughter – but then, no, that can’t be right, must be a granddaughter – of my classmate Andy Frumpkin.  Had no idea she existed.  But, well, since she’s here – and a teenager already, to boot! – by all means, welcome.

But I’m afraid I won’t be staying long enough in this midpart, this clearinghouse where people of various generations are visible in both directions, a generation or two (or three) from me:  some checking in, some checking out.  I’m at the top of a hill.  It’s downhill back behind me, but also downhill ahead.  And, honestly, it’s a hellacious road, both directions.  It certainly hasn’t been a straight shot to the top, from where I started to where I am now.  Not at all.  It’s been winding and nasty, and we’ve lost some along the way – Rodney, and Kevin, and Dwight, and probably a whole assortment of others I won’t hear about until the next reunion of some class or family or whatnot, careening off the edge of the road, or their engines failing, or maybe just flat run out of gas, but for whatever reason not making it this far, abandoned back there in places I missed as I shot on past, or anyway won’t be returning to.

I’d actually prefer to stay a bit longer in this midpart, but the vehicle has momentum and it’s plain we’re going to be rolling down the other side soon now.  And those who have stopped out back there, behind me, aren’t a fraction of the many who went on ahead.  Mom and Dad, I can see, got a good long roll out of it – I can’t yet quite identify what kind of place it was, where they ended up, but I know it’s up ahead somewhere.  Or I guess I should say “down ahead,” down in the twists of that road, narrow and gravelly in spots, winding down from this hilltop into trees and swamps I haven’t seen yet.  And David, Louanne, Walt and Pete – really, no end to the numbers of them, fantastic people in their own time, all heading onwards where the road led:  sometimes letting it roll, sometimes hanging on desperately as they plummeted into tight curves, sometimes just stalling out, down there in spots that I, myself, may or may not reach.

It’s just so funny, to go so quickly from struggling to keep up the forward motion.  It was such a hard slog to get here, such a tremendous push just to keep moving; but now, as I face a prospect that things will be speeding up all on their own, I’m suddenly wanting to drag on the brakes, pull off to the side for a while.  Wish I could.  I don’t find it a sad height.  This midpart seems to be a brief scenic overlook, easy to miss.  We’re all tourists in the Smokies, climbing, turning, climbing, rounding a bend among the endless trees – and then suddenly there’s an opening, the clouds part, everybody in the car gasps but, damn, we’re already past the turnoff.  Oh, well, it was pretty spectacular, there for a moment, being at the top of this part of the world, seeing it all, or at least an awful lot of it.

Not that there’s just the one turnoff and that’s it.  There’s the one, and then the next, some higher and some lower, some wrapped in clouds or obscured by shrubbery.  Without quite knowing it, you find you’re already partway down, by the time you finally do make up your mind to definitely turn off, stretch your legs, and take a look.  A younger person, on their way up, could have told you that you were already past the peak; but the young don’t come up that side, so you pretty much had to guess and wing it.  So then, yep, looks like we’re a bit post-climax after all.  Oh, well.

And then, I suspect, it’s on you.  In a heartbeat, you go from being on a slight roll, gathering speed as you head downwards, to being completely out of control, lurching into the ditch and then flipping ass over applecart.  And that will be the end of you.  Because what starts to happen, here in the midpart, is crisis and upheaval, death and devastation, really no end to the variations on the theme we’ve been hearing all along.  Same tune but, ah, now we’re a bit more vulnerable.  Now, by God, we’re really listening.  The broken bone or emotional wound that would have slowed us down for a few weeks, back then, is full ready to provoke a real blowout, and then there we go, careening over the brink.  This is supposed to be an era, a long slow phase of pleasurable existence.  And for some it is.  Some manage their approach speed, somehow; they drift up here for a good spell.  But even for them, this stage has all the makings of sudden-death exposure to every stray virus and random accident.  One little skin blemish that turns out to be melanoma, the accrued payback for all those decades in the sun; one slip on one banana peel and a fall onto the wrong hip.  One overlooked clause in the health insurance policy; one virus that would hardly have fazed a younger person; one screwup at the pharmacy.  It just takes one – of something, unpredictable – and suddenly we’re viewing the precipice from a completely unacceptable angle.

I, personally, won’t be staying long in this midpart.  I’m not sure why not, but I sense that’s so.  Thinking back, I can’t even say for sure whether I was always roaring on too fast, or was actually just idling up the hill, poking along far behind most others.  It seems like it was both ways at once, though of course that’s impossible.  Well, whatever.  Here I am, and not for long.  Worry itself seems to accelerate the downward pace, or to make the drop seem more precipitous – and yet who can help but worry?  But maybe that’s the trick.  Maybe I’m supposed to always remember that I am a tourist.  It’s not just any road, this one; it’s the road to the top.  It’s the one I chose, intending to get to precisely this point, wherever it is precisely that I really am.  Now, of all times, is when I should be most earnestly looking off to the left and right, seeing what I came here to see.  That sounds like a half-assed way to drive, but the best tourists do it, and survive; and perhaps I shall too, at least for a while.

The Real Osama bin Laden Question: What Changed?

I’m seeing all these editorials asking how we can consider Pakistan an ally when it allowed Osama bin Laden to live in a place where it surely knew of his presence, just a few blocks from a Pakistani military base.  These editorials seem to be focusing on a relatively trivial matter.  Yes, Pakistan is complicated.  Yes, American relations with various factions in Pakistan can be complex and even contradictory.

But the real question is, what changed?  Given that Pakistan has been harboring this terrorist for some time – that it was surely aware of the creation of bin Laden’s bunker – why did his whereabouts suddenly become not merely known to the Americans, but vulnerable?  Suddenly, the U.S. found out where bin Laden was (assuming some American spies had not been aware of the location for some time).  Suddenly, in any event, U.S. troops were able to fly into that bunker without interference from Pakistani forces.  How come?

I don’t have the answer.  Maybe bin Laden pissed off the wrong person.  Maybe his previous protectors, in Pakistan, were removed or overruled.  Maybe the Pakistani elite decided that the Arab Spring uprisings could come to Pakistan; maybe they felt that someone like bin Laden would not be someone they would want to become influential in that sort of development.  I don’t know.

Quietly shooting bin Laden could have drawn Pakistani attention to the Pakistani citizens who would have authorized and committed that act.  There could have been repercussions against Pakistan, or against those particular individuals.  Instead, it could be more convenient to feed him to the Americans, barking and snarling to get at him.  As so often happens in life, it’s easier to blame it on the dog.

Contrarian Position: The U.S. Should Police the World

This is not an earnest, carefully researched piece.  If you want that, go to my other blog.  The purpose of this blog is to entertain ideas.  Within this blog, the purpose of the Contrarian Position series is to entertain contrarian ideas.

The idea in focus today is the idea that the U.S. should not police the world.  Since everybody seems to agree on it, there’s a reasonable chance that it will eventually be considered completely idiotic.  In ideas, buy low, sell high.  Don’t buy everything; but after shopping carefully, choose well, and then wait for developments.  It may take a couple of centuries, but eventually everyone will agree, at least for a while, that you were right.  (This, too, is a contrarian argument.)

Why should the U.S. police the world?  First reason:  it’s cheaper than the alternative.  Take a hundred cruise missiles, each costing several million to build, ship, set up, and launch, and you could be paying for a lot of policing.  A few machine guns here, a few Special Forces teams there, and you could exert a great deal of low-pressure, long-term influence.  It’s expensive to send in the cavalry.  Send in the social workers and the cops instead – years ahead of the actual crisis.  Expand the Peace Corps, for heaven’s sake; it’s dirt-cheap.  Build libraries.  You get the idea.

Second reason:  things can always get worse.  It costs money to police the world.  Ah, but everything costs money.  If we don’t invest in ideals of good government in your random hopeless nation now, we can always wait until they build nukes or sign trade agreements with China for – what’s this? – a bazillion dollars’ worth of some essential element that nobody knew was there.  Oops.  Now, instead of spending a few million here and there, helping them out in small ways over the long haul, we can pay through the nose on our fix du jour.

There’s probably more reasons, but I’ve finished dinner, so that’s all I have to say on that.

Needed: A New People’s Car

For many people in the world, cars are too large and expensive to buy, repair, maintain, and operate.  The notion of one large, complicated device that is completely out of the owner’s hands — that arrives as a single package and must be replaced as such — seems terribly rigid and old-fashioned.

Instead, there should be a seamless upgrade path.  A person can start with a moped, swap out the engine and other parts, and advance to a motorcycle.  Swap out the rear end and have a trike.  Replace the front end to make it a dune buggy.  Add a cowl to have a mini-car.  Upgrade to an electric motor to have a Smart Car.  Extend the frame to have a sedan.  Replace a rear body section to make it a truck.

It’s not so much that every random person would have the tools and ability to do all this replacing.  But with good engineering, it wouldn’t have to be hard or expensive for a local mechanic to do so.  As cities condense inward from suburbs, this may be all the transportation that many people need.

The concept can be developed.  There could be an aftermarket for customized parts (e.g., fancy colors, additional features) that bolt in or snap on at the same connection points as the stock upgrades from the manufacturer:  different motors, longer frame extensions, etc.  Flexibility of attachment would foster ideas.  For instance, front and rear passenger seats might be contained in a removable module that could be replaced with a sleeper attachment for long drives, lowered and hooked up from the ceiling of one’s garage or rented from U-Haul.  Replace the mini-camper with a tank to make it a water hauler, for agriculturally inclined individuals or amateur firefighters.  Replace the water tank with a mini-kitchen, for people who want to sell or serve food without having to manhandle a pushcart.  Replace the kitchen with a traveling office.  Install a hitch and computerized following software to form a train of such vehicles, towed behind a train-like engine unit with redundant engineers, so that just one or two drivers can shepherd a dozen of them across the desert while everybody else sleeps.

A car can do many things.  Present notions of the automobile are far too constricting.  Here’s hoping that someone takes a cue from the personal computer and begins to enable the public, starting with hobbyists, to expand and customize concepts of meaningful transportation.

Needed: Google Unique Search

I am looking for the various kinds of multiple desktop software that might exist.  I do a search.  I do another search.  Every time I do a search, I see different products.  I step back a level and try to find reviews or comparisons that show what products are out there.   This helps, but now I am relying on what is sometimes a completely misinformed or irrelevant concept of what counts as a multiple desktop program, or of how well various programs perform.

What I’d prefer is a Google search that, in the first level of analysis, gives me the whole shmeer, with perhaps a visual option depicting various ways in which these many search results could be categorized.  In response to my click in one direction or another, the search engine would have a sense of what I was trying to distinguish.  Within a couple of degrees of Kevin Bacon, the thing might be able to figure out that I’d really just like to see one or two of the most frequently visited webpages on Dexpot, and one or two on VirtuaWin, and so forth.  So maybe then, in the top 20 hits, I would have a smorgasbord of links to the different kinds of multiple desktop programs that exist.

Needed: gScholar

Sent this to Google today:

Could you provide a permanent location for scholarly papers? Journals are not keeping up: it can take two years to publish cutting-edge insights. Scenario: I write my manuscript; I post it on gScholar; I send the link to the editors of a journal. They vet it. If they don’t like it, I send it to another journal; it remains visible only to me and those whom I designate as readers. Ideally I would be reminded that sharing with more than one journal at a time may compromise its publishability. If they like it, they let me know and send me the posting URL for their electronic version. I designate that as the URL where my article will be published. Using that URL, they embed my article on their website once they and I have agreed on its final format. Once they embed it, the link becomes permanent; I lose control of it as long as their website or its designated successor remains viable. This outlet allows them to e-publish supplements containing as many articles as they wish. Conceivably, their paper version becomes a memorialization of their most downloaded articles from the past three months. Just like that, the pace of scientific discovery quickens immeasurably.

Needed: Superheroes Club & Council of Elders

I started to write this up and realized there were two separate ideas.  The first idea was that the world needs a relatively informal but real institution, a superstar team or council of elders, limited to maybe a dozen truly standout people.  Like maybe the Nobel Peace Prize would count as one of the bases for nomination.  The people I had in mind were those like Mandela or Gorbachev — or, to take some American examples of people who have changed the world without necessarily being unanimously beloved at home, Gore or Reagan or Carter.  Perhaps the team would choose its own replacements, as members retired or died.  A paramount criterion for membership would be the ability to make a profound impact on significant world problems, by dint of international political (as distinct from e.g., financial) influence.  The superstar team would serve the purpose of giving the Schwarzeneggers and Blairs and Merkels of the world an answer to the question:  what else is there, after this?  It would do so by combining their influence in a relatively visionary direction — no longer, What will get me re-elected? but rather, Where should the world be heading?

The other idea is the Superheroes Club.  That was the term I first had in mind, as I was thinking about that Council of Elders.  But then I realized that, no, a Superheroes Club, in true comic-book fashion, would have to consist of people who bring markedly different powers to the mix.  So there might be some politicians, but then there might also be financiers, actors, inventors, and so forth.  A panel of this sort, from earlier times, might have included Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, J.P. Morgan, Mohandas Gandhi, and Pablo Picasso. More recently, and stretching on into the future, one can imagine nominations ranging from John Lennon to Bono to Bill Gates to Lady Gaga.  A club of this sort, again limited to perhaps a dozen members, would likewise be oriented toward making an impact on world problems, but by dint of its relative youth (and, perhaps, its imagination) might be more flashy, flexible — you might say child-oriented, in the sense of providing role models for all sorts of young dreamers.

Proposed: The Permanent Drizzle

I keep hearing about cloud-seeding and all sorts of other cool ideas to get water into the air so that it can fall on the ground — not to mention other water-related terraforming concepts, like the canal to bisect Australia.  My humble contribution, probably inferior and unworkable in many ways, is to suggest putting pipes up in the air and pouring water out of them.

There are probably many ways to put pipes or tubes up in the air.  They could be very thin, so as to reduce weight; they could hang from blimps, or could be supported by cables running to the tops of mountains, skyscrapers, or radio or water towers; they might be moisture-conducting ropes or strings instead of actual pipes.  It would be hard to get water to any great height, which might be just as well; above a certain point, water will freeze.

The water conveyed upwards could come from rivers that are already there, or from canals to the coast.  There are lots of places around the world that are lower than sea level; presumably water could be tunneled and/or siphoned from the ocean to holding tanks in some such locations.

Seawater could be safe for this purpose.  The water would go up; the water would rain out of the end of the tube; the water would evaporate on the way down, and drift off as vapor; the salt would drop back to the ground, not too far from the shower head.  This probably wouldn’t work with a wicking scheme; the salt would presumably clog the ropes or strings.  On the plus side, if the drifting water vapor could be collected downwind, this might be an economical approach to desalination.

This sort of device could be used on various scales.  Whatever its terraforming potential, it could at least create ambiance and downwind cooling in urban settings.  The idea that people would live in cities without waterfalls could someday seem bizarre.

Probably the main problem for this sort of device is the need for energy to pump the water upwards (though not in the case of wicking).  Possibly the motion of a blimp could be used to pump water upwards — if, for example, the emptying of the tube changes its weight, causing the blimp to change its location.  Local windmills could also pump water.  Incoming water pressure via siphon might also vary with coastal tides, creating opportunities to elevate water somewhat.

The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon: $550 Million

In 1987, Michael Milken made $550 million from his notorious work with junk bonds at the Drexel Burnham Lambert investment banking firm.  Milken’s indictment and Drexel’s ensuing bankruptcy led to a 1993 court decision holding that a fraudulent firm (i.e., Drexel) could not use its insurance to protect itself from paying fines for its criminal behavior.

That court decision came back to life in 2009 when Kevin Bacon and other investors were swindled out of billions of dollars by Bernie Madoff, who was involved with Henry Paulson of Goldman Sachs, which has just agreed to pay the SEC a total of — you guessed it — $550 million to settle charges against it.

Proposed: Electricity from Pavement Expansion & Contraction

Like so many other ideas, this has probably already been considered, rejected, tried, and/or implemented in one form or another.  My quick search this morning doesn’t turn up anything obvious, and I’m out of time for more searching, so I’ll just write it up and move on.

Pavement expands and contracts with each morning’s solar heating and each evening’s cooling.  Tar strips between blocks of concrete typically absorb that expansion.  (I’m not sure how it works in the case of asphalt, which is tar itself; presumably the tar compresses and/or expands vertically rather than horizontally.)  The tar strips are squeezed upwards as the concrete expands.

Tar, water, or some other material, within a tube or membrane, could instead be made to expand outwards, toward the edge of the roadway.  As the tar strip is squeezed, this outward pressure could drive a little generator, one per tar strip.  Alternately, this outward pressure could compress the air or water in a tube running parallel to the roadway, moving through a larger generator located somewhere down the line.

Letter to the CEO of Radio Shack: Get a Clue

Dear Radio Shack:

I am looking for a gizmo.  I am not sure what to call it.  I do a search on your website, using the best name I can imagine:  “Ethernet extension adapter.”  Nothing comes up; you apparently don’t have it.  Point no. 1:  you’re the adapter store.  You should have ethernet extension adapters;  and if you do, you should have a database that’s smart enough to find them, if that’s what people call them.

I Google it.  “Ethernet extension adapter” produces lots of results.  There’s one for $2.77 on eBay, with free shipping.  But, of course, shipping takes time.  That is your advantage:  I can just pop over to the local Radio Shack and get one.  I need one today, so this is important.

There is one problem, though.  I don’t know if your local store carries this product.  I could call and ask, but I left my cell phone out in the car.  Besides that, though, I might be one of the many Chinese- or other-speaking tech nerds who are not comfortable with situations in which I must display my poor English and rely upon the kindness and intelligence of the store clerk to help me.  Or maybe I’m a good English speaker, but like many computer users I’m not good with people, or maybe I’m just lazy or addicted to my computer.  If God had meant us to use the phone, he would have designed a mouse for it.  For whatever reason, I’d rather send you an e-mail or do a chat.  Sadly, a search for “Chat” on your homepage turns up nothing.  Point no. 2:  Radio Shack, if you are in the tech business, then for heaven’s sake catch up with the 1990s and discover chat.  My local library has chat help; how can you not?

The other reason why I can’t just call up your store and describe it to them is that, the last time I was in a Radio Shack, the employee had no idea of what I was talking about.  Here’s where you basically piss away your home-team advantage:  if I’m going to drive to your store and have a fruitless encounter with a clueless clerk, I would have been better off to just buy the thing online and do without it for a couple of days.  Point no. 3:  if you can’t get competent nerds to staff your store, I sympathize; but at least give your employees a database (see above) that can help them figure out what the customer is looking for.  Even better, give your employees, if not your customers, a direct chat connection with the super-nerds you should have been recruiting to staff your global chat line all along.  If you can’t find super-nerds in America, I hear there are still a few left in India.

I was thinking that you would be interested in this sort of feedback.  After all, your webpage pestered me with an opportunity to participate in a survey, as soon as I arrived there.  I waved that off; but then, when I went seeking my gizmo and yet did not find, it occurred to me that I probably should have done that survey after all.  So I looked for the “Contact Us” link at the very bottom of the page, like other websites have.  None to be found!  Radio Shack, get a clue.  You are the gizmo store.  People like me are paying your salary.  Please don’t treat us like pests.  Give me a nice, clear “Contact Us” at the bottom of the home page.  Indeed, give me a big red button, above the fold, that says, “What are you looking for today?” leading directly to the enhanced database (above).  And if your super database doesn’t find what I need, put me directly through to a chat wizard — one available 24 hours a day, because there’s a good chance that I’m doing this at 2:35 AM.  Point no. 4:  if you’re not going to be there when I need you, Radio Shack, don’t expect me to be there for you.

A lot of this would have been avoided if your webpage were as usable as, say, Amazon’s or Newegg’s.  There, I can click on options, on a left sidebar, that narrow down the scope of what I’m looking for.  Or, if you insist, a menu bar across the top — but either way, give me menu options that make sense.  I’m looking for an ethernet adapter to connect to the Internet.  I click on your “Cables, Parts & Connectors” menu option.  Hmm.  Radio Shack does not seem to have heard of the ethernet, or of the Internet; or if they have, it hasn’t occurred to them that these would be subjects of interest within the sphere of cables, parts, and connections.  There’s space for a menu pick for the very narrow slice of customers who want LEDs; but nothing for the Internet — unless, of course, I want to pass my time wandering around your site, trying to figure out whether my ethernet adapter would perhaps be found under the menu’s “Connectors & connectivity” option, or its “Wire & cable management” option, or its “Component parts” option.  But of course I’m not going to do that; after all, a general-purpose search already failed to turn up the item.  Point no. 5, Radio Shack:  give me reason to believe in you.  Show me that you don’t really believe it is more important to sell people LEDs than to get them connected to the World Wide Web.  Because if you believe that, I am probably wasting my breath.

Needed: The Google Imponderable RSS Feed

When you do a Google search, ordinarily you get thousands if not millions of hits.  If you do a specialized search, you may get it down to just a few dozen or, rarely, just a handful of results.

Once in a while, though, you find that you have asked Google a question that it cannot answer.  These unanswered Google questions yield this statement from Google:

In other words, as far as Google knows, nobody else in the history of the world has used the words, phrase, or combination that you are searching for.  You have achieved uniqueness.  Congratulations.

What the world needs, in response to this situation, is an RSS feed that immediately notifies people of this situation — people who have nothing better to do with their time than to answer questions that, until now, nobody even knew existed.  We need an RSS feed that will tell us what people are wanting to find and yet are not finding, so that the truly bored among us can immediately enter forum posts that use precisely the desired terms.  Or if the flow from such a feed would be overwhelming, we need at least a feed that will send us the Google Imponderables whose first letter matches the first letter of our last names, so that the world’s previously unknown questions will now be made known to as many as 1/26th of humanity.  And then there could be a traceback feature that notifies you, tomorrow, of the various posts and webpages that have gone up overnight in response to your Google Imponderable of yesterday.

This may seem ridiculous.  The strange thing is that it is not.  I use quotation marks in my Google queries, so I actually tend to come up with quite a few Google Imponderables.  Just now, for instance, I searched for this:

“purpose of a social work license”

And would you believe that, according to Google, nobody has ever used that phrase online?  Oh, don’t worry; I also tried this variation:

“purpose of a license to practice social work”

Same result!  It seems to be a genuine unknown.  Surely the situation will change at some point — not as quickly as if the RSS feed were already in place — but we can tentatively assert that, as of 12:54 PM on July 10, 2010, there is evidence that nobody has ever actually bothered to sit down and explain why anyone would bother to get a social work degree.  I don’t know what social conditions could possibly account for this bizarre situation, but I can tell you one thing:  it is a situation that calls for social change.

Proposed: The U of M’s Pfizer Space Becomes the Hub of a Global Intellectual Haven

In previous posts, I suggested that a tough economy and chronic undervaluing of intellectual assets create an environment in which Ph.Ds can be acquired cheaply, and that it makes sense to provide highly skilled people with Internet access and other basic resources needed to make themselves useful to society.

The University of Michigan has acquired a large, largely vacant Ann Arbor office facility from Pfizer.  Meanwhile, a half-hour to the east, Detroit faces a different kind of vacancy issue:  tens of thousands of abandoned houses that are slated for demolition.

Apparently one or more studies have found that 95% of those houses are still liveable.  Moreover, some neighborhoods in Detroit are experiencing a classic artists’ renaissance. It seems, in other words, that southeastern Michigan may face a confluence of crises and opportunities, by which an infusion of hundreds or thousands of intellectuals into targeted Detroit neighborhoods could powerfully stimulate those communities, economically and otherwise.

In other words, can we find a way to make those houses available to intellectuals who are otherwise spinning their wheels — and who, in light of systemic changes in higher education, are likely to continue to do so?  Specifically, can we combine the housing surplus in Detroit and the office space possibilities at the former Pfizer space, in ways that will benefit Detroit, Ann Arbor, the university, and those individuals?

Large numbers of presently unemployed, or otherwise unproductive or underemployed — but highly educated, skilled, or otherwise knowledgeable — workers from around the world could contribute to the viability of those Detroit neighborhoods by their very presence.  At the same time, they could use express bus or commuter rail service to travel from Detroit to Ann Arbor.  That is, their welcome to the U of M would not necessarily require (in fact, it could be structured to preclude) substantial additional automobile traffic in Ann Arbor.  They would nonetheless presumably have a beneficial impact on attendance at various university events, neighborhood restaurants, and the like.

In one scenario, the university would provide basic computing resources, scheduled access to a private or shared carrel or cubicle in the Pfizer space, general access to tables in a library-like facility, Detroit-area housing subsidized at least to the tune of the cost of bulldozing, and a pass for the express shuttle.  In addition to the credential of a university affiliation, participants would thus acquire a point of anchoring or reference and, not incidentally, self-respect.  In exchange, as described in my previous posts (above), the university would receive a commitment of, say, 20 hours of service per week on general or specific assignments, with encouragement for the recipients to use the balance of their time productively within their areas of expertise.  The proposal is, in a sense, a nongovernmental organizational (NGO) variation on the theme of the Federal Writers Project (FWP) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) of the 1930s.

Such a project would generate important opportunities for social science research into a plethora of topics, including mental health, employment, camaraderie and shared purpose, post-industrialism, the role of NGOs, community revitalization, and cyclical, long-term roles of the arts in the national economy.  Such research could itself be a product — indeed, it could be a structuring principle — in the enterprise.

Needed: Firefox: Control Extension Installation

This morning, I’m looking at Firefox add-ons that provide a certain function.  There are a dozen of them.  Some are experimental; some have mediocre reviews; some have unique features that, if they work well and cooperate with other add-ons, would be a real help.  How can I sort them out?  I don’t want to install them all — they might wreck my Firefox installation — but I don’t want to just make a list of them somewhere, which either I will never use or will have to resurrect lots of information to figure out whether they still seem worthwhile.

What I need, for this purpose, is better control over installation of add-ons.  This calls for several changes:

• When I indicate that I would like to add an extension to Firefox, before restarting Firefox to install that extension, I would like to state the mode in which I want it installed.  Now that I’ve sorted through my list of a dozen add-ons that provide the desired function and have selected a half-dozen that look like they might do the job, I want to go down the list of those about-to-be-installed add-ons and indicate which ones will be started in Disabled mode.  That way, I can be ready to use them, but can enable them one at a time, using each one for a few hours or days before turning on the next one that I selected in this morning’s browsing.
• Once I have installed an extension, I would appreciate it if the Add-Ons window would show me the current rating (e.g., four stars) for each of my add-ons.  That way, I can become aware of any that may initially have seemed promising but have been allowed to lapse or have more recently developed problems.
• For each installed extension listed in my Add-Ons window, ideally I would have a link (or, better yet, a mouseover preview) showing me (semi-transparently?) the Mozilla add-ons homepage for that extension, so that I can quickly check whether others have had a kind of problem I have had.  Better still, I would right-click on that extension, in the Add-Ons window, and would type in a search term that would highlight related text on the add-ons page.

Needed: Firefox Extension: Contribution Tracker

I need more information about my Firefox add-ons.  Examples of things I would like to know:  have I installed this add-on previously?  What is its current rating (e.g., four stars)?  Is there another that meets the same need with a higher rating?  This information should be linked to an online database of my current add-on atoms.

The need motivating this post is the need to know whether I have already contributed to an add-on developer and, if so, when and how much.  I want the online database of my current add-on atoms to indicate how frequently I have (intentionally or without being aware of it) used a particular add-on (ideally, to indicate how heavily I have relied on it relative to my other add-on atoms).  I want to be able to set its options to make an automatic (e.g., monthly) contribution (from e.g., my PayPal account) to each add-on atom that meets a certain usage or importance threshold, or alternately to give me a list of e.g., the top 10 in terms of my usage during the past month.

Needed: Outdoor-Friendly Lodging Options for College

College is looking a bit pricey these days.  At the same time, we have successive generations of young people whose alienation from nature stems from their training for lives and careers indoors.  This has happened despite their occasional discovery that some of their own best experiences – from childhood on through summertime experiences in high school and thereafter – have taken place outdoors.

There are college students who could use some help in cutting costs, and there is an environment, out there, that might be grateful if they would get a clue about the place where our food, air, and water come from.  So instead of looking down our noses at life in the outdoors, how about orienting college students toward the lovely benefits of a quasi-outdoor lifestyle?

There are many steps along the spectrum from abject homelessness to plush digs.  There is, of course, the simple tent, with all facilities outdoors, and with a lifestyle of matching simplicity, favoring activity by day and sleep at night.  There is also the lifestyle of an earlier America, in which indoor sleeping and (to varying extents) food preparation were combined with outdoor toilets, bathing, and other facilities.  Outhouses are hardly charming.  Yet those who have observed the cleaning habits of college students might wonder whether a well-designed outdoor composting toilet could actually contribute to a superior lifestyle in some cases.

There is also the reverse option of a building or common area for shared functions – cooking, for example, and studying – combined with individual sleeping space elsewhere.  Like at the more expensive campgrounds:  you get to sleep outside, but you can still have hot showers.  In this scenario, the sleeping quarters can range from the humble tent, through the Hobo Condo and the modified shipping container, to the RV or hardsided trailer that a college student might buy and call home for four years or more.

I wish I, myself, had been able to pursue that kind of opportunity.  I did take a somewhat similar approach during a year of graduate study at the University of Missouri:  tenting out, often in wilderness areas, combined with access to a gym and a place to store food and cook meals indoors.  I also knew a woman at Columbia Law School who slept in her boat at the 79th Street Marina.  It could be very nice to pitch your tent on a gently rocking float.

In all of these options, the utilities can also be made more realistic and natural.  For instance, much of the ordinary life can unfold without electricity; and where electricity is involved, it can originate off the grid as well as on.  The obligation to crank your own electricity, to mind the solar panels and batteries, to pump your own water, and to be concerned about nearby threats to its drinkability – these bits of daily exposure to reality might stimulate a greater sense of personal responsibility for the stuff.

Colleges try to teach students to think creatively, to look for novel solutions, to experiment and explore.  College is a place where people should be encouraged to live outside the box.

Needed: Fact-Recording Paralegals

People file lawsuits and then wait.  Their expensive attorneys burn up enormous amounts of time and money.  The legal system imposes delays lasting months and even years before there is finally a serious attempt to sort out the facts.  Often, that never happens at all; the parties simply settle the matter on terms that can be completely unfair to one or more parties.

At a time when the country does not have enough jobs for all of the people who need them, it makes sense to divert some of that money away from the attorneys, to paralegals who would be tasked for the specific purpose of nailing down the facts of the case.  One way to do this would be to hold the parties, not the court, responsible for coming up with a coherent statement of those facts.  Sanctions could be developed and revised to give parties an incentive to cooperate with the paralegal; for example, a party denying a point, and thereby requiring the other party to prove it, could be responsible for the expenses (or double the expenses, or the expenses plus fines) that the other party and the paralegal incur in proving it.

For this purpose, suitably trained paralegals could be registered with the court, as mediators and other professionals are, and cases could be assigned to them.  This approach could result in more thorough and accurate development of the factual record – although not, perhaps, in a comparison against the imaginary world in which all parties have adequate legal representation.  In the real world, people who wanted and could afford attorney representation in the factual phase could still have it; the essential point is just that parties would not be railroaded through a commonly bogus factual phase handled by an overly busy judge and overly expensive litigators.

Needed: Website Accessibility Logo and Certification

The world knows what the accessible symbol means.  Now somebody needs to make a modified version of that symbol, to serve as a logo — as a sort of Good Housekeeping Seal indicating that a webpage meets standard accessibility guidelines.  Permission to use (or, with sophisticated coding, perhaps even the possibility of using) the symbol on the webpage would be contingent upon passing an automated check.  Ideally, Google and other search engines would run that check, or at least look for and indicate the presence of the logo.  That way, people with disabilities could ideally indicate their preference or requirement for accessibility within their Google search Settings.

Scenario: China Discovers the Other Side of Drafting

China seems to be feeling its oats.  There have been shows of power and displays of arrogance.

That sort of thing makes friends and enemies.  It makes friends, because everybody wants to be on the good side of the bully.  It makes enemies, because nobody likes a bully.

There is a bicycling technique known as “drafting.”  It involves following another bicyclist very closely.  Following closely is far easier than leading:  the leader takes the brunt of the wind resistance.  Moving from second place to first can be a sobering experience:  suddenly it is much harder for the former follower — and much easier for the former leader.

As the world transitions away from the era of the American superpower, China will face new kinds and degrees of drag on its progress.  It will be less able to thrive by merely following in, and tinkering with, the American world model.  There will be — there have already been — glimmers of a new and different Chinese model of how the world should operate.

Some of those glimmers are not reassuring.  World powers usually serve themselves first, but a population of 1.3 billion seems to stimulate unprecedentedly visible and sometimes hamfisted grabs for natural resources around the world.  There are signs, too, that China may experience its own “Ugly American” era, enhanced by the impression that China is ready to send a million of its workers to mine your ore for itself.

There is also, of course, a markedly different Chinese model of public participation.  However offensive the imposition of American values and priorities may have been in some times and places around the world, not many will prefer the freedoms that China’s government seems prepared to offer to its potential economic colonies.

For the U.S., two outcomes are possible.  The Chinese model of the world may come to seem superior to the American model.  In that event, some of us may feel nostalgic for the way things used to be, but there will be no realistic possibility of a powerful movement back in that direction.  Alternately, the Chinese model may come to seem inferior to the American model.  If that’s how it turns out, then the U.S. can perhaps expect to borrow once again from the British model of empire:  for a century or more into the future, the U.S. may have its own Commonwealth, but on a larger and less tangible — one might almost say on a more spiritual — level.

It is conceivable, in short, that the 21st may turn out to be the century of the American idea, when each new Chinese economic and military success produces greater global faith in the American vision of what is good and important in private and public life, and greater fear that such a vision could be erased.  What we were not smart and kind enough to build throughout the world with our own wealth, during the so-called American century that has now expired, may yet come back to us in our time of relative poverty — in modified form, no doubt — from the world’s preference for the good things that we and our parents did achieve.  It would be most ironic if America thus learned, and taught China, that you must treat your neighbors well if you want your children to live happily and at peace.

Needed: Freeware Use Tracker

I would like to make contributions to some software developers. I can’t pay them all. There are freeware programs that are highly visible. Those, I know about. But there are also scripts, utilities, Firefox add-ons, and all sorts of stuff that I probably use quite frequently but take for granted — if I even remember that I installed them at all.

I would like to be able to run a program that would tell me what programs, add-ons, scripts, and other software devices I have been using, and how much I’ve been using them. Ideally, it would tell me more than just how frequently the programs run, because there are probably some that run and do nothing.

Armed with such a program, at my time of generosity and reckoning — every week, or month, or year — I could decide how much I could afford to pay all of these people for their efforts, and the program would give me the breakdown, and I would make the payments.

Needed: SpringBike

I was going to send this idea to MIT’s Senseable City lab, but couldn’t find the contact info.  So here it is instead.

They’re working on an electric bicycle that saves the energy that would otherwise be wasted when you stop the bike.  It stores that energy to a battery that powers a motor.  But it seems like you should be able to accomplish the same thing mechanically.

Example:  bike frames are made of tubes.  On the traditional men’s bike, there is a flat top tube.  Inside that top tube, you put a hydraulic device, a weight or something, that slides forward against some compressible substance (e.g., a spring, or a gas) when you stop the bike.  So the energy of stopping is saved inside the tube.

Problem:  that saves only the energy associated with stopping the weight, as distinct from stopping the whole bike and its rider.  But what if you put a similar device inside a modified front fork, so that the energy involved in stopping everything back of that – that is, the rider and most of the bike – is saved there?  Then release that energy to a front gear, with a governor that keeps it from just spinning the front tire.

Proposed: The Main Food Groups (for Emergencies)

Every schoolchild has heard about the main food groups:  grains, fruits, . . .  well, whatever they are.  But it occurs to me that, in a pinch, people have pretty well established that there are also some main food groups for emergency situations.  Emergencies, in common experience, include receiving a divorce notice, getting a leg pinned under a four-ton boulder, nearly starving to death, and having the wrong person say the wrong thing to you on the wrong day.

In response to these key psychophysiological triggers, the established emergency food groups include the following:

1.  Alcohol

2.  Caffeine

3.  Candy

4.  Dessert

5.  Socially approved and/or personally tolerable prescription drugs and controlled substances

Not to belabor the obvious, but to prepare for an emergency, every household should stockpile these important emergency food groups in easily accessible, secure locations.  Examples include:  under the mattress, in the closet, behind the bookcase, and inside the mislabeled jar.

Needed: Mechanics’ Dogs

Dogs could be trained to smell problems with cars.  Not all problems, of course, but quite a few:  brakes, fuel & exhaust systems, cooling system, electrical system components (e.g., overheating, short circuits), battery acid mix, mold or other signs of concealed water damage, etc.

There are computers that can more accurately detect quite a few problems.  For that, you have to take your car into the shop, you have to live in a country where they have shops with computers, and you have to have a vehicle with computerized diagnosis capabilities (which excludes old cars and many non-car vehicles, such as motorbikes and many tractors).  You also have to pay for sensors in the vehicle you purchase, and sometimes you have to pay to repair the sensors themselves.

Scenario: The Obamater Urge

America has a corrupt president, and reacts by choosing a person of apparent character.  In place of an ugly, hardball Republican administration, we elect a decent, sweet-sounding Democrat outsider.  The new president proceeds to treat politics as though it were a matter of what makes sense.  He won’t or can’t muscle his way out of sticky situations in Central Asia, and instead becomes a hostage to them.  And if 2012 were 1980, we would once again be on our way to electing a Great Manipulator, who would wrap him/herself in the colors of the flag while leading us into a generation of presidential stupidity.

There are some differences.  Gen X was sure; Gen Y is not so sure.  Reagan could still tug on the heartstrings of World War II-era voters.  They’re mostly gone now.  Some adaptation has occurred:  arrogance is less fashionable.

My early predictions:  Obama will win re-election in 2012, probably not by a wide margin; and after he does, he will belatedly discover the confidence and urgency of practicing international politics, as distinct from political analysis.  Palin won’t be the Republican nominee in the general election, though she will certainly be a candidate in the primary.  Obama will never really rise above himself, and will therefore stoke a desire for the more muscular kind of president whom we will elect in 2016.

Scenario: In a Stable World, China Wins

In a stable world, China (that is, the government of China, as distinct from its people) wins because it can make and enforce the kinds of long-term plans that central planning and control are good at.  The world can never be completely stable or unstable; these things develop along a continuum.  If you want stability, you make adjustments to prevent or minimize sources of instability.  These, as China (and also the U.S.) have demonstrated, include people who cause trouble in unacceptable ways.  Here, you don’t picket a July 4 fireworks celebration unless you want to get beat up; there, you don’t make too much noise about human rights.

The U.S. is not a good place to develop an alternative to the stable world in which China wins.  The U.S. has, in fact, been heavily involved in creating the kind of stable international order that would suppress undesirable kinds of dissidents in other countries.  China represents, not an opposition to the concept of world order that the U.S. has stood for during most of the past century, but rather an extension or completion of it.  If you want an alternative to the stable world order in which China wins, you may come closer to it by fostering efficient successes in multiple spheres:  spiritual alternatives like Falun Gong; governmental alternatives like Switzerland; environmental alternatives like Yellowstone.

The Cold War won’t really be over until centralized planning and control – not only of economic activity, but of people’s lives in any variety – is much more carefully restricted and much more wisely managed.  In our struggle against the Soviet Union, we committed on an international scale the blunder that one soldier described on a local level in Vietnam:  it was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it.  We became centrally planned too.  And now we have put the Chinese government on a path toward a world in which, not too far in the future, leaders will have the power to control thoughts.

The U.S., despite its problems and debts, still has ample resources to achieve a radical swing away from central planning.  Should it take that path, it can inspire a historically unprecedented flowering of brilliance, efficiency, and diversity in the ways in which peoples conceive of and pursue their lifestyles.  Taking this high road may position the U.S., for the much longer-term future, as a beacon of human rights and ideals against which China’s present government could not hope to compete.  We are not presently traveling that high road, and it does not appear we will.  But we should.

Needed: Normalized Homelessness

We started pretty simply.  Regardless of your religious beliefs, you likely concur that we were living outdoors, without a pot to boil beans in.  What we have now is an advance over that in some much appreciated ways, but it is also a departure from that in some unfortunate ways.

In our early days, we were living pretty much from one tree or cave or water hole to the next.  This had advantages that we still appreciate.  For instance, it made it easier for us to be where the cool stuff was happening, without having to worry about loading up a whole vanload of kids and dogs and their appurtenant accessories.

Somehow, however, we have arrived at a place where it has become fashionable to use our resources as unproductively as possible.  Like some bird that grows absurd tailfeathers to attract mates, we reached a stage where we needed to have houses that we could then fill with assorted merchandise from around the world and never leave, except that we usually did.  Leave, that is.  So while we might have enough stuff to entertain two dozen starving Africans in the basement for a week without hardly even noticing they are there, we actually only use it for ourselves, and only once in a while at that.

A different model, closer to the nomadic spirit and the simple life, and made available to anyone who’s interested in having it, would require little more than a plastic card and an overnight bag.  My overnight bag contains fresh underwear and tomorrow’s clothes, picked up from an indoor storage unit located near my job.  Tonight, I’d like to party with some friends, so I’m going to take mass transit out to their vicinity.  I’m going to drive or walk along until I see an available housing unit.  I’m going to stick my keycard in the door.  My account is charged and the place is mine until tomorrow.  It’s already fully stocked by an organization that’s a more efficient shopper than I am.  What I take goes on my tab.

I’ll pay for this with the money I save on not having to rent and/or maintain a place that’s bigger than I need, with various appliances (e.g., vacuum cleaner, ice cream maker, charcoal grill) that most people use only occasionally.  If I have little or no income, my card might work only in a certain category of minimal housing units.  Nonetheless, there will tend to be places where my card will work, and I’ll be able to focus on jobhunting or taking classes or whatever constitutes my next step.

This model permits gradations upwards and downwards, according to individual need and desire.  I may not need a place with a swimming pool and an expansive lawn every day, so why should I pay to have it every day? If I’m going to be in a rut for the next five days (e.g., Monday through Friday), I’ll rent the place for the five days and ask them to haul over the multiday locker from my storage unit on Monday morning. If I want to be experimental, I’ll rent a sleeping space in a gazebo or a treehouse or a boat.  On the other extreme, if I just need a place to crash, I’ll rent a glorified box.  If your child is sick, you rent a space near your job; if you have to be at an appointment early in the morning, you rent a space near there.

These accommodations can be provided by Marriott/FedEx or a landlord or the government or whoever.  The important thing is that the concept of a house as a building that keeps people away from each other is replaced by the concept of a living space as a temporary respite from daily life in the world.  Less is invested in making it huge and fixed, and more is invested in making it adaptable and suited for evolving individual and societal needs.

In this model, being homeless ceases to mean being a loser who cannot afford those exotic tailfeathers.  It means, instead, having to make a phone call to get a card.

2120 Hindsight: The Barren Years

My Dear Eleanor,

A little while ago, I came across a silvery disc, half-buried in the hog lot.  I don’t know how it got there.  Probably a sow dug it up while she was rooting around.

I picked it up and looked at it.  It was all scratched and scarred; still, I knew right away what it was.  It was a CD disc, which meant it was well over a hundred years old.  It looked like the ones we learned about in school, except this one didn’t have a label on it.  The label must have gotten scratched off during its travels.

It surprises me that things like that could still be turning up at random, after all the decades of turmoil – all the waves of collectors and recyclers and government prohibitions on such objects.  You’d think they would have pretty much gathered up the last of it by now.  But they made so much of this stuff, way back then, that I guess it will probably take centuries to entirely cleanse the Earth of it.

It must sound silly that I would dwell on it.  I know nobody’s much interested in objects from that era anymore.  The smart thing is to just stay away from it.  It was a crazy time.  Well, anyway, I tossed the thing in a bucket.  I’ll figure out what to do with it later.

But I have to tell you, something about the experience made me stop and think.  Here I was, holding a little device, or whatever you’d call it – a marvelously technical thing, able to store large amounts of information if I recall correctly – and yet it had hardly any meaning to me at all.  It was as if someone had been working all night to solve a problem, and then in the morning someone else came along, freshly rested, and fixed the thing in about five minutes.  Or like when someone gets all wrapped up in the details of an argument and winds up disagreeing with what they, themselves, originally said.  Like, this little disc would be capable of storing a hundred different ways in which its owner could prove, without meaning to, that his or her life made no sense.

I twirled it around my finger and looked out across the pasture, and I felt thankful to be alive and living now, and not then.  Imagine living in a world of – what was it, eight billion people.  Billion!  No wonder the world back then was so crazy.  Everyone needing food and a place to live and water to drink, and the poor Earth just groaning under the weight of it all.

Well, and I had to be thankful for China.  God only knows what would have happened to America without the Chinese.  We’d probably still be making babies and merchandise and junk – grow, grow, grow!  We just didn’t have the depth of wisdom they developed, once they returned to their traditional role as the center of the world’s learning.

So now, thanks to what they have taught us, I can pick up this piece of plastic and put it in a bucket, and I can go on with my happy day.  I am free of so many awful things that my great-grandfather told me about, when I was a little boy, things that he had heard from his own great-grandfather.  I am free from constant interactions with people whose faces I cannot see.  I am free to write you this letter with my love, without worrying that you are surrounded by a dozen men everywhere you go, indoors or out.  We welcome strangers in need, of course, but we have the security and peace of knowing most everyone around us for years on end.  I think our ancestors would have found that hard even to imagine, in that crowded and anonymous world of theirs.

People are rarer now.  We are free to be special for one another, you and I and all our friends, and I cherish that.  And so the day’s adventure made me think of you, as it always does, and I do so wish you were here.

With love,

Martin

Needed: Poem of History Wiki

It would be informative and inspiring to set up a wiki dedicated to presenting poems about the events of history.  Go to the page for October 14, 1066 and one of the links there is for the Battle of Hastings.  Follow that link and you’re on a wiki page where people can post their own original rhyming or free-verse poems, or poems that others have written, regarding that event.  If possible, set up a voting mechanism so that the most popular poems float to the top.

There surely wouldn’t be a page for every day, going back millenia.  Go back more than a few hundred years and the number of pages per year would dwindle.

Pages could also have links, perhaps automatically generated, to other reference sites that provide historical or literary information about the day in question.

Proposed: Morality < Cleanliness < Self-Respect

This is a response to “The Smell of Virtue: Clean Scents Promote Reciprocity and Charity,” Psychological Science (2009) (lead author Katie Liljenquist) (see LiveScience writeup).  The paper says:

[C]lean smells might not only regulate physical cleanliness, but may also motivate virtuous behavior.  … [M]orality and cleanliness may also be reciprocally linked.  … [T]he current research identifies an unobtrusive way – a clean scent [apparently provided by a spritz of Windex] – to curb exploitation and promote altruism.  … The current findings suggest there is some truth to the claim that cleanliness is next to godliness; clean scents summon virtue, helping reciprocity prevail over greed, and charity over apathy.

The LiveScience writeup offers this additional observation:

A separate study last year at the University of Plymouth in England found that a vigorous hand wash or shower could cause a person to be less judgmental.

Theory:  cleanliness, per se, has nothing to do with it.  Cleanliness worked, in this experiment, because the subjects associated it with the behavior of upper rather than lower socioeconomic classes.  They were in an environment that smelled (albeit subconsciously) like it would be populated by self-respecting individuals.  In that setting, they probably adjusted automatically to the likelihood that they would have stood out, unpleasantly, if they had behaved as though they were in a less genial environment, and had then found themselves surrounded by people who had been socialized to prioritize the physical circumstances provided – who could afford, for example, to have the windows cleaned frequently.

Ways to test this:  (1) use participants who have not been socialized to associate Windex with higher socioeconomic status; (2) try it with non-olfactory environmental cues (e.g., kind of wall decorations or furnishings); (3) test other morals against other olfactory cues (e.g., smell of a doctor’s office vs. a restaurant re truthfulness).

Needed: National Life’s Story Library

Dead men tell no tales.  But that’s not true if they leave behind a journal or other account of what they’ve experienced.

During their lifetimes, people accumulate a tremendous amount of information about themselves, the people around them, and current events.  This material is sometimes priceless, but often that’s not discovered until the person is gone or, while still living, forgets the important details or can no longer find the crucial documents or other data.  Sometimes the value of the material is monetary; sometimes it is intangible, as the images, experiences, and records associated with the person are lost or, nearly as bad, warehoused and forgotten.

These days, people do record much more data about themselves, voluntarily or otherwise, than ever before.  Even so, those data are commonly maintained in fragmented and fragile forms.  Some are deleted, sometimes mistakenly, by a mere click; some are lost as data standards change and hard drives crash.  Some are retained, but only in forms whose meanings or connections are difficult to guess.

People often value the thought that their legacy will live on – indeed, that the things they have done are already providing insight, entertainment, memories, assistance, or other benefits to those who remain.  In an era when people are cremated, or buried far away, or survived by no descendants, that legacy – the very memory of their existence – may often be best preserved online, where it may be preserved and may remain accessible indefinitely.

A library is perhaps the best place to store such materials.  Such an institution could provide stability and consistency in converting, formatting, backing up, and otherwise accumulating and preserving data in usable form.  Much of that work could be performed automatically, at relatively low cost.  Incoming material may consist primarily of data supplied in digital format , supplemented by scanning, photographing, logging, video- or audiotaping, and other data collection services provided by the library or by third-party contractors.

Perhaps the best way to encourage the accumulation of such data in that sort of library would be to give each library member his/her own account.  The member would be free to deposit a broad variety of materials through various media.  For example, in addition to a relatively secure deposit performed online, there may also be more secure ways to deliver the data physically (e.g., by USB jump drive carried directly to the library) for preparation and storage, or to grant access to such materials on the World Wide Web or only to users of computers, on the premises, that are not connected to the Web.  All such services and options may be supported by a sliding fee scale based upon income, degree of usage, or other commonly used guidelines.

The library could invite such deposits under a variety of arrangements.  Some people might wish to stipulate that they are using the library only for storage, during their lifetimes, and that they will state, in their last wills (which will not be read until after their deaths), what they want to happen with the materials stored in their library accounts after they are gone.  Some might wish to keep the materials in their accounts completely and publicly available, starting immediately.  Some may wish to make automatic deposit arrangements, through which the contents of specified data sources (e.g., their electric bill, their Facebook postings) are fed automatically into their library account.

The library would doubtless impose certain conditions upon accounts.  It may be agreed in the account opening agreement, for example, that the contents of each account will become publicly available on, at the latest, the 110th anniversary of its opening.  Members may have to consent to make their data available to researchers in several phases – not available at all within the first five years, for example; available only for anonymous, quantitative research for the next twenty years, and so forth.

Legislation would probably be needed to insure the integrity and, where needed, the privacy of the library’s contents, so as to encourage people to continue to deposit their biographical data there, without compromising law enforcement and other emerging needs for archived data.  One focus of such concerns would be upon data whose existence would not be known, but for the fact that the member has placed those data into his/her library account.  One possible response in such a situation would be for the library to retain a copy of those data for library purposes, while returning another copy to the member, where it may be subpoenaed.

Within a few decades, this potentially self-supporting institution may begin to yield remarkable scientific insights regarding myriad questions in political and social science.  There may also be data networking possibilities, as the biographical information of males born in, say, 1920 becomes linked with that of other males born in that year, to produce composite perspectives on the experiences of World War II veterans.  Those data networking possibilities may also facilitate the reconstruction of life circumstances of famous persons and also of those who die unmourned, only to be sought out years later by long-lost relatives.  One need only imagine a holographic version of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC to get a sense of the enormous possibilities of such a library.

Needed: National Sliding Fee Scale

At present, there are sliding fee scales in which higher fees are charged to higher-income individuals, often to subsidize services provided to lower-income individuals.  This occurs in a variety of areas, such as income taxes and the provision of health services in neighborhood clinics.  These and other income-related gradations in services may be simplified and made more predictable and manageable through development of a general-purpose sliding fee scale.

It may turn out, for instance, that I am in category T.  Category T may mean that I am in a 38% tax bracket – as distinct from category S, which would be at, say, 37.5%.  Also, I am in, say, a 96% entitlement bracket, which means that I am entitled to 96% of the dollar value of benefits provided to the lowest-income individuals.  So whereas they pay nothing for the provision of basic food to prevent starvation, and whereas the wealthiest people would be expected to pay market price (or possibly even more) for that same quantity and quality of food, I am entitled to receive that quantity and quality of food at a price of only 96 cents on the dollar.

The purpose of this innovation would be to enhance both the public understanding of benefits available to various kinds of persons and the possibility of fine-tuned, relatively uncontroversial adjustments to those benefits over time.  If, for example, there is not enough money in the governmental revenue stream to cover the anticipated costs of benefits supplied to people in category D, there would need to be negotiations on the qualifications and benefits applicable to that category, with relatively visible and typically symmetrical compensations in adjacent categories.

It may develop that public irritation and division on such topics would be reduced as the dialogue would shift from vague depictions of stigmatized categories of persons (e.g., welfare cheats, plutocrats) to more lucid gradations in differences among persons.  In essence, class would be reintroduced into the official lexicon of American society, but along a relatively smooth and bloodless continuum that might supplant the coarse and divisive class categories found in earlier class conflict perspectives.

Needed: Canned Biography Website

Suppose I can go to a website and interactively say and learn who I am.  I enter the stuff I’m pretty sure of – age, weight, birthplace, and so on, for as many details as the database is configured to accommodate.  Then the website tells me all about who I am, based on what I have put in.  People like me tend to get divorced once, on average; die at age 78, give or take 5.5 years; have particular issues with joints or heart problems or whatever; and so forth.  If I can refine the information later – if, say, I upload data from my song collection, photo album, or checkbook – then the website can refine my understanding of who I am.  I might like songs by so-and-so, whom I’ve never heard of; Joe Smith, who appears in one of my photos, is now a member of Facebook; the transmission repair shop that gave me a lifetime warranty went out of business last year.

Based on the information I feed it, this website can write a first-draft biography for me.  I’m not interested in including the trip to the tranny shop, so I begin with a default value preference incorporating anecdotes based on automobile repair – or, at a more global level, I generally exclude retail transaction data from the biography.  The website attempts to tell its best tale about who’s in photo no. 42, again with interaction from me if I’m so inclined – the scene takes place in New Jersey, not Delaware, therefore that sign in the background indicates that this must be Newark, NJ, not Newark, DE.  I can decide on the form of arrangement for this biography:  it might be topical, based on different places I’ve lived or visited, or chronological, starting when I was a tyke, or it might be stream-of-thought, as a tale about a photo set in Newark leads to a transcript from a school I attended there.

The website can also prepare a first-draft résumé for me.  Other people who attended that school in Newark tended to describe it using these words, so the website goes with that, with drop-down alternatives.  Of course, if I’ve already worked through a bio, the résumé can draw pretty heavily from that for guidance.  It is also intelligent enough to focus the résumé on what appears to be the main point of the job description, job ad, or whatever I can tell it about the desired position.

Using the various data I’ve fed it, as supplemented by my interactions with its biography and/or résumé features, the website can work up a draft presentation of a singles ad, and can show me the results of other similarly designed ads, and alternatives, for people like me.  My feedback from the dating experience may lead to prompting for a revised sense of what job ads are most appropriate for me, or to a suggested alternate structure for my bio.  Such revisions will tend to improve the quality of solicitations from potential employers – I will be hearing from people whose job openings are closer to the mark for me – such that I may be able to stop actively jobhunting and just let the machine connect me with the places where I am most likely to belong.  Similarly, I may come to a better understanding of my actual as distinct from my assumed availability for participation in social groups and activities I might never have heard of, with better odds of fitting in, based again on what I can tell the system about my previous interactions with comparable kinds of groups.

If I am interested in refining the hits that I get, and further automating the search process, I might be prompted to enter a few seconds of video in response to specific questions flashed on the screen.  The list of questions in use, and of those that I have already answered, with my video answers, can then be mixed and matched for automated or random review by potential dates, employers, and other individuals, groups, and organizations.  My onscreen video list will indicate whether I appear to have been clothed casually or professionally, looked sad or laughed, etc. – just in case I want to tweak the entry, or add an alternate, for the particular use I now have in mind.

One unfortunate reality of job markets, dating markets, and so forth, is that people on both sides of the equation tend to see who they are and what they’re talking about through their own unique lens.  It could be very helpful, especially for people whose hits are not appropriate, if the system permitted an automatic mode in which the user temporarily surrendered control to, or sought frank feedback from, the system.  Word counts and other analyses of things that I have written could reveal that my language tends to be harsher than that of 95% of the adults my age, or that my face is actually the type that would tend to be considered attractive by far more people than I would have expected.  In its background mode, the system might pick up that I have typed the word “glum” or “depressed” more than three times in the last four minutes, which tends to indicate that I am especially interested in hearing about my attractive face rather than my disturbingly high odds of dying of esophageal cancer within the next ten years.  Of course, there are nearly endless implications for preventive health and early diagnosis of medical conditions.

Scenario: Housing Prices Are About to Plunge

Longtime readers know that I place bets for the hell of it.  Easy to do, when you aren’t putting money on it.

My bet is, housing prices are about to drop.  Here’s my reasoning.

First, of course, housing prices have recently been recovering.  This could be discounted – in my hypothesis, it *should* be discounted – as a common market phenomenon in which people jump in and bid prices up, in anticipation of a larger rise later.  Sometimes, sad to say, the bet is premature, and after a while the larger downward slide resumes.

The whole housing price world is still built on an assumption of things being like they used to be.  That’s a faulty assumption.  Things may never again be like they used to be.

As I pointed out years ago, a globalizing economy inevitably means that wages in the U.S. are going to adjust downwards until they meet competitive wages coming up in places like China and India.  We may not generally be heading for the abysmal poverty and hunger found in some such places – I think there’s a good likelihood that we *are* heading that way, when you factor in climate changes and threats to agriculture – but let’s not go there in this post.  For now, the point is just that our theoretical intersection of wages and living standards lies well below what we’ve known, and well above what India et al. have known.

How quickly will we reach that theoretical intersection?  Those who recall the Rust Belt dismantling of American industry may consider that it became foreseeable pretty quickly, but the actual unfolding has taken decades.  If that’s a good guide to the future, then I expect that the dust will be mostly settled on this equilibrium point in twenty or thirty years.

People can’t buy houses if they can’t afford them.  As more and more workers find themselves in jobs that pay half what they used to earn, or jobs that are only part-time or unpredictable (or no jobs at all), the whole concept of families typically buying houses and raising kids in the suburbs is rapidly becoming history.  I don’t think there’s a solid floor under the market for such units.

If we want to get where we’re going as quickly as possible, one approach would be to adopt universal conscription.  Upon turning 18, everyone has to move to a dorm-type living arrangement.  It can be in the military; it can be in something like Outward Bound; it can be on a college campus.  Doesn’t matter.  The point is, the next generation has to be trained to consider a minimal living space to be normal, so as to be grateful for anything above that, and also to be more critical toward indulgence in vast excess above that.  It’s simply time to adjust our goals and expectations to our means.

Rapid steps in that direction will train members of the next generation to interact well with one another and to be comfortable in closer quarters.  This will facilitate a shift, within just a few years, to smaller, more ecofriendly, and more closely located dwellings that people will actually be able to afford without 30-year mortgages.  That’s where we need to go.

That is, in fact, where we *are* going.  It’s just a question of whether we march there promptly or are dragged there, kicking and screaming.  How long do we want this Bust Belt restructuring to take?

Needed: Freedom to Hire and Fire Instantly

Business today changes very quickly, and so do the numbers and kinds of employees needed for a task.  To remain globally competitive, employers should have as much latitude as possible to acquire and eliminate employees on short notice.  Many problems arise when hiring or firing someone becomes a huge, time-consuming ordeal:  existing employees find themselves overworked or underworked, for example, execution of a plan gets bogged down, and the work environment becomes toxic as people hate to stay but are afraid to leave, given the complexity of finding another job.

To develop a job market in which people can be hired and fired promptly and with minimal hassle, certain things will have to change.  Requiring employers to pay for employee benefits makes no sense; it amounts to a penalty for hiring someone.  The job market gets distorted, in terms of the kinds of firms that can hire and the places that people prefer, when one organization is required to provide benefits while another, of a different size or type, is exempted.  There is usually no logical connection between employee benefits (e.g., dental insurance) and the type of job.  The better approach would be to require employers to provide supplementary benefits, or to pay an additional amount, only when the basic benefits available to everyone are not sufficient – when, for example, the job in question imposes excessive risks of physical injury.

And what is this concept of “the basic benefits available to everyone”?  Simply put, a decent nation does not abandon its own people.  Keeping people healthy and safe is a basic human value.  Businesses that are given a market environment, along with governmental and social support and encouragement in their self-serving efforts to deliver wealth for their owners and operators, must operate by the market principle of paying for what you get.  The costs to society of providing those opportunities to business need to be accounted for as accurately as possible, and businesses should pay for those opportunities just as they pay for other costs of doing business.

Employee benefits typically have nothing to do with workplaces.  The employer should not be saddled with them.  Business opportunities commonly take advantage of free and underpriced social and governmental resources.  They should pay for what they get.  In a business environment where jobs are more accurately perceived as providing opportunities to the employee, and also as preventing the employee from pursuing other opportunities with his/her time, perhaps jobs will eventually transition from being desperately needed mainstays of survival to being, instead, the kinds of things that most people do sometimes, like sports, shopping, and housecleaning.

Needed: Compensating Bat

I need a softball or whiffleball bat that rewards gentle use but somehow becomes spongy or nearly useless when it is used with force, so that adults and children could seriously play the same game.  When you hit the ball hard, it only goes a little ways; when you hit the ball softly, it goes about the same distance.

There would still be a need for compensation in other areas, e.g., running speed, throwing strength.  Measures of galvanic skin response, focus, and direction might measure and reward effort rather than actual speed, strength, or demonstrated accuracy in an electronically based game.

Everyone Is So F*cking Miserable

Everyone is so fucking miserable
But I didn’t mean to say fucking
Pardon me for being profane
But to the point:  everyone is so f*cking miserable
It’s a world in pain
Pain!  Pain!
Remember the nastiest headache you ever had
That’s a good day
Probably
For some poor bastard
With some badwater-induced f*cking disease
In some developing country
(Not developing fast enough)
(I hate headaches.)

I was meaning to say that everyone is so f*cking miserable
It’s an overstatement
One-tenth of the world is comfortable and wealthy
Or at least half of the one-tenth
Or whatever.
Who’s counting?
The point is,
(Almost) everyone is so f*cking miserable.

What’s really miserable
Really, really miserable
Is that people in pain don’t even know they’re in pain
Like a blister on a marathoner’s toe
Toe? Blister? What? I need water
Marathoners do need water
The toe can wait
Almost everything can wait
Almost everything does.

Needed: Recording Layers of Experience

It is possible to add layers to a map.  You might start with a map of a city, in the simplest sense – as, say, a blob of color on a white background.  The yellow area indicates where Columbus is, for instance, on the map of Ohio; but the yellow area does not show any details about Columbus.  But if you add a layer showing the city’s streets, you start to have some useful information on how to find your way around town.  Take away the street layer and add a layer showing the city’s parks, and now you have useful information on outdoor recreational opportunities.  Combine a hundred layers – showing where people live, where the city’s sewer lines are, where crimes have been committed, and so on – and you start to have a feeling for what Columbus is all about.

It is also possible to add layers to an audio recording.  First, you record the piano part.  Then the vocalist sings the words while listening to the piano part with headphones, so you can add the vocal track.  Then you record what the guitarist plays while s/he listens to the combination of the piano and the vocals.  Put together the various layers and you’ve got a song; take out the guitar part and replace it with a violin part and maybe you’ve got a better song.

Something like this is also possible for human experience.  At each moment, I am seeing certain things in my vicinity, and am not seeing other things.  The complete story of my lived experience thus has a video layer.  I am also hearing things, so there is an audio layer.  At the same time, I am also remembering things and having emotional and cognitive reactions and so forth.  These various layers, combined, comprise my lived experience.

If I could record and then play back the layers of my lived experience (through e.g., a brain implant that would supply those layers directly to the portions of my brain that process sound, visual input, and so forth), I would be having new lived experiences during the playback.  This might be useful, or it might just be overload.  If I could suppress part of the current lived experience – put on a blindfold, say, to minimize the visual portion of current experience – then playback of the recorded visual experience could be very interesting.  It would be as if I were currently seeing what I had actually seen at some time in the past.  With the benefit of subsequent experience, and also with the detriment of forgetting, I would doubtless be surprised to observe what I had seen, and had failed to see, at that previous time.  This sort of thing could lead to the creation of very informative sorts of diary entries.

Other people might also want, for various reasons, to know and to understand what I had seen or, more broadly, what I had experienced.  I could share video of my latest vacation with my friends by simply giving them an edited copy of the video track; I could put the combined audio and video portions of an especially remarkable experience on YouTube 2.  A psychologist would have a much clearer understanding of what I had been paying attention to during a certain moment, and so would a criminal defense attorney, a girlfriend, and any number of other people.

To get a full understanding of a certain experience, it would probably be necessary for some other person to take several runs through the recording of my lived experience.  They would suppress their own video capability while “watching” what I had seen; then they would go through it again, suppressing their own hearing while “listening” to what I had heard; and so on with whatever other layers had been recorded.  They would probably not have access to the full contents of my mind, so even if it were possible to record my emotional reaction to a certain sight, sound, or smell, they would presumably not fully understand where that emotional reaction was coming from.  In this sense, the recording’s many layers would almost invariably be lossy rather than lossless.  Some important parts would be missing.  It would nonetheless be possible, through revisiting the several layers of my lived experience, to get a rough approximation of what it was like to be me during a certain experience.

Extensive indulgence in such recordings could be invaluable for an actor who would seek to play the part of a future president.  The president’s lived experience in office would be recorded; after s/he leaves office, the recordings would be released; someone would write a movie about that president; and the actor would then find his/her way to those portions of the former president’s lived experience that seemed especially characteristic or poignant, and would spend hours reliving those experiences, so as to learn to think and react as the president did.

Putting together multiple portions of a lived experience could compromise an observer’s independent judgment.  If, for example, you could see and hear and think what I saw and heard and thought at a certain moment, you might tend to have the reaction that this was not just my personal experience but was, rather, the actual, swear-to-God reality of what happened in that situation.  Possibly the most challenging and important aspect of this innovation, then, would consist of understanding and using the critical or judgmental faculty that makes it possible for a person to feel as though s/he is watching his/her own experience from outside.  This mental crow’s nest would presumably be the portion of the observer’s own lived experience that one would try to insulate from influence by immersion in another person’s lived experience.

Needed: Unfinished Projects Registry

A government agency is restructured, and what people were trying to achieve previously is mothballed.  A company goes out of business, and some really cool thing that its people were trying to develop gets put into boxes in a warehouse.  A retired individual has a labor of love underway, and would like to pass along what s/he has learned and achieved to some younger person who takes an interest in it.

Some of these projects may only be partially disclosable.  There may be legal restrictions, financial obligations, or simple reluctance to throw one’s pearls before swine.  Adjustments may need to be made but, in general terms, the concept is that people work really hard on many important things that unfortunately get interrupted or sidetracked, and then someone else comes along later and has to reinvent the wheel.

What is needed, then, is a way or place by which people can make some kind of record of what they are working on and which parts of it are available to be passed along, for specified (e.g., for-profit or not-for-profit) purposes, and under what circumstances.  In one scenario, you could describe your work in your webpage or Facebook page, with a link to a registry or other repository of information (e.g., whom to contact for further details in case you or your company are no longer available for, or interested in, the project).  Your registry entry could then indicate that this material is to be shared only in the event of your death, or to anyone who is interested, or whatever.

2120 Hindsight: I Love You, I Want You, There Ain’t No Way I’m Ever Gonna Need You

My girlfriend and I have been getting along really well for a long time now.  But every now and then, she still does something that makes me a little nervous about our future together.  Like last night.  We were just lying around, talking about stuff – just being two people who live together.  You know, that sort of communication that comes and goes, in little bits and pieces – like, “I’m hungry” and “I love you” and “Are you thinking with anyone now?”  Nothing special.

And then, suddenly, out of the blue, she looks directly at me and says, “I need you.”  My mind was going a million miles an hour.  She needs me?  What the hell is this?

At first, I thought maybe it was some kind of twisted joke.  Was she, maybe, pretending to have a mental disorder, just for laughs?  But no, she looked serious, and anyway she’s pretty conservative. I quickly decided there was no way she was going to put herself at risk of investigation, not for a cheap laugh.

So, OK, she was serious.  Much to think about!  And maybe that was a good thing.  They say conflict in a relationship keeps your brain sharp.  I have to admit that, sometimes, she and I are a little too happy and comfortable with each other.  So the next thought that went through my head was a little bit like competition, like a challenge.  Like, all right, I’ve had the implants, my logic is impeccable, and I’m ready to put it to work.  I’m ready to think my way through this.  It was like I was putting a rarely used muscle to work and was discovering, to my pleasure, that it was strong and responsive.

Apparently she did believe she needed me.  She felt she could safely say this to me without fear of being reported.  As far as I could tell, it was a sincere statement of some sort.  But what could it mean?

Ordinarily, of course, needing someone would have all kinds of psychosocial and criminal/political implications.  Need implies dependence, dependence implies abuse, and abuse implies relational failure.  When someone tells you that they need you, they are basically saying that you are manipulative and/or abusive:  you have created, or helped to create, a kind of relationship in which you will enjoy power over the other person.  In other words, your friendship is on the rocks.  And because the rate of recidivism is so high, people ordinarily assume that a tendency to attract need from others is a lifelong disability.  You’re just “that type.”  If anyone else endorses that first person’s judgment, you are at risk of finding yourself on the social margin, or worse, very quickly.

But in this case, my girlfriend didn’t seem to intend to insult or accuse me.  And her behavior, both before and after that little remark, did not convey any sense that she was afraid of me or was assuming our relationship was over.  My next thought, then, was that perhaps she was entertaining some kind of subversive intent – was quietly notifying the world, in her way, that she would not be told when and whether she could need someone.  This possibility was irritating; it would imply that she was questioning my loyalty to society.  Not reporting her for such a statement would tend to indicate that I shared her subversive intent – unless, perhaps, there was something psychosocially wrong with me too.

Fortunately, of course, the matter was not especially urgent.  I would have at least a week before I would have to file a report.  So while this interpretation seemed plausible, I had time to think about it.  Knowing her as I did, I did not think the subversive interpretation was likely.  She wasn’t trying to make a sociopolitical statement.

But what could she possibly intend by saying that?   My understanding of the thing was that, when people used to need each other, it was because they were wrapped up in a world of interpersonal needs and expectations.  People really didn’t know how to get along with each other, or even how to behave in social or professional situations, until they figured out who needed who, and how much, and why.  The whole socioeconomic system was founded on a corrupt ethic of need and exploitation.

I wasn’t sure exactly what that would mean in her case.  Had she perhaps encountered a compelling story from some previous century, where it had seemed good that one person needed another – and, if so, was she adopting or experimenting with the sort of scenario that had unfolded in that story?  That seemed possible, but it didn’t make a lot of sense.  The whole history of need had been sorry indeed.

Need in interpersonal relationships started becoming unfashionable when need in work relationships came under serious scrutiny. Back at the dawn of the Age of Robotics, employers quickly lost their need for employees en masse.  And then – we’re talking about Hypocrisy 101 here, what everyone learns in the most basic liberal arts education – within just a few decades, everyone got religion (so to speak).  Everyone saw the light.  The jobs that nobody liked were gone, so now it was OK to admit that nobody had really wanted them in the first place.  People had wanted survival; they had wanted independence and pride in themselves.  But now it was the end of the whole artificial scheme by which people tried to get such things through employment.  Suddenly it became normal to go directly toward such things:  to identify, acknowledge, and resolve threats to survival, independence, and pride immediately, not through some roundabout job-based theology.  Needing things meant that you weren’t actually getting them – that your needs were not being anticipated.

Preliminarily, then, I couldn’t see how she could need me, or believe that she needed me, without repudiating the foundation of modern life and wishing to return to a failed, old-fashioned way of thinking about relationships.  I didn’t want to be in the immoral position of being a target of her need, real or imagined.

Then, suddenly, I understood.  It was seductive to imagine that I had that kind of power over her – that I would be needed.  What she was exploring, in this relational thought experiment, was the sexual impact of needing and being needed.  That, I had to admit, was interesting.  I, too, had little experiential exposure to need.

Consistent with her other behavior to date, then, there could be no credible inference of manipulative or subversive orientation or intent.  I was relieved:  it appeared that she did not truly need me, after all.  Her mental condition tentatively appeared to be as healthy as ever.  I would not have to file a report after all, not unless I was completely wrong and the questionable behavior continued longer than seven days.  I was quite confident, now, that it would not.

The interaction ended when, understanding my cue, I looked back at her in equal seriousness and said, “I need you too,” and we hugged.  It will be interesting to see what learning opportunities emerge from what will be, I expect, several days of experimentation with interpersonal need.

I have recorded these thoughts from the moment of her remark for purposes of documenting a questionable interpersonal encounter.  The recording was provided by a ThoughtReconstructor, and was revised with the aid of an Eyecam.  The encounter in question occurred at 19:43 on 04/07/20, and was finalized in this document at 08:15 on 04/08/20.

2120 Hindsight: Funky Weather

In the last five or six years, the weather has been really strange.  It used to be that a person could pretty much count on the weather to do as it pleased, depending on the current state of disputes and negotiations in the International Climate Control Conference.  Usually at least one major nation would be manufacturing warm, rainy weather while another one, somewhere, would be fabricating cooler and/or drier weather, or some daytime or nighttime or seasonal variation on such themes.  They would obviously be trying to get their preferred conditions in place over their own territories, but there was the inevitable lagging effect on into neighboring countries and even across oceans; and often those effects could mix from several sources and produce fairly extreme weather conditions.  So for the ordinary person, anything could happen in weather conditions, from one day to the next.  So a person would normally just put on some Adapta-khakis and an Adapta-vest, before heading out the door in the morning, and that would generally be good enough for almost anything that Daughter Nature would throw your way.

Oh, but then fashion reared its ugly head.  Or at least that’s what some people say.  The theory is, women got sick of dressing the same as each other, every day.  Adaptafashions may have sprung out of the burka; there may have been an era when many women wanted the experience of Common Dress; but those days were gone long before I was born.  Ever since I can remember, women (and, sure, some men) have wanted to dress diversely, like they did back in olden times.  This was not an easy sell – not in a culture that had long ceased to accommodate such tastes, nor in the laws and ordinary ways of living that had grown up around the Common Dress philosophy.

What really turned things around was the Weather Scare of the late 2090s.  Some say it was a hoax, or an artificial setup intended to bring about a change in leadership.  The weather would have returned to its normal unpredictability, they say; it was just going through a cyclical period of extreme stability.  Such cycles were said to recur every couple of decades – every 50 or 100 years, in varying degrees of intensity.  But, you know, when there’s no food, people panic.

It probably had to happen sooner or later anyway.  The ICCC was one of the last international bodies relying significantly on male leadership.  When climate became the big arena for potential warfare and national security in the early decades of the 21st century, the men and the money gravitated in that direction.  There had been other scares and missteps before the 2090s, though.  Meanwhile, it was becoming increasingly obvious that new leadership, provided especially by women but also by some members of the elame, had been substantially improving cooperation and reducing warfare in a variety of international collaborations.  So at last, starting especially in 2093, the Weather Scare provided the big global push that women needed.  It was finally feasible to throw out those dinosaurs – that male leadership of the ICCC – wholesale, around the world.

Changes followed swiftly.  By the turn of the century, the ICCC had been reformed and restructured into a vastly more collaborative and interactive body. Fifteen years after that, what was once hard to imagine and hard for the public to accept – a return to a non-engineered climate – became the standard assumption and goal of future climate planning.  So, as I say, the weather started to change.  Relatively predictable seasons returned and, with them, we began to experience the constant and obligatory changes in fashion that people had endured a hundred years ago.

We may never know if this all came about because of deliberate efforts by female leaders.  Nor does anyone seem very interested in finding out.  The thinking seems to be, As long as things go smoothly, who cares who’s in charge?  But I, unfortunately, now have a dozen perfectly good pieces of Adaptafashion, gathering dust in my closet.  Instead of using them and enjoying their lifetime warranty, I find that I am now almost expected to join the women, and now a number of men as well, in this unnecessary and repetitive exercise of buying and wearing new clothing.

2120 Hindsight: Those Sad, Confused Centuries of Critical Thought

As every child learns in school, we must love and care for the people in our lives, even when they think and speak in negative and critical terms.  To reject independent, critical thought and speech is to become independent and critical oneself.  Indeed, our acceptance of the people, and of their words and thoughts, must be deep and sincere.  They are “right,” in the way of thinking that lies beneath independent thinking, because everyone and everything is right from that perspective; it’s just a matter of finding and understanding what that perspective is.  They would not think and talk as they do if they did not hold such a perspective – unless, of course, they hold a perspective that says they do not hold such a perspective.  Ultimately, we seek to understand and interact with the perspectives, and with the perspectives on the perspectives.

The purpose of this acceptance is not to manipulate or deceive such persons by persuading them that we share their views when we do not.  Completely sharing the views of another is nice when it occurs, but everyone knows that often it does not occur.  Views come and go; they change and completely invert themselves.  They are not really very relevant to long-term human interactions.  A view is a perspective; behind the perspective is a person; and in our world the focus is always upon the person.

In our understanding of history, it was not always like this.  There have been whole centuries, especially within the past 600 years, in which people were taught, from childhood onward, that they should develop views that differed from those of other people.  They were to emphasize their differences in every area of life – religion, wealth, even the home.  There were fights and hostilities on all levels – among individuals, among groups, and among nations – because people thought they were supposed to insist on seeing and having things their way.  They thought they were supposed to seek power to get what they wanted – through persuasion, deception, theft, violence, and so forth, as necessary.  Many influential people insisted that it was important to take things seriously – especially the things that those influential people themselves considered important.

Many people found it natural to think in these ways because independent, critical thought seemed to deliver important new achievements.  Fortunately, people began to return to more intelligent perspectives on that belief in the 21st century, when what had seemed to be “important” or an “achievement” in previous generations was, very often, just the opposite.  It seems so odd, to us now, that hardly anybody from those centuries knew how to insist that something was important, and was also not important, and that the insisting itself was both important and not important, for practical purposes – that, in other words, there would always be perspectives, and perspectives on the perspectives, and that the perspectives would unpredictably mutate and contradict themselves.  The perspectives were, of course, those of living creatures; and as we teach the children, life adapts.

Quips: Money and Democracy

Democracy is like money.  Below a basic level, its absence causes suffering.  Above an optimal level, its excess fosters absurdity.

Needed: Individually Wrapped Aspirin

Chewing an aspirin at the onset of a heart attack is said to improve the odds of survival.  But aspirin, aspirin, who’s got the aspirin?  The aspirin bottle is safely waiting for me somewhere back home – in the bathroom, maybe, or the kitchen – and here I am on a 10K run, about two miles away.

I have some individually wrapped LifeSaver candies.  Each is in its own little cellophane wrapper.  If I want to eat one, I just tear open the wrapper, and there you are.  If I wanted to take one along, I would not have to worry about it getting fouled with sweat or even crushed if I put it in my back pocket and sat on it.  The crumbs would still be there inside the wrapper.

So, OK, next winter, when I go out to shovel snow, what I’d really like to do is put one or two cello-wrapped aspirins in my pocket.  The outside of the cellophane can go ahead and get wet from melting snow, no problem.  And if I start to get nasty chest pressure, I know where the aspirin is, and maybe I can open and munch one before I keel over.

Proposed: The Digital Year

It will probably be a long time before anyone finds it advisable to tinker with the basic units of our calendar – weeks, months, years, centuries, millenia.  Ditto for other basic units of timekeeping.  But that doesn’t mean we can’t speculate about what it would be like if someone did.

I saw a video, the other day, of a guy who could clap 13 times per second, or so he claimed.  I watched, but I didn’t time it.  It was pretty fast.  So what if we defined an “instant” as one-tenth of a second?  People would understand, almost immediately, that we were talking about something that happens super-fast in human terms – without having to resort to scientific nomenclature (e.g., “ten centiseconds“).

What would happen if we went in the other direction, and tried to develop a digital (i.e., base 10) relationship between seconds, minutes, hours, and the day?  There are 86,400 seconds in today’s 24-hour day.  To make it all work in base-10 numbers, we might shoot for 100,000 seconds in a day.  Then this “second of the future” would be just a bit faster than today’s second.

But if 10 seconds = 1 minute, and if 10 minutes = 1 hour, and if 10 hours = 1 day, then we would have only 10 x 10 x 10 = 1,000 seconds in a day.  To get up to 100,000, we would need two additional levels.  We’d have to come up with names for them.  At present, let’s suppose we called them “moments” and “steps.”  So what if we had 10 seconds in a moment, 10 moments in a minute, 10 minutes in a step, 10 steps in an hour, and 10 hours in a day?  That’s 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 = 100,000.  A day would consist of 10 hours, 100 steps, 1,000 minutes, 10,000 moments, or 100,000 seconds.

This is conceivable, and conceivably convenient, although clearly impractical for the foreseeable future.  We weren’t even able and willing to transition to metric measurements of length and volume in the 1970s; we sure aren’t going to rejigger our clocks.  But to continue the hypothetical, what about days and years?  This is not so easy.  We can imagine a second of a different length, but a day is too obvious and too much a part of human behavior to ignore; and there is also a fixed 1:365 (sometimes 366) relationship between days and years.  And 365 is an odd number.

Maybe we could declare that there are 10 days in a fortnight, and 10 fortnights in a phase.  This would get us to 100 days.  Then what?  If we said there were 10 phases in a stage, we’d have 10 x 10 x 10 = 1,000 days in a stage.  Or, if the “stage” and “phase” lingo seemed hokey, we could use more digitally oriented terminology (e.g., milliyear, centiday).

The problem at that point is that the calendar would be completely out of touch with natural events.  The shortest day of the year, for instance, would no longer be predictably December 21; it would just be 365 or 366 days after the last time we had a shortest day of the year.

That would be a problem.  But it might not be as much of a problem, or not exactly the kind of problem that a person might imagine.  We already make all kinds of adjustments for the fact that our calendar is out of touch with natural events.  For instance, the shortest day of the year in the Southern Hemisphere is June 21, not December 21.  Flowers bloom in the spring, but spring arrives at different times in different places, and global warming may also mean that spring in some places may arrive, in the future, in February or March rather than April or May.  The first day of winter typically comes long before or long after (or bears no relationship at all to) the first day of snowfall or freezing temperatures.  And unlike the situation in some cultures, our solar calendar essentially ignores the Moon, despite its effects upon human behavior.

There might even be some advantages to deliberately unlinking the calendar from natural events.  People might be more in touch with nature if they watch what it is actually doing, rather than assuming that it is doing what it always does at this time of year.  Also, for many people, the calendar would become mentally friendlier if it eliminated the annual connection between yearend (i.e., a time of reflection) and the shortest, darkest days of the year.  In everyday thought, digital calculations might make it easier to be aware that, say, the hot season (defined by e.g., average daily temperature) has already lasted for 40 days, and last time it lasted for about 50 days, so we’ve probably got only one more fortnight of beach weather before the weather turns cool. As another example, there is a big gap between the present measures of one year and one decade, in human terms.  That is, many important human events (e.g., relationships, wars, economic booms and busts) unfold on the scale of the 1,000-day period.  People who think consciously about 1,000-day periods may view many key aspects of life in a different and perhaps clearer way than do people who think in terms of years and decades.

In short, the calendar and the clock are artificial devices, used for human purposes.  Those purposes generally involve interactions with other people rather than with nature.  Interactions with people, unlike interactions with nature, may be more plainly understood in digital terms.  The old structures of 86,400 seconds in a day, and 36,524 (or 36,525) days in a century, are not just computationally awkward.  They are ancient artifices that – perhaps in some very important ways – prevent people from seeing their lives and activities clearly.

2120 Hindsight: The Anzschluss

One of the world’s last great alliances of nations, the Anzschluss, formally ended 70 years ago this week.  To commemorate that famous alliance, and to give viewers an authentic sense of what the world was like when the Anzschluss was first formed more than a century ago, tonight we will provide old-style “interviews and commentary” in place of our regularly scheduled multisensory immersion news coverage.

For those unfamiliar with this antique journalistic format, the basic idea of an “interview” is that the Panews network has assigned several human beings to talk to other human beings, total strangers, and to ask them questions about some of their experiences.  Needless to say, the people “interviewed” for this particular program all seem to be at least 80 years old; otherwise they would have been too young to remember the Anzschluss.  Since only selected individuals received resource approval to enter Senior status during the Winnowing of 2091, the memories of these interviewees will reflect the views of certain classes of people.  This is unfortunate; among other things, it has been impossible to locate an 80+ person from the lower statuses who comprised the Anzschluss military.  Viewers may nevertheless find this to be a remarkably authentic historical news experience.  Again, viewers are reminded that this program lacks the normal intensity restrictions of multisensory programming, and may thus provide cognitive and/or emotive overstimulus.  Viewer discretion is advised.

The concept of an “interview,” as used in this program, was that the experiences of a few individuals would somehow represent or reflect the views and experiences of many other people who looked or thought like them.  This primitive approach, while obviously pigeonholing and demeaning from a 22nd-century perspective, was quite normal and accepted during the era of the Anzschluss.  Viewers are thus advised that some of the contents of this program may be offensive and ignorant.  See Clearance Waiver 812A4t.

By way of introduction, the first segment of this program will feature an interview of a person who understood two important languages of the era, English and Mandarin Chinese.  A surprisingly high number of people spoke different languages until well after the end of the Anzschluss, so this skill helped this person to obtain firsthand impressions from cultures of the time, both inside and outside the Anzschluss.  Expert Knowledge™ tells us that it was common, in the interview form of journalism, to start a program by asking questions of the interviewee, so as to provide an overview of what seemed to be the basic facts of a story.

As her story will reveal, this person was a teenager when the Anzschluss was formed.  Her exact age is confidential, of course, but as a Senior she could not be subpoenaed to participate in this program.  Fortunately, when she heard that we were going to use an interview format, she decided to contribute her time and knowledge to this project.  So we are very grateful for that.  Her own voice, with the accent of the era in which she grew up, certainly adds to the authenticity of this viewing experience.  And so, without further introductions, following the required disclosures, we will turn to our interviewer, Mr. Jonas Savimbi.

Disclosure:  The Anzschluss is alleged to have been a political and military union of the separate nations of Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, based upon the ANZUS alliance but promoted into a federation in 2014 in response to the alleged Chinese Sinippon bailout of and confederation with Japan and alleged provocations arising therefrom, including but not limited to alleged crimes of resource acquisition.  The term “Anzschluss” is alleged to stem from a European concept of the 20th century.  “Jonas Savimbi” is reported to be the name of an actual historical figure.  Person syntheses appearing in this program are believed to portray generally accurate similitudes of human beings existing in approximately the periods indicated. No warranties are provided as to conceptual, historical, or literary validity or relevance of information provided in this entertainment program.  Not to be used for educational purposes.   Consumption without Expert Knowledge™ may impair mental clarity.  Any similarity of persons, places, or events described or depicted in this program to actual persons, places, or events is purely coincidental.  This program does not seek to implicate any regulated Truth controversies.  No large mammals were harmed in the making of this program.  Copyright © Disneydoch 2120.  All rights reserved.

Proposed: Merge Citibank and Bank of America

Citibank and B of A are failing, and yet are too large to fail.  The bankruptcy of either one would likely have large effects on global financial confidence.  The bankruptcy of both would be much worse.

One solution may be to merge them.  Doing so could have some benefits.  First, it would constitute a form of action where, otherwise, it is not clear that any action will be taken in the near future.  As such, it holds out at least a hope of progress through what otherwise is coming to seem like a quagmire.  This, moreover, could be a form of action that would not call for much immediate FDIC involvement, thus sparing that entity’s reserves for other purposes in the near term.

Another benefit of merger would be the creation of obvious redundancies and the consequent dismantling-without-dissolution of some of those redundancies.  Duplicative branches within a single area, for example, could be sold off.  Duplicative back-office processes could be streamlined.  Downsizing — adjustment of the business of “Citibank of America” to its financial realities — would thus take place in a relatively orderly fashion, without the drama of receivership.

The goal of such a merger would hopefully be to reorganize this mega-bank into competitive, freestanding business units that can then be spun off into distinct companies — with none exceeding a size that the FDIC will be able to cope with, in future times of difficulty.

2120 Hindsight: Aneurmal Implants

Over a couple of beers last night, my friends and I decided that animal neural implants were the best invention of the 21st century.  Especially for cats.  We’ve all seen videos of what cats used to be like.  Funny beasts, but a true pain in the butt.

I guess some people were dead-set against implants in the early years, but from what I know about it, their reasons were basically superstition.  It’s pretty obvious, by now, that a cat can be both cute and useful.  Plus, you know, they deserve some subjugation, as payback for all those centuries of manipulating humans.  Once neuroscience reached the point of mapping and interpreting animal cognitive functions, there was no longer much doubt about cats’ mildly deranged scheming.

When aneurmal implants first appeared, they seemed artificial – but then, so was assisted childbirth, a couple thousand years ago.  The opposition to them seems to have been another example of accepted behavior during the Hypocrisy Epoch:  we like artificialities, except when we don’t – and then we complain about them bitterly.  Fortunately, when the real possibilities of the technology emerged, it turned out that nobody really enjoyed bee stings or snakebites.  You program in some permanent human-avoidance, and presto! no more mountain lions jumping on hikers.  No more cockroaches indoors.  Just another technology that seemed bizarre until it became normal, and then not having it seemed bizarre.

Ironically enough, we can thank early terrorists for the propagation of aneurmal implants in the wild.  These implants were originally supposed to be for use on nonreproducing test insects, which were utilized for purposes of research and warfare – tracking microscale wind currents, for instance, and videoing enemy combatants.  But the advent of genetic cellware meant that these sorts of capabilities could become permanent, inherited parts of insects’ neural wiring.  After that, they were “implants” only in the sense that they had originally been introduced artificially – and that, when properly designed, they could be shut off or turned down remotely, without impairing natural neural function.

Actually, in the early years, some of them couldn’t really be shut down, after a few days or weeks of usage, because insects’ brains, eyes, or other assets became atrophied through overdependence on them.  By now, with few exceptions, improved programming has taken care of that, and fortunately nobody misses most of the original insect assets that did become extinct before aneurmal programming reached its present level of sophistication.

But as I was saying, terrorists got hold of the technology, just as they got hold of most technologies sooner or later, and started playing around with it.  The notorious Dogs of Cuba incident, during that island’s Liberty (Mutual) Celebration in 2021, made clear that Approved Nations scientists could no longer assume that terrorists lacked access to aneurmal technology.  The only way to stay ahead of terrorists, from that point forward, was to out-program them.  So aneurmal programming went Open Source; and for some years thereafter, it developed rapidly according to the Open Source community’s established anarchic procedures.

There was a price for this progress.  For one thing, countless animals and insects endured untold moments (and sometimes years) of physical and mental agony.  Particularly awful examples include the stories of civil wars among incompatibly programmed animal proxies.  Eventually, though, cellware technology reached a point where scientists could propagate high-quality implant upgrades and countercellware (antivirus, antibacteria, etc.) updates throughout the wild kingdom wirelessly on a 24/7 basis.  The goal of such efforts was usually to insure that wild creatures would just be left alone, safe from terrorist manipulation, except when law enforcement or other authorized personnel needed all creatures fitting a certain description to be on the lookout for a specified type of person or behavior.

It is funny to recall the story in which PETA Unwired programmed the world’s skunks to approach humans on April 1, 2023.  But I’m sure it was distressing for many people at the time.  These and other activist measures (along with the sorts of atrocities cited above) did enhance public awareness and support for restrictions on cellware use.  Governments began to require ethical and technical training and licensing (and sometime court orders) for the use of cellware on living creatures who were not affiliated with the user’s home or his/her ordinary duties.  Public attitudes toward aneurmal programming in general became significantly less permissive.

Like many other aspects of those chaotic decades, such semi-random measures and countermeasures generated, inevitably, an enormous amount of unanticipated confusion, pain, and destruction.  Certainly much has changed since the commencement of the Great Calm.  But we still do have, from those years, at least the freedom to program our cats.

Needed: Community Run Time

Exercise is healthy.  People are more likely to participate in exercise if they’ve got support and company.  5K and 10K footraces for community members typically charge $15, $25, or more.  This penalizes participation, especially among lower-income people, who apparently have the greatest need for encouragement to exercise.

Fundraising 5K races might well get more participants if more people were running regularly.  There should be a regular time — say, Friday, 5 PM — when people in communities around the world are encouraged to go out and run and/or walk for an hour.  This healthy Happy Hour Run/Walk should include starting points and recommended routes in local communities, so that people have the option of meeting and running with others at known locations.

Needed: Open This Link on My Other Computer

Users of the Firefox web browser can install “extensions,” or “add-ons,” to enhance the browser’s capabilities.  There have been several Firefox add-ons that have added the ability to right-click on a link and open this link in IE.  IE is short for Internet Explorer, the web browser from Microsoft.  Some webpages look or function better in IE than in Firefox.

There are times when I see a webpage that relates to something I was doing on another computer — on a laptop, for example, or on a computer at work.  I can e-mail myself the link, or write a note for myself to do a Google search for that webpage when I get to that other computer.  But this is cumbersome.  It would be very helpful if the present “view in IE” add-on were expanded to allow, not only viewing in any installed browser, but also viewing from any computer I use.

One way of accomplishing that option would be to link it with a service like that of Xmarks, formerly Foxmarks.  This Firefox add-on keeps an offsite copy of your bookmarks or favorites (i.e., websites that you have indicated you want to keep track of).  Then, if you buy a new computer or use more than one computer, you can just log in to Xmarks and upload or download your entire set of bookmarks with just a few clicks.  In other words, this Xmarks-style service would save, not (just) your bookmarks, but a list indicating which tabs you want open on which machine (e.g., “home,” “laptop,” “any”).

This could go one step further.  Instead of just listing your allocations of individual tabs, you could have tab stacks by topic or group, as you chose.  For example, I do a Google search.  I’ve set my program options to know that, when I do a Google search, I am likely to be opening a bunch of new tabs.  So when I do that search, a dialog asks me whether I want to start a new stack of tabs.  I say yes, and I name this stack “jobs in California.”  I do my search.  Every tab that I open from this Google page, or from the pages opened from it, is listed in this stack, like shoving additional candies into a Pez man.  Xmarks (or whatever) backs it up and, if I switch to some other topic or close the browser, Xmarks asks me if I want to save the stack and which computer it’s for (default = this one, but I could also be leaving point A with the intention of continuing my work at point B after lunch).

One final tweak:  anticipatory Google search.  As soon as I indicate that yes, I am starting a new tab stack on the subject of jobs in California, another Google search page is automatically opened in the tab stack.  As I select especially interesting hits from my Google search results, this new Google search is automatically refined to home in on words shown in (a) my original search plus (b) words shown in the Google summaries of the hits I have selected.  If more than, say, a minute passes since my last selection from the Google results page, a ghost dialog reminds me of the automated search.  I click on the ghost and maybe I see hits that are better than what I found.  Until I dismiss it, the anticipatory search page is part of the tab stack.

Proposed: Use Malls as Disney-Style Day Parks

I got this idea:  Golden Corral and other buffet-style restaurants could sell day passes.  You could have breakfast, lunch, and dinner, all in one restaurant.  Problem:  at least until we have fingerprint or retinal identification, they could have people sharing their day passes with friends.  Instead of stuffing one person, which could require a large but limited amount of food, they might be stuffing three different people, each of whom used Golden Corral as their big meal of the day.

So it seemed that a solution might be to incorporate the buffet restaurant into a mall, as some already are.  Malls are struggling, as shoppers cut back and become savers.  But what if a mall converted itself into a place like Disney World, where you’d pay admission to enter the mall, and then you’d be entitled to use the whole thing all day for free?  There would still be some stores there, where you could buy things; but your day pass would entitle you to a lot of things without additional charge.

The buffet restaurant would be one example of what might be included in your day pass.  Another example:  they could use part of the parking lot as a water park that they could convert, in winter, into an ice rink.  (Could you still use a slide lined with ice?)  Or a gym or climbing wall.  They might also just have a very nicely maintained little park, where you could sit out and maybe have elegant tea with friends in your own gazebo — and in winter they might enclose the gazebo.

Presently vacant stores could be converted into funhouses, county-fair-style amusements, and McDonald’s-style play areas for kids.  A redundant floor of the flagship store (e.g., Sears, Penney’s) could become a bowling alley or year-round miniature golf course.  Extensions could include a pool or a greenhouse.  Hallways might become specialty aisles — with one (indoors or semi-outdoors) given over, for instance, to a genuine, relatively gritty county-fair atmosphere.  A bicycle, jogging, or walking track (or even a go-cart track) with pedestrian overpasses might encircle the place.

If people hung around for the whole day, they might do more shopping.  They might also do a different kind of shopping.  At different times of day, different needs might emerge.  For example, if people felt relaxed enough to take naps in their own little coves somewhere, there might be a store of sleep-related merchandise (e.g., specialty pillows, waterfall noisemakers) nearby.

Different levels of daily passes might include different services.  A platinum daypass might include unlimited use of a spa, perpetual parties (one for adults, one not), movie rooms, and reading alcoves.

The concept could be extended beyond single days.  A weekly pass could be affordable enough to offer as a gift, and might be made special by including a 10% discount at jewelry stores.  A specialized weekly pass could offer one free appointment with each of a variety of different life-cleaning services (a financial consultant, a lawyer, a time consultant, a rug-cleaner, a kitchen cleaner).  Basically, week passes could be designed to provide whatever people might like to do in a week’s vacation.  There could also be longer-period passes.  For instance, an annual pass might include a membership to the Sam’s Club at one end of the mall.

2120 Hindsight: The Road Museum

I went to the Road Museum today.  It’s Saturday, and I had some time, so why not?  I’ve been hearing about it, just never got around to checking it out.

Like museums have probably always done, they used virtual enhancements for their main exhibits.  Of course, you couldn’t tell at all.  It really felt like we were “driving” on famous old American highways.

I participated in several of the exhibits.  One was called the Cross-Bronx Expressway.  What a pretentious name.  But yeah, the roboy curator assured me there had really been such a thing.  There was another, an interregional — no, interstate, they called it — Interstate Highway Number something.  85, maybe.  95.  I’m not sure.  Everything had numbers back then, and complicated names.  Or I guess 85 or 95 was the number for the Cross-Bronx Expressway.  It was a little confusing.  But you get the basic idea.

Driving, itself, was pretty intense.  You’re in your own private car, basically a steel box on wheels, going down the road next to all these others (and sometimes zipping right by some that are going the other way).  Make one mistake, and you and everyone in your car can die.  I tried it once, by myself, and wrecked my “car” almost immediately.  Some of the other muesumgoers had done this before, so I rode along with them.

But there were still some crashes.  And these highway deaths are no ordinary deaths, just turning out the light as we know it.  You’re out of control, going sideways or upside down.  Everyone is screaming.  Things are hitting your car very hard, very fast.  You experience this enormous pain — we didn’t actually get the full treatment, obviously, but we felt some of it — definitely enough of it!– and we saw the Xs and we knew what that meant.  It was really just unbelievable.  The pain goes on.  Different parts of your body are feeling different kinds of pain.  What makes it scary is that you don’t know how long it’s going to go on, or how much worse it will get.  At the same time, you are having these intense feelings of instantaneous guilt and stupidity, because when it comes to pain you’re always wanting to back out, go back and redo it, in this case choose someone else to drive the damn car.

No wonder people were so afraid of dying.  It had to be fricking horrible.

Along with the famous highways, they had some famous street scenes.  Like, we got to ride in the car immediately behind President Kennedy, when somebody shot him, back in the 1900s.  They also had some more or less anonymous exhibits, where you were just experiencing what it was like to drive down some random country road in a car with the windows open, wind blowing through your hair, smelling some weird plants.  No guarantees that it was actually like that — obviously, they were relying on some old video to reconstruct the audio and visual portions of the exhibit; and for the olfactory portion, they tried to piece together the smells of a prairie that supposedly grew there.  Rebuilding the scent of an entire prairie by using synthetic plant oils based on old seeds — well, I bet it didn’t really smell like that.

Overall, though, I think it’s a good museum.  I came out feeling like I really had been visiting a different world.  Hard to imagine — streets and roads everywhere, huge amounts of digging and blasting and concreting, millions of vehicles running every which way, sometimes just sitting there waiting on each other — and the whole thing making an unbelievable amount of noise and dirt.  It’s hard to believe that people really had nothing better to do with their time.

Needed: Gap-Removing Audio Editing Software

I have an audio recording that contains gaps.  There is speech, then a gap, then music, then a gap, then speech, etc. I would like to close up those gaps so that the recording is easier and more interesting to listen to.  Some of the gaps last for only a few seconds; others are quite long.  Manually removing them is time-consuming.  There needs to be software that is capable of recognizing the gaps — perhaps guided by an example that shows what level of noise constitutes a gap — and eliminates them, so that there is just speech, brief gap, music, brief gap, etc.

Needed: A Place for Notes on What S/he Just Said

I want to be able to append typed, dictated, image, or videotaped notes to a specific location in a typed, dictated, image, or video file.  I want to be able to pull up a list of such notes.  I want to click on a particular place in such a note and go to another place in some file that I have linked to it.  I want to be able to load the data I have collected on a particular topic (consisting of such interlinked files) (including at least flash video) in RAM.

As always, please pardon me if this is already available for $29.95 at Wal-Mart.  If it is, I missed it.

Proposed: The Subsidized Intellectual Life

We have lots of highly educated people who won’t be getting work, anytime soon, at their skill level.  We would have even more of them if people were more diligent about following their interests and going with what really excites them, which is much more likely to be literature or social justice than engineering or accounting.

Normally, we consider egghead intellectuals to be a net drag on things.  They don’t produce nearly as much money as a lawyer or an engineer, so we pay them very little.  Indeed, we put all kinds of barriers in their way.  We discourage them from majoring in English in college; we minimize the funding for graduate educations in philosophy; we insure that they will be competing against 200 or more other Ph.Ds when they finally come out of graduate school and start looking for a job as a professor.  And then the job they get will pay next to nothing.

Instead, why not cut to the chase and encourage these otherwise unemployable and not highly money-oriented individuals to pursue their dreams?  We give them enough to live on, maybe including some kind of minimal housing near a campus where they can do their reading and their research; and in exchange we expect them to devote four hours a day to work with short-term value.  For example, a team of them might be responsible for understanding and summarizing, in plain English, an issue that economists or politicians wish the public could understand.  We give them opportunities and incentives to use their skills, and their 20 hours per week, to help out where their help is needed.

In exchange for that part-time usage of their talents, these intellectuals get a basic lifestyle, with an opportunity to spend years at it if they choose.  By the end, it will be a miracle if they are not just craving a chance to plunge into the capitalist economy, when and if it roars back into action.  Some of them won’t — the bohemian life will be just fine for them — and that’s OK too.  Either way, we are treating them as productive assets, just as they are, regardless of what happens with the economy, and we reduce both the unemployment rate and the political problems that arise when intellectuals go hungry.

Advice to Obama: Use the Summer Well

Everything is so different when it is warm outside.  Moods improve.  People can exercise, increase their outdoors exposure, fire up the grill, and learn to love camping.

These could be valuable skills and attitudes when the weather turns cooler in fall 2009.  Here’s hoping that the Commander in Chief gets ahead of events by preparing people very well for the worst.  It can be done, but not if we wait until the grey days return.

Needed: Massive Free Internet Access Locations

High unemployment means lots of people — many of whom are highly skilled and/or educated — with not much productive work to do, other than hunt for a job.  Jobhunting can be a fulltime endeavor, but at a certain point it becomes futile for many people, and they give up.  Then, running very short of money, they stop paying for the Internet connection, don’t buy replacement hardware to fix their PCs, and steadily become less valuable to themselves or to anyone else.  This is a waste of our biggest resource.

Now is a great time for the country to invest in creating large Internet access locations along the public library model, but on a more expansive level.  Cities, if not smaller towns, should take advantage of cheap real estate, cheap office furniture, cheap computers, and cheap labor to set up and staff 24-hour free Internet access locations near public bus routes, where people can at least use a computer at a table, as in the library, and could ideally have their own or semi-privately shared computer and desk workspace.

These centers may prove to be important in their own right, as a way of giving people something intelligent to do with their time — something that preserves self-respect as an educated human being, as distinct from e.g., the mechanical engineer I met the other day who was collecting aluminum cans in an alley in hopes of getting an extra buck.  These centers themselves would also generate a few jobs — for computer technicians and janitors, for instance. But the real payoff from these centers would be to maximize the nation’s productive capacity.  While we have lots of down time and cheap availability of trained individuals, it is an excellent time to start working through America’s enormous backlog of paperwork and unfinished tasks that desk workers are supposed to be able to tackle.

Not to deny the value of the infrastructure investments that Obama is making, but in this case there is no need to buy cranes and dump trucks and invest billions in a new highway.  Just give a person a desk and a computer and some incentive (a minimal financial incentive, a hope for a future job for the best performers, a free hot lunch, or possibly even just membership in a proud and dedicated volunteer group) to get to work.

The work in question is scattered broadly and deeply throughout this country.  We have judges with enormous backlogs of undecided cases, because there’s just not enough staffing to go through the papers and figure out the right solutions for those cases.  We have governmental agencies with endless piles of unfinished tasks, half-started projects that nobody has time to work up into more meaningful form, and investigations to complete.  This country is stacked to the ceiling with brilliant ideas that, supposedly, nobody has time to explore.

For very little money, you could basically turn existing governmental employees into supervisors, as individuals or at least as teams, that would oversee the computing and thinking efforts of large numbers of unemployed persons who need some meaningful work to do.  Don’t convert an accountant into a ditch-digger.  Leave that for the ditch-diggers.  Let the accountant do accounting, on a project where his/her skills may yield thousands of dollars in governmental cost savings or disaster prevention.  If someone is interested in history, why not let steer them toward investigative needs that could resolve missing-child cases or assist in a town’s efforts to digitize its property records?

Advice to Obama: Antitrust

We have AIG, an insurance company that’s said to be too big to fail.  We have Citigroup and Bank of America, ditto.  We did let Lehman Brothers fail, and there have been recriminations about that decision ever since.  We are shoveling money to the automakers — “only” tens of billions, to be sure, but that did once seem like a hellacious sum.

When companies get too big to fail, they are too big.  It was once understood that big companies frequently gain monopoly or oligopoly powers in their markets, that they frequently misallocate their resources, that they come to resemble undemocratic governments with unchanging, often out-of-touch bureaucrats at the helm.  Inefficient companies that refuse to reform themselves should fail, so that most attentive ones can take their place.

It’s time to rediscover the concept of antitrust — to break up companies before they get too big to fail.  The capitalist market is supposed to be competitive.  Proactive government intervention can keep it that way.

Advice to Obama: Heads Must Roll

My first prediction of the Obama presidency was that he wouldn’t pull it off — wouldn’t take sufficiently bold action, that is, to address the present extreme circumstances.  That appears to be accurate.  There is no denying that, by historical standards since the Great Depression, he has taken remarkable measures.  But I saw him surrounding himself with moderates, and I speculated that, most likely, these would not tend to be the people who would throw the baby out the window and dive out after it if the house was on fire.  Moderation and caution are great, in many circumstances.  But there are times when you just don’t screw around, and that seems to be where we are.

A month ago, in my other blog, I did advise Obama to play it cool, to stay about the fray.  But I didn’t mean that he should meet every circumstance with a desultory, Milquetoast placidity.  Right now, people are looking to the government for firm, convincing leadership.  Somebody needs to get punched in the nose.  People are crying out for blood.  Some heads must roll.

That doesn’t necessarily imply sadism.  No need to throw anyone to the lions.  But throwing them to the prosecutors, or giving them the bum rush, is a different matter.  It was sobering, last week or so, to see big-city mayors laughing at Obama’s threat to “call them out” if they wasted his stimulus money.  They weren’t too worried.  One of them said, “We get called out all the time.”  Somewhere, somehow, sometime, a president has to have some teeth.

Muscles get stronger from actually using them.  Political power accrues to those who already have power.  Mere admonitions and statements of concern can very quickly get this president back into Jimmy Carter territory, with his pronouncements about the “Moral Equivalent Of War” — which was quickly and justly shortened to “MEOW.”  Obama has been doing a marvelous job of following the examples of presidents like Roosevelt and Reagan.  But perhaps he could also learn a bit from Lyndon Johnson.

Question: Is Nighttime Good for You?

People originally lived outdoors.  They were outside during the daytime, and therefore got lots of sunshine.  They were also outdoors at night, except if they happened to live in a cave.  So they got to see the stars and the moon, feel the night breeze, hear the nighttime insects, and so forth.

Nowadays, people are mostly indoors at night.  Even when they are outdoors, they tend to be in towns and cities, where they have very little contact with the original human nighttime experience.  They may not *feel* deprived, but it is possible that they are, in fact, deprived of some kinds of physical or emotional experiences that would be good for them.

I wondered about this because I found that I sleep so well outdoors.  If I can get myself a tentsite (or, in bug-free locations or times of year, a place to lay down a tarp) that is not near sources of artificial noise, no parties going on nearby, etc., it’s a great experience.

Scenario: Next Experiential Step in the Economy

We have reached the point of recognizing that our economic wizards made some serious mistakes in handling subprime mortgages, banking regulations, and so forth. In this sense, we have laid the groundwork for a recovery like the one that followed the dot-com bust circa 2000.

This time around, however, we are seeing a real Dolly Parton bust. It’s much bigger and much more artificially created than the dot-com bust. If anything, the dot-com crash was our warning sign, indicating that we had now created an economy that was capable of such foolishness. We didn’t unmake the artificial contrivances of that economy. To the contrary, we treated them as though they were normal — were, indeed, just the start of something truly grand.

On this reading, it will not be enough, this time around, to recognize that we once again did something like the dot-com bust. This time, we have to go further and recognize that some substantial segment of our economic assumptions and behaviors are untenable. We are already progressing toward that, in pulling back from unsustainable spending and beginning, instead, to count our pennies.

If we had pulled back, like this, before the thing started to spring leaks, we might have managed a graceful retreat. Unfortunately, we didn’t have leaders, institutions, common sense, or divine intervention to give us a serious heads-up. So now we are going to have to do it the hard way. This will be a panicked retreat, a volatile, disruptive, destructive affair.

Usually, when you have panicked and destructive actions, things go a little overboard before reverting to a relatively moderate state of readjustment. We’re not likely to just wind our way down to a lower level of economic activity, and then calmly and gradually start to put things back together again. What’s more likely is that there will be some experiences of financial devastation, a widespread sense of economic despair, people in the streets, wrecked and sometimes terminated lives — in short, a fairly extreme unmaking of things we have taken for granted for decades.

Where we will wind up, I think, is a mindset that goes much further than before. We won’t say that the subprime mortgage meltdown was a sort of repetition of the dot-com bust. We will say that both were symptomatic of an entirely confused sense of how a healthy economy works. My guess is that large numbers of people in coming years will reach a point where they decisively reject major parts of the contemporary economic landscape. They may feel that debt and/or high interest are absolutely impermissible; they may finally get serious about rejecting the nonsense of trickle-down Reaganomics; they may adopt a relatively permanent less-is-more mentality that rejects the accumulation of large, expensive, or unnecessary possessions.

The next experiential step encountered by participants in our economy, I am speculating, is to go through hard times that will shock people into revising some fairly basic assumptions. This is likely to take years. The teenagers of 2015, I am speculating, will be stunningly different from the teenagers of 1995.

Proposed: Public-Private Worksharing

Some companies have been known to pay their employees to do random work, for the companies themselves or even for other organizations, rather than take the easy route of just terminating or laying off those unneeded workers.  Companies have done this mostly because it can be difficult and expensive to recruit and train personnel, and perhaps to some extent because nobody likes layoffs.

The federal government could provide an incentive to encourage employers to do this.  One possibility would go like this.  Rather than being laid off, the employee’s wages will be reduced by, say, 15%.  Rather than expect the employer to pay all of the remaining 85%, which employers will tend not to do, the government could subsidize the paycheck with the amount of unemployment benefits the worker would receive.  So if, for example, the worker’s salary was $50,000, 85% would be $42,500; and if unemployment paid $22,500, the company would now have to come up with just $20,000 to keep that worker as its employee.  Caveats:  (1) These weeks of unemployment would count only partially, or perhaps not at all, against the weeks of unemployment to which the worker would ordinarily be entitled.  (2) The worker would have to spend part or all of his/her time working at projects designated by the government rather than by the employer.  Until the government came up with tasks on which the employee’s help was needed, s/he might just continue to work for the employer.  There may be some built-in incentives to encourage employees to com up with projects that demonstrably benefit their communities or specific nonprofit or governmental organizations.)

This approach would keep people employed, for the benefit of companies and individual workers alike.  It would preserve jobs that are continuous with the employee’s career, rather than putting him/her into some tangential enterprise that may not make good use of his/her special skills.  At the same time, it would put employers and employees on notice, in this and future crises, that they need to be looking at additional training, links with the community, or other ways of enhancing continuity in the employee’s work experience.

Needed: Hourly ETFs

There should be exchange-traded funds whose current value is posted hourly, based upon the previous hour’s transactions.  The reason behind such funds would be to allow people who want to do other things with their time to participate in ETFs by just checking in occasionally, knowing that much can change in an hour.

Proposed: Tax Credits for Helping Someone

The question is whether President-elect Barack Obama should cut taxes on the wealthy.  Raising taxes on anyone during a recession is said to be bad policy.  That may be; but it does not necessarily follow that a simple tax reduction is the most prudent course.

One alternative would be to grant tax credits in exchange for helping someone take a small (or large) step upwards.  Let’s say a charity connects the rich person to a person living in poverty.  The rich person gets a tax credit for getting that poor person enrolled in a training program, another tax credit for getting him/her a place to live, and another for making sure s/he has enough to eat.  As the rich say, no handouts:  they can have their tax credits, but they need to earn them.

Question: Does Upheaval Happen More at the End of Decades?

In 2008, Obama won on a campaign of change, which McCain imitated.  Clinton won in 1992 on a much more centrist message.

The world’s most famous stock market crash occurred in 1929.  The recession of the early 1980s arguably began with the 1979 energy crisis.  Likewise, the 2001 recession arguably began with the skyrocketing NASDAQ (dot-com) speculation in 1999.  The savings & loan crisis reached its peak in the late 1980s.  The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression began in 2007.

1968 may have been America’s politically most tumultuous year in the second half of the 20th century.  Also musically.  Elvis Presley made his big breakthrough in 1956.  Punk rock exploded in the late 1970s.  Apparently the first rap hit single came out in 1979.

Living in the Wrong Era

I just realized what the problem is.  Of course.  I’m living in the wrong era.

It’s no surprise that I wouldn’t recognize the problem right off.  It’s one of those weird kinds of problems, like a time travel movie where you made decision X rather than Y and now everything is different, and nobody knows how it might have been.  Or maybe it’s like having bad eyesight, and not realizing it, and when you look at your face in the mirror it looks normal – but when somebody puts reading glasses on your nose, suddenly – whoa! – there’s this whole reality that you had almost forgotten.  But now, for the first time in years, it’s staring you right in the face.

The era where I *thought* I was, well, that’s America in 2008, seen in one way; and the era where I actually *am* is sort of like that.  It’s America in 2008, but after having had that one key experience.  There’s this turning-point kind of experience, like putting those reading glasses on your nose, or like eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, in the Garden of Eden.  In an instant, everything changes, and you can never go back.

Except that you sort of can; and what’s more, you have to.  You remember that Garden of Eden experience, and you think about it for years to come.  The Bible says Adam lived 930 years, and apparently most of that was after his big screwup.  This is a seriously long time to live with regrets, and you know what happens, anyway, when people live with regrets.  Day after he bit that apple, he was saying to himself, Damn, that was stupid, but the apple sure tasted good.  Day after that, he was saying, You know, God kind of overreacted there.  Give it another week, and Adam is saying there’s got to be another way.  Small wonder that Cain was so f*cked up.  By the time he came of age, his dad had built up enormous repressed anxieties that he may well have redirected into domestic psychological abuse.  And Eve is, like, omigod, it has been 700 years since we had good sex.

Point being, you have put those glasses on your nose; you see everything different; you will never forget; and then you do pretty much forget and go back to your old ways, as soon as you lose those foolish glasses.  So I see America of 2008 in a very different way, because I have had that one eye-opening experience – but, to tell the truth, I’ve had a boatload of eye-opening experiences of America of 2008 – and before that, it was America of 2007, and America of 2006, and . . . Like, if someone whacks you over the head once, it really hurts; but if they do it every day, it’s more of an irritation and something to be avoided if you can, which in this case I can’t.

Proposed: Global Inflation as Financial Cure

People desperately need money now.  So give them money.

If any one nation does this by itself, its currency will become worthless.  If you print endless amounts of dollars and give them to all American citizens, you help them wipe out their debt, but it will take a stack of dollars to buy a single Euro.

But if all nations (or possibly just all major nations) do it in concert, there won’t be much else that people could exchange their worthless currencies for.  The price of gold and other commodities will skyrocket, because there will be still be people who will be able to afford to buy an ounce here and there.  People may still not be any more able to afford food.  But the credit crunch will end, because people will have the money they need.

Goals for 2100: Loyalty to Fashion Heritage

The accepted idea, from time immemorial, seems to have been that you should not dress like you want to dress; you should dress like everyone else wants you to dress.  So if, for example, you were raised in a time and place where it was normal to wear a double-breasted suit or a rope tie, you should not do that anymore if you find yourself in another time or place — not, that is, unless you are trying to make some kind of statement, and you are comfortable with people staring at you.  Instead, you should dress like everyone else dresses.  Likewise with the way you cut your hair and even the words you use to express yourself.

It could be more interesting, possibly less expensive, and, for many, easier and more gratifying to be able to dress as you see fit.  So if, for example, you think hippie beads, a long beard, and a tie-dyed T-shirt really express who you are, or if you think you look your best with a beehive hairdo, it should be OK for you to adopt that look until you’re ready for something else.

An insistence upon uniformity of appearance rewards those who do the best job of copying other people, and punishes those who see or think creatively.  Some people do medieval or Renaissance re-enactments, or they study Latin, and in those specialized context it may be OK for them to use words or wear clothing from the period; but maybe they would sometimes like to bring a bit of that into their daily lives.  Our world would be richer if we were more freely exposed to clothing — and, for that matter, ideas — from other present and past (and imagined future) cultures that more accurately reflect how we think or feel on a given day.

One way of phrasing this goal is to point out that, as we have become more tolerant of differences among people, we have removed ways of making them feel bad, and have instead improved their chances of feeling accepted for who they are.  It turns out that who they are is much more complex and interesting than previous generations realized.  They are apt to be happier and more productive, and less likely to fall into depression, sabotage other people’s relationships or careers, or shoot up the Post Office, if we accept them regardless of body size or shape, color of skin, and so forth.  This proposal merely takes that realization into the realm of fashion and style.

Proposed: Zardari for President

Excerpts from a recent New York Times article:

If Pakistan is the most dangerous country on earth … its presidency is one of the world’s least enviable posts. ….

My impression? This guy’s very smart, street smart, a wheeler-dealer in an area full of them, secular, pro-American, committed to democracy, and brave. I never heard Musharraf frame Pakistan’s fight against terrorism with such candor. …

Zardari added this: “I am not a warmonger. I am not interested in physical might which is not the expression of my strength. I have many strengths, and one of them is that I can take pain, not give pain. I don’t consider anyone who can give pain brave, I consider anyone who can take pain brave. That is why I consider a woman a stronger gender because she can take much more pain than a man.”

How about we give him safe passage to the White House?

Needed: Hackers for Pakistan

Pakistan is going down the tubes.  Someone will get their hands on its nuclear weapons, and the world will change.  And it could change in a very bad way.

Pakistan needs all the help it can get.  And once things are better in Pakistan, there will be a Georgia or a Somalia or someplace that will need help next.

There are a lot of very sophisticated computer users in this world, with enormous computing power.  I wonder if they could spare some time to help Pakistan, in some way, to defeat the strongholds of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda within its own borders.

Proposed: CCC + RTC = Public Service Administration

The Civilian Conservation Corps employed thousands of jobless young men in the 1930s.  In exchange for room, board, and a stipend, they built state parks and other public works that have been enjoyed by generations of Americans.  The discipline instilled by that experience served those young men well, as they next turned to military service in World War II and then to the building of the U.S. as the richest country on Earth.  This is not to oversimplify the costs and dangers in that sequence of events; but as a general proposition, the creation of the CCC did have tangible positive effects in response to the employment crisis of the Great Depression.

The Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) was a temporary federal agency responsible for cleaning up after deregulation of the savings and loan industry led to its collapse in the late 1980s and early 1990s.  For all that the RTC achieved, it was an imperfect solution.  As an employee of that organization, I heard and encountered a great many instances of poor management, great waste, and sometimes stunning inefficiency.  Among the multiple causes of the organization’s sometimes chaotic operation, one was haste, both in its creation and in its termination.  It appeared that, in its early days, the corporation had disposed of immensely valuable properties in a fire-sale fashion; and toward the end, many RTC employees seemed to be spending a great deal of their time trying to arrange their own transfers from that sinking ship — which by law was to go out of existence in the not-too-distant future — to permanent federal jobs.

The country now faces multiple crises.  There is, among other things, a crisis in the financial system, of such magnitude as to shake the country’s economy to its core; a crisis in the nation’s infrastructure, such that major bridges can collapse or be at risk of doing so; and crises in Iraq and, even more so, in Afghanistan, where the nation’s wealth and military recruitment have so far been insufficient to finish the job to which we committed ourselves.  To rise to the challenges posed by these and other crises, it cannot be business as usual.

Something is wrong when there is so much work to be done, and yet so much fear that people will lose their jobs, and so much discouragement on the part of those who have no jobs and cannot find any.  In theory, the job market will take care of such things; but in reality, it does not, and in various ways it has always failed to do so.  The job market has never paid stay-at-home parents for their irreplaceable contributions to the future; it has rarely paid teachers enough for doing their part; and it has never found itself sufficiently motivated to put up an army to defend the country, a postal service to deliver our mail, or an agency to give us trustworthy tests of our prescription drugs.

National service is not simply a matter of people opting to go to the Peace Corps instead of getting drafted.  We now approach an era in which it may be both necessary and salutary to provide meaningful jobs to all who need them.  That may mean repairing bridges with a new CCC, or carrying a gun in the military.  It may also mean providing adequate staffing for the next RTC.  This time around, the bailout agency should have sufficient personnel and resources to prosecute cases against those who milked the banking system, and to get a competitive price for the assets of the failed banks and other organizations that it will be taking over.  Even in a time of greater computerization, there will be lots of boxes of paper to go through, and lots of transactions to scrutinize.

People are now talking about reregulation of the financial industry.  It would be fair to ask whether there should not also be improved regulation of infrastructure, so that we do not again have this experience of blowing money on SUVs and McMansions while failing to keep the water pipes working.  Regulation of the military would also be a good idea, in some sense of the term, to insure accountability and timely changes of course when a strategy is patently failing.  One could say much the same of the health care industry and the judicial system, both of which operate under regulations of a certain type, and yet substantially fail to provide affordable services to those most in need of them.

The needed sorts of regulations may be most intelligently developed and administered on the basis of practical familiarity with what went wrong before.  The job of a file clerk or grunt soldier is not necessarily just to do what someone else tells them.  It is also to think, ask questions, learn, report findings, and become knowledgeable in the better ways and worse ways to do things.  Theirs is the sort of knowledge that should inform future regulations.

Rather than create another RTC to come into existence and then vanish again, it may be time to create a problem-solving public service agency with a longer-term horizon.  With or without a competent president, the country does not need to keep lurching from one crisis to the next.  When the next Hurricane Katrina hits the next New Orleans — indeed, well before that happens — there should already be a combination of meaningful pre- and post-event plans in place.  This is a matter of having, administering, and revising regulations that people inside and outside the agency find relevant and useful on a daily basis.  Again, such regulations cannot just flow from the pen of an attorney who lays the onus on others to do whatever s/he says.  To work, regulations of these kinds should be developed and revised interactively and continually, through consultation with the people who are actually building those levees or digging through those file boxes.

The next crisis-response agency should not be a flash in the pan.  The U.S. is now at a place of needing a relatively stable repository of problem-solving knowledge and skill.  People who want to make a difference, regardless of skill level, should always be able to obtain employment in an enterprise dedicated to addressing the nation’s disasters.  That may mean the American Red Cross or the Army Corps of Engineers, working under contract with the proposed Public Service Administration (PSA); or it may mean the PSA itself, as it identifies and responds to the next short-term crisis or the next neglected long-term problem.

There are so many crises out there.  It may sound like what we need, really, is just for the government to start doing its job.  But the government has been doing its job.  The job of government, as we know it, is to do the work that now needs to be done, and to prepare for the work that is anticipated for the future.  Crises come, not from government failing to do its job, but from the job expanding faster than governmental budgets and political (and public) willpower can respond.  A public service administration, responding nimbly to an emergent issue, would strive to stay in touch with the messy realities, although certainly it may recommend or foster the creation or modification of agencies and regulations to handle the identified problem going forward.

The mission of the proposed public service agency is, ultimately, to institutionalize the concept of government by the people, for the people.  As we now know, neither a president nor a voter can reliably marshal enough knowledge, power, and long-term stamina to keep governmental institutions responsive to developing needs.  A problem-oriented public service agency — a sort of Ombudsman or Inspector General with executive power — would differ from agencies that deal with agriculture, education, or war.  Its commitment would be to an ethic of good government, no matter what type of issue it might be handling.  As such, it could inspire considerable popular enthusiasm, on into the indefinite future.

Proposed: American Carmakers Should Get into Trains

The highway paradigm seems to be dying; and even if it weren’t, it should.  Trains are a much more efficient and enjoyable way to travel, in most situations.  Chasing the highway paradigm may be the death of American carmakers.

It seems likely that prices of steel, aluminum, rubber, concrete, and other materials used in production of automobiles and highways will continue to rise as global consumer demand continues to swell.  While such materials become more expensive, Americans’ ability to afford them will continue to decline.  Americans are increasingly competing for jobs against developing nation workers who earn a fraction as much.  Governmental tax bases are eroding.  It is uncertain that federal and state governments can ever catch up with the massive overhand of accumulated bridge and highway projects on which maintenance has been deferred.

There is an alternative.  It centers around an extensive national rail system, built initially on one dedicated lane on existing limited access highways, and perhaps coordinated with bus networks, car rentals, and bike lending arrangements.  The purpose of this alternative is to get ahead of the curve by making a bold commitment to sensible transportation that fits people’s needs more affordably.

The automakers’ role in this system would be to design and build family-sized cars that can ride on the rails at high speeds in computer-controlled convoys.  Propulsion for distance travel could be supplied by engine units, just as with today’s trains, thus allowing each car to get by with a small electric motor and battery for short-distance hookups.  The cost of a vehicle would plunge as engines and transmissions vanished.  Railcars could still be stylish, but with a greater emphasis upon comfort (with e.g., spaces to eat and sleep) and aerodynamics.

Streamlining would be especially useful for those instances when users would travel in convoys of one, accompanied only by an engine unit.  Users might have the option of traveling common routes in groups or alone, the latter being managed by computerization to insure maximal spacing between vehicles.

There would be various possibilities for construction of the rails.  They might be made of steel or other metals, or possibly of plastics.  Alternately, cars could be guided by one or more steering troughs in place of weight-bearing rails.  As another possibility, concrete barriers and/or electronic sensors could provide channels in which these vehicles and convoys would travel.  There are enough possibilities, in any case, to suspect that engineers could develop something requiring far less space, maintenance, and material investment than today’s highways.

Besides being less expensive, such an arrangement would be incomparably safer and more pleasant.  Breakdowns, road rage, pollution, traffic congestion, junkyards, and other maladies of the present arrangement could be studied and minimized.  Falling asleep on the way home would be fine.  Drunk travelers would not kill pedestrians.  Thousands of lives and incalculable pain and suffering would be eliminated.

For some years, as the network of rails began to spread, hybrid systems would be needed to link the high-speed rails with lower-speed local travel.  Auto manufacturers could design trucks, ferries, or motorized docking units that would tow, haul, or mesh with railcars to provide short-distance transportation from rail stopping points to travelers’ destinations.

This proposal would enable American automakers to start over again, to a considerable extent, with a blank slate and an opportunity to engage in better long-term planning than the shortsighted market has permitted in recent decades.  There would be target dates, some years out, by which specified phases in both the rail network and the railcars of the future would have to be complete.  The mediocre maintenance reputation earned by many American cars would be largely reset, since so many of the most expensive components in today’s carswould have been substantially altered or eliminated.  It would not matter anymore whether Toyota makes superior engines, because railcars would not have engines as we know them.

There is nothing inevitable about this proposal.  It does seem possible to keep breathing life into the model of the individually driven automobile running on asphalt or concrete roads.  That model comes with enormous costs and detriments, however.  At bottom, we love it sometimes, but it is getting old.  It is possible to imagine a new day and a better way in this consummately important set of industries.

Proposed: Stop Emphasizing Math and Science Scores

There is a perennial concern that the U.S. will fall behind because young people don’t study math, science, and engineering often enough or well enough.  A partial solution to this problem is to stop making such fields even more forbidding than they are.

Math is a language.  It is a way of thinking.  It is a world unto itself.  A kid can get lost in it.  It is just like a good novel, or a bug crawling around on the ground.

If participants in an educational system view math as scary, difficult, or intrinsically less fun than literature or social causes, kids will pick up on that message.  Those who do study math will do so for extrinsic rewards — money, for example, or secure employment — and not for its own intrinsic merit.  This means that, when they have enough money or security, they will want to turn to something else.

If, on the other hand, math teachers and literature teachers have mutual respect and appreciation for one another’s participation in the grand pursuit of learning for its own sake, there will tend to be a message that this is all an opportunity.  It is possible for a child to discover that this — learning — is a more rewarding way of spending one’s time than watching some stupid TV show.

In short, to improve math and science scores dramatically, stop emphasizing math and science scores, and start emphasizing the love of learning.  It became convenient to dismiss such a thing, as though it were a medieval holdover that we can ill afford in a fast-changing modern world.  The love of learning has become almost synonymous with the study of philosophy or other fields perceived as useless.

But the exciting new stuff tends to come from people who can slow down and look at things carefully.  It is essential to be able to become absorbed.  That’s the skill to teach.

Questions: What If It’s Not Just Parrots?

I was just thinking about what people do when they meet someone who speaks another language.  Sometimes, especially if they are not too bright or not too kind, they make jabbering noises at the person who is trying to speak to them.  That’s what they hear — jabbering.

Now, parrots have learned how to do this well.  We think they’re gifted because they’re very good at imitating spoken language.  But maybe they’re just more skilled jabberers.  Maybe all the animals are trying to talk to us, using what they hear as our language, when we talk to them.  It’s not that I actually said “oo-oo” to the monkey; maybe that’s just what it sounded like to him, or that’s as close as he can get to imitating what comes out of my mouth.

Needed: Paint Mix Sampler

I want to get some paint to fix a scratch on my car, or on my wall.  I want to go to the store and not buy a quart or even a pint:  I just want a half-ounce.  I’ll take it home and try it out.  If it’s not right, I’ll go back to the store and put another 50 cents in the automated paint mixing machine, type in the code for the exact shade (out of 16.2 million colors) that I tried last time, and then follow the software instructions, one step at a time, to (1) Lighten (2) Darken (3) Add more Red, (4) Add more Green, etc.

Contrarian Position: The Poverty Paradox

You cannot end poverty because people who have money are selfish.  They weren’t necessarily born that way; money makes them that way.  Comfort makes you less able to understand and sympathize with the failings and mistakes of other people; and as you experience fewer mistakes and failings, you tend to become even less able to sympathize.  In other words, the people who have the ability to end poverty are not going to be inclined, on balance, to do so.

The people who have the understanding needed to end poverty tend to be those who are somewhat on the lower end of the income scale themselves.  This includes not only poor people, but also social workers and the like, who tend not to be paid nearly as much as other kinds of professionals.  These people have the desire to end poverty, but they lack the power.

In order for the people who want to end poverty to develop the means to do so, they must become more wealthy and powerful.  In the process of doing so, they will tend to lose sight of what it was actually like to be poor, and why people are poor.  On the other hand, to get the people who have the power to make the move and do their bit, you have to put them into an inferior socioeconomic position — at which point they have the sympathy, but no longer have the power.

SAB Highlight: Eat of the Tree of Knowledge and Die/Live

Genesis 2:16 And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat:

2:17 But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. . . .

3:2 And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:

3:3 But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.

3:4 And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:

3:5 For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

3:6 And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.

5:4 And the days of Adam after he had begotten Seth were eight hundred years: and he begat sons and daughters:

5:5 And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years: and he died.

Needed: Calibrated Wind Chimes

The basic idea with wind chimes is that you have something that sounds nice when the wind blows.  It could be helpful to choose the weights of the different chimes so that they ring on regular windspeed intervals.  When the wind is blowing 1 MPH, one little chime rings.  2 MPH, two chimes.  And so on up to 5 MPH.  Then a heavier chime rings at 10 MPH, an even heavier one at 15 MPH, and so on to 25 or 30 MPH.  Then graduated by intervals of 10 to 20 MPH.  When you hit hurricane speed, you get a gong.

Needed: Equal Time for University Academics

There ought to be a law, or an accreditation requirement, or an FCC regulation, or something that would require universities to spend as much time and money promoting their specific academic achievements (i.e., not their vague reputations) as they spend promoting their sports teams.  For every billboard on the highway, every highway sign, every radio commercial that talks about the sports team, and for every minute of interviews granted to a college athlete or coach, there should be an equivalent billboard, sign, commercial, or minute of interviewing granted to — or, if necessary, purchased by — the university on behalf of its scholars, undergraduate and graduate programs, faculty members, and libraries.

Certainly sports have a place at universities.  As a parks & recreation graduate student, I feel recreation has an important place.  But so do academics, for heaven’s sake.  Sports provides a huge amount of money and attention for colleges.  To some extent, that continues to send the wrong message to young people, on the question of what they should aspire to achieve.

Proposed: Party Game: What Are You Thinking?

In this game, you sit in a circle and take turns.  The first person says, “I bet that, since this game started, someone in this circle has had the thought that they hope they will win the game.”  Everyone in the circle who has had this thought raises his/her hand, gets a point, takes a drink, or whatever.  If no hands go up, then the speaker loses a point, takes a drink, sheds a piece of clothing, or whatever.  You go around the circle, each person betting that they know of a thought that at least one person in the circle has had since the game started.  You play until someone reaches the winning score (10 points, maybe, or 21), or whatever.

Then you start back at the first person and ask him/her to repeat the thing that s/he bet first.  In the example just given, the first person would say to the winning person, “OK, John, I bet that someone in the group had the thought that they hoped they would win.  You raised your hand.”  Then the next person for whom John raised his hand would repeat the bet that s/he had made.  You go around the circle until you’ve repeated all of the bets that John raised his hand for.

Now John has to describe the thoughts he had, in response to each of the bets, and explain how one thought led to the next, or provide other details about the thoughts he claimed to have.  Then people in the circle vote on whether his story is believable.  If they think he’s fibbing, he loses his winner status, or gives up his points, or is out of the circle, or whatever.

Needed: An Extended Tour for International Students

Students from other countries come to the U.S. to study and earn undergraduate or graduate degrees.  Those who come from relatively familiar (e.g., European) cultures may benefit from this experience.  Those who come from relatively unfamiliar (e.g., Asian) cultures are at greater risk of having an experience that is counterproductive in some regards for them and for the U.S.

These students often study hard, excel, and in many cases go on to fill important positions in the U.S  They may stay here many years, or they may return to their homelands after a few years in the U.S.

Those who return home after school, immediately or after a few years, can easily go back with negative attitudes toward American people, values, and policies.  This has been especially likely during the Bush years, when there have indeed been many American college students and professors who would share their distaste for seemingly foolish, wasteful, and destructive American behaviors.  But even during those years, a different approach to international students from relatively unfamiliar cultures could have achieved better results in some cases.

The Bush Administration is not, in itself, solely responsible for some international students’ failure to become engaged with American life.  It is entirely possible for an Asian (or, perhaps, a Middle Eastern or African) student to come to the U.S., live on campus, hang out almost exclusively with other students from his/her homeland, maintain virtually no friendships with Americans, speak his/her native language in most of his/her daily contacts, watch TV from back home rather than American TV, improve his/her English only marginally over a span of two or more years, and go back where s/he came from with an enhanced knowledge of bad rather than good examples of American people and life.

A student of that sort can easily be a net loss for America, for American students, and for American universities.  They may return home with hostility toward and/or disappointment in America, in place of the admiration that brought them here.  In classrooms, they may sit silently, unable to follow the rapid give-and-take between students and professors, or they may pipe up with observations that demonstrate that they largely do not understand the discussion.  They may supply tuition dollars that help pay universities’ expenses, but in exchange they can easily be a drain on the level of energy, camaraderie, and interaction in the classroom.  Certainly they are not providing the international interaction that educators may hope American students would experience.  Such international students may also be unlikely to support the university in extracurriculars (e.g., sports, campus events).  And they, themselves, may not be having such a great time.  They are human beings too, obviously, and they can get lonely and feel excluded when they are so far out of the loop.

Of course, such observations vary from one situation to another.  Many international students do become intensively involved in school and classroom, interact extensively with their classmates and with other American people, media, and businesses, and generally participate as well as anyone could hope.  Many classrooms do facilitate active involvement by international students of any level of language ability and cultural orientation.  It would be unfair and inaccurate to say that any of the foregoing concerns apply to international students across the board.

Such caveats notwithstanding, it remains true that many American universities now make it possible for international students to keep themselves fairly isolated from Americans, and that that is in no one’s interest.

An alternative arrangement would admit students to the university only after demonstrating that they are capable of participating in meaningful discussion at the university level.  This demonstration might include some revised form of standardized test; the tests presently used are plainly not insuring sufficient language ability in international students.  It might also include interaction with, say, American tourists who visit their homelands.  One example of the latter could feature ten-minute conversations involving two would-be students and one tourist, where the tourist would be asked to state which of the two students spoke better.  A student who came out worst in each of three such pairings (with different American visitors) would hardly seem a likely candidate, while one who came out best in all three might merit some presumption of language and cultural competence, sufficient to understand and, hopefully, to become engaged in university life.

A different approach would be to allow or require would-be college students to begin with an American high school experience.  Much of what international students fail to understand, in typical banter, is of a cultural rather than merely linguistic nature.  There is so much slang in our speech, and there are so many obscure references in many classroom discussions (though of course these observations, too, vary greatly from one academic discipline to another), that it can take years before an Asian student begins to understand what we are talking about.  A response in that case would be to send them to high school before letting them into college, if necessary, so that they can have a fair shot at having a good and well-rounded college experience.

Needed: Personal Numbers Map

Some numbers seem to recur in people’s lives at times.  For example, a person might coincidentally live at two different houses numbered 1012 (e.g., 1012 Main St. and then, years later, 1012 Green St.).  It’s probably just coincidence.  Still, it could be interesting to see which numbers appear most frequently in one’s daily materials.  A program running in the background on one’s computer could process all of one’s electronic letters, e-mails, and other data sources, capture all of the numbers appearing in those sources, and map them in terms of (a) their frequency and (b) the statistical likelihood that those particular numbers would recur at that frequency.  Of course, there may need to be some adjustments (for e.g., one’s present home address, or for numbers in frequently-used spreadsheets).  Some such adjustments might consist of a simple weighting according to the number of seconds during which such numbers are visible on the computer screen during a given month.  At any rate, the idea would be to create an appropriately weighted map that would highlight the most frequently used numbers, perhaps for comparison with similar number charts generated by other persons whose numbers might interest the person, for whatever reason (e.g., one’s spouse, a celebrity, someone of the same astrological sign).

2120 Hindsight: The Life Expectancy Gap

The exploration of paradox was an important development in philosophical logic during the 21st century. People gradually quit thinking that contradiction proves or disproves anything. This momentous change meant that, for the first time in some 2,000 years in some cultures, people began to realize that things are commonly true and false at the same time, in various regards. It was no longer that there might be black or white or shades of grey; it was, rather, that there were black and white and shades of grey.

This philosophical development had an important ramification in the realm of slavery studies. With the practical abolition of contradiction, it came to be recognized that people are always simultaneously free and enslaved. The question was no longer whether someone would be a slave; it was, rather, how s/he would be a slave. The strong – most of the strong, that is, in most times and most places – would generally be willing and able to force most of the weak to serve them; but in what ways?

The modern manorial movement grew out of the very belated realization that people specialize. Some are very practical; some are not. Some of the world’s brightest people cannot figure out how to dress themselves in the morning. Those who were given power over others, as a result of the manorial movement, came to have it because of their practical skills in arranging affairs of this world. They were, for the most part, highly competent in what they did, but one would not generally confuse them with the truly brilliant or insightful type of person.

Practicality, combined with the mandatory concern for people’s welfare and balance of competing priorities, explains why so many of the first liege lords were drawn from the ranks of the old judiciary, as it existed up through the early decades of the 21st century. As a prominent jurist of that era pointed out, “The judge’s essential activity . . . is the making of a large number of decisions in rapid succession, with little feedback concerning their soundness or consequences. People who are uncomfortable in such a role – and perhaps they are the most introspective, sensitive, and scrupulous people – do not become judges, do not stay judges, or are unhappy judges” (Posner, 1990, p. 192). Certainly practicality had a place in this business, along with an ordinary – that is, not to say a passionate – concern for the general welfare.

One thing these liege lords recognized, from the outset, was that people were just not very good at taking care of themselves. They were, in particular, not very good at deciding how many children they could raise properly. Those least suited for the responsibilities involved in heading a nuclear family of the 20th and early 21st centuries were, too often, those who got themselves most deeply mired in it – starting their families young and keeping at it for entire decades, often with insufficient food, clothing, attention, love, and even interest in the bare existence of all those kids they were begetting.

The liege lords, meanwhile, were the sort who were comfortable with making sweeping decisions in such regards. They did tend to bring a certain cultural perspective into that sphere. Research has demonstrated (too late, as often happens) that they frequently imposed their own values in ways that were destructive of entire cultures and lifestyles among certain socioeconomic groups. Regardless, by the middle of the 21st century – by, that is, their early years in operation – the liege lords had already perceived clearly that, according to their standards, this state of affairs among child-bearers could not continue.

One of the driving factors behind that conclusion was the life expectancy gap that had emerged and widened during the previous half-century. A widening wage gap was, of course, old news by the dawn of the Asian Century. Everyone knew – indeed, Americans had long expected and accepted – that the most highly skilled and sought-after leaders would command incomes vastly greater than those paid to the entirely replaceable individuals of the rank and file. This much had been part and parcel of American capitalism since at least the 19th century. But by 2010 the backlash against overpayment of top executives brought stockholder groups into cooperation with anticorporate and antiglobalist groups in the call for change. Such groups’ motives differed, of course – the stockholder groups believed that overcompensation sometimes had a counterproductive effect on executive competence – but from that time forward there were fewer extremes of executive overcompensation.

The wage gap that concerned most people thus tended to involve, not the infrequent extremely overpaid chief executive officer, but rather the gap between what came to be known as the Living Wage and the Dying Wage. While economic well-being could be (and was) measured in theory as a continuum, in terms of the numbers of dollars available per person within a household, in practice people tended to be drawn toward standards of living that either were, or were not, conducive to their continued survival and well-being. At a certain point, the combination of economic numbers and psychosocial conditions tended to demonstrate a statistical differentiation between a surviving middle class and a struggling and dying underclass – even though, in the affectation of the time, people who called themselves “middle class” out of pride had long been, in fact, far below a middle-class standard of living.

In any case, though, it was not the wage gap that forced a change. The change element was, again, the life expectancy gap that became more evident, and grew wider, following the collapse of the so-called middle class lifestyle. After an extended period during which the life expectancies of ordinary Americans grew steadily longer, the trend began to reverse itself for the increasingly visible underclass. People without sufficient resources to afford increasingly expensive health care, freshwater sanitation, and natural foods – forced, that is, to rely upon the relatively primitive artificial foods of the time, and to accept a certain amount of daily exposure to drug- and antiseptic-resistant viruses – found themselves increasingly vulnerable to lethal maladies that their overburdened health care sector could no longer address effectively.

As stated by an epidemiologist of the time (Srinivar, 2024, p. 117), “Detroit is the new Calcutta.” A population driven especially to coastal and Great Lakes cities by drought in the interior, concentrated in city centers by contractionist theories of burban development, and no longer able to live off the land – to subsist, that is, on the surviving disease- and drought-resistant but inedible supergrains without sophisticated processing – found itself experiencing, on those city streets, a form of existence that had been assumed to be a thing of the past. For the underclass, life expectancies began to decline precipitously, and continued to do so for some time.

Power rides upon principle. It is not certain that the liege lords would ever have been able to secure the sweeping authority they did acquire, even under such conditions of hardship, if they had not been supported by a rather virulent responsibilism. The land, said many, should not be expected to carry people whom it, itself, cannot support, and parents should not be burdened, by self-destructive sociocultural habits and expectations, with children whom they, themselves, could not reliably raise, feed, educate, and otherwise perpetuate in survival. Thus, in a new development in the ancient argument between Plato and Aristotle, it gradually came to be accepted that a child was, in fact, both the responsibility and the property of the entire community, rather than of those who created it.

On that basis, parenthood came to be seen, not as some unwritten birthright, but rather as a natural condition, like the ability to become intoxicated, that may appropriately be indulged by some people, sometimes, but that should not become a general habit and should perhaps never be practiced by those who cannot do so responsibly. Later, under the care and guidance of the liege lords, people became more or less naturally associated with a private rather than public overseer in all capacities of life; hence the ascendance of the liege lords and their tendency toward population restriction.

These were not, after all, times in which people would support themselves through manual labor on the land. A larger population did not mean greater prosperity. To the contrary, what could be produced was being produced, nearly as efficiently as possible, by a relatively small population. The rest were surplusage. They would literally eat into the resources of the city and, later, of the liege lord. The quest for ever more habitable lands argued strongly against the previous century’s rapid despoilation of the countryside; now there were the sons and daughters of liege lords who expected their own manors upon attaining majority. In short, the entire productive system of the 19th and 20th centuries was turned on its head, with views of excessive population being an important aspect of the process.

It would be incorrect to represent this process as entirely peaceful and gradual. There was one additional, important development. Declining life expectancies brought increasingly casual attitudes toward survival. Where life was cheap, it was easily spent. People who might not have dedicated themselves to violent attacks upon the middle class and its supportive authorities, if they had expected themselves to live into their sixties or beyond, were increasingly willing to undertake such attacks as their life expectancies dropped well below that. Such statistics meant that, in practice, angry young men and women all knew someone who had died or been killed in some way that, they believed, was not supposed to happen to “middle-class” persons. They realized that the same sort of thing might happen to them next. Thus the tradeoff between conformity and resistance began to be recalculated by underclass Americans en masse. A “protecting” mentality took root, not only among those who needed protection, but also among the better-off individuals who saw “protection” of the poor as a way to neutralize the more radical voices among them.

Needed: Global Database Database

There should be a website that provides a link to each known global database.  One example of a global database would be a global listing of parts available for purchase.  Another would be a universal basic biography website.  A Google search (for e.g., “global database”) could work, if it wouldn’t also turn up so many other pages that are not global databases in this sense.  The basic purpose would be to provide a quick start into a search for anything that should be listed in a global database.

SAB Highlight: How Many Gods Are There?

Genesis 1:26
And God said, let us make man in our image.

Genesis 3:22
And the Lord God said, Behold, then man is become as one of us, to know good and evil.

Genesis 11:7
Let us go down, and there confound their language.

Exodus 22:28
Thou shalt not revile the gods.

Exodus 34:14
For thou shalt worship no other god: for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God.

1 Samuel 28:13
And the king said unto her, Be not afraid: for what sawest thou? And the woman said unto Saul, I saw gods ascending out of the earth.

Psalm 82:6
I have said, Ye are gods.

Zephaniah 2:11
The Lord will be terrible to them: for he will famish all the gods of the earth.

John 10:33-34
The Jews answered him, saying, For a good work we stone thee not; but for blasphemy; and because that thou, being a man, makest thyself God. Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?

Needed: Freeway & City Noise Cancellation

They have noise-cancellation headphones.  They need the same thing throughout cities.  Noise polluters should be obliged to install appropriate technologies, as soon as they become available, sufficient to counteract the noise they generate.  The idea that you can burden your neighbors with your noise — whether you are a music lover or a factory — should be as intolerable as the proposal to burden them with any other form of pollution you might generate.  People should not have to erect walls that block everyone’s view in order to protect themselves from overwhelming noise (e.g., along freeways).

Needed: Mass Transit Experimentation

Everybody’s worried about gas prices, about the cost of commuting and relying on cars.  People are going to be talking about improved mass transit.

Which we need — desperately.  We have needed it for decades, since the 1970s and before.  I remember writing a letter, as a schoolboy, to a state governmental transportation authority in Indiana in the 1960s.  I said that what we needed was an individualized rail-based system of transportation.  I suggested that rails could lead into people’s garages, just as driveways do.  It seemed to me that it would be cheaper and easier to run one or two rails than to cover the nation with hardened concrete platforms, wide as a barn and endless thousands of miles long.

The rail guy was kind enough to respond in all seriousness to my childish letter.  He said that a rail system limits mobility.  I remember thinking — Yeah, and a highway system doesn’t?  I still wonder what he was thinking.  Those were not the days of four-wheel drive vehicles and off-roading.

At the time, my concept was that each family could have a pod-like car that would run on rails, and when a bunch of them wanted to drive across the country on vacation, they could connect their cars together into individualized passenger trains and run them on express rails.  Later, when computers became popular, it occurred to me that computers could do that too.

I guess I still don’t get it.  Why perpetuate a system that kills so many thousands of people each year, when you could do something else instead — something that would move everyone along at maximum feasible speed, without slowdowns for accidents, without these tremendous road construction projects, without the unbelievable tab for maintenance that we now don’t know how we will afford?

Anyway, I wouldn’t be surprised if rail transportation will experience a comeback.  My suggestion now is that it do so incrementally, in tandem with developments in preferences.  An alienated nation created suburbs in which people wouldn’t have to know their neighbors and wouldn’t have (or be able) to walk to the market.  That may not be the shape of the next generation’s America.

What’s needed is some relatively small, rapidly planned, highly publicized efforts that combine incremental mass transit development with higher-density residential areas.  Run an existing subway or light rail line one stop further, as quickly as possible, to a neighborhood that is being developed as an old-fashioned smallish town (of, say, 5,000 to 15,000 people), complete with its own city center including courthouse, grocery, and so forth, but perhaps with higher population density within walking distance of the train station.

Knowledge from that sort of project could advise as to whether the country is going to be intensively urbanizing or is, instead, in the market for a revival of the old Interurban lines, rolling along, trolley-like, from one freestanding small town to the next.

2120 Hindsight: Commencement Address by Dean Hasayna Silverstein

My fellow scholars:

I greet you at a special moment in the history of Avicenna University. This year marks the centennial of the founding of this educational institution in 2020. With you, members of the class of 2120, I feel the excitement of releasing you into the world, to share with it the marvelous gifts you have shared with us during these past six years.

As I was preparing the remarks I will be making today, I thought you might appreciate hearing a full 15-minute speech, in the style of the times when this university was founded. [Audience laughs lightly.] In those times, it was believed that wisdom came primarily from wise people. Everyone wanted to be considered wise; therefore, everyone had a great deal to say.

It seemed absurd, at the time, to imagine that one of the 22nd century’s leading centers of education would arise here in the blue grass of the district – what was then the state – of Kentucky. Places like this were backwaters, as people called them then: they were places where the water just sat, rather than rushing rapidly to somewhere or other. Backwaters were thought to be places where not much was happening – where wise people did not tend to congregate, and where, therefore, wisdom was believed to be in short supply. Water was not supposed to just sit around and do nothing. [At the mention of water, the audience grows very quiet.]

We know, now, where that leads. Funny, how the imagery changes when circumstances change. We are now more inclined to realize that, when water rushes off to some other place, you can’t keep it and use it. It’s gone. Backwater stays put, and remains available for those who need it.

The 20th century’s frothy centers of intellectual ferment brought strange fire to the hands of people bent upon misusing it. The yeast fermented uncontrollably. Finally, the batch blew up. The so-called Islamic Manhattan Project returned the strange fire of nuclear power to its birthplace, sending an exceedingly urgent message to political and intellectual leaders worldwide. Suddenly, froth was not so appealing; suddenly listening, reading, and thinking became as valuable and esteemed as speaking, writing, and teaching had been.

And so the way was prepared for the world’s discovery and embrace of Islam, enduring philosophy of the desert. The way was prepared, that is, for the interminable cycle of reflective life in which all (and university faculty most of all) are humbled before the vastness of that which they do not know. In the Judeo-Islamic backlash that followed the devastation of New York City, our thousand-year-old heritage was rediscovered. True Islam – the Islam of Avicenna, Averroes, and others of their era; of humble, openhearted, and exceedingly kind thought – reemerged.

Thus, this proud university came into existence. Here, you have found a haven from the harried practicality of everyday life, from the day-to-day struggles of those who must rely upon common sense in order to survive. I have satisfied myself, from extensive conversation with each of you, that you are well aware of the extraordinary privilege to which you have been entitled, during these years of reading and contemplating classical works in their original languages. You have acquired an education, in the very deepest and most consequential sense of the word.

You are now prepared, beyond any likelihood of temptation into practical affairs, to labor in good and anonymous pursuits, providing unpatented and virtually uncorrupted insights to political leaders and other decisionmakers whose entanglements would otherwise prevent them from achieving depth of insight or clarity of purpose. You cannot cure the desperate internal deficits that compel those unfortunate souls to seek approval in the eyes of thousands of onlookers; but, like generations of Avicenna graduates before you, you can – and you will – help those decisionmakers utilize the fruits of reflective wisdom at a level they would otherwise be unlikely to attain, within the still-benighted world in which they must function.

Avicenna, the scholar, helped to preserve the knowledge upon which Europe would later depend, during those dark centuries before Europe was prepared to use that knowledge. Avicenna, the university, likewise came into existence in a period that spanned many dark centuries, when an obsession with material goods and individual survival had left the bulk of humanity increasingly incapable of experiencing deep satisfaction and peace within themselves, with others, and with nature. In place of an individualistic, competitive divisiveness that had turned people against their neighbors and their planet, Avicenna University offered a path forward, one that will work sustainably for all of humanity, forever.

[Dean Silverstein lifts her hands. Members of the graduating class rise.]

This, then, is your fate, dear students. I welcome you to your futures. I bless your endeavors. I thank you, as my colleagues, for blessing us with your presence.

Let us now enjoy some refreshments and return to our work. But first, please allow me to append a short comment about this unusual little speech I have given.

I realize I have said many things here. These are things to which you, the graduating members of the class of 2020, have already been exposed. It will not be difficult for you to ponder and process my words, lengthy though they have been. But I do want to express my concern on behalf of those parents, family members, and other members of the audience who have not been so fully exposed to such subjects, whose daily meditations may thus be disturbed, for some time to come, by the thoughts I have expressed. Had this not been such an important milestone in the history of this institution, I would not have made such a speech. In the consensus of the faculty of the university, however, these are thoughts of such importance as to merit inclusion in your reflections. May they serve you well.

Needed: Tech Jams

It would be entertaining and instructive to attend a jam session of highly skilled tech types.  The ambiance would be that of a karaoke bar, but the equipment onstage would be a set of fearsome multimedia computer systems.  The concept would be that you wait your turn to get up there and do something with the huge display, the audio synthesizer, the 3D sculpting printer, and whatever other toys they have.  No doubt the best acts would feature some audience participation.  (Has anyone yet actually invented Aldous Huxley’s “feelies” movies?)  Example:  instant group therapy, with volunteers from the audience wired for galvanic skin response, heartrate, etc., complete with therapeutically trained group leader and audio and visual feedback indicating how each group member is responding up on the big display.

Needed: Google Search Refinement Add-On

1.  I do a Google search.  It gives too many results.  I refine it.  It gives fewer.  I want to see the cascading list of what I had before, and what I have now, and what I get when I refine it further.  Color-coding would be good, to show me (in e.g., blue) which ones dropped out in the first round, and (in e.g., green) which ones dropped out in the refined search, etc.

2.  Having refined my Google search, I begin to look at individual articles.  I want to annotate what I have found.  Under each Google hit, I want a space where I can write notes to myself about what this website contains.  I want it to happen within the Google format, so my notes will come up again if I do a similar study in the future.  Having annotated various webpages in the Google search results, I want a check box that allows me to hide the less relevant results, or perhaps display them in greyed or smaller print.

3.  I want to be able to design categories, and to click all categories that apply to each website Google finds (e.g., “informational site,” “product sale site,” “too good to lose”), and save my clicks, and do future searches (for e.g., “great vacations”) just within webpages I have already marked with checkboxes (as being “too good to lose”).

2120 Hindsight: The End of Slavery

One of the most firmly held beliefs of the 20th century, in the United States, was that slavery had been largely eradicated following the First Civil War (CW I). This belief was possible primarily because, at that time, slavery was defined in terms of chattel ownership of one person by another. The ascendant view, throughout much of the 200-year period beginning in 1865, was that ending slavery was a convenient matter of forbidding the legally authorized ownership of persons.

That view survived as long as it did because this was an era of extraordinary cognitive disconnection, wrought primarily by excessive tolerance and sheer public fatigue. In other words, people were essentially trained to look at a situation and conceptualize it in terms other than what it obviously was.

The fatigue factor was simply that people were too tired and overwhelmed by the constant barrage of news, advertising, decision, stress, obligation, and the other trappings of consumerist society. They did not have time or stamina to sort things out and understand them. So when they looked at ongoing slavery, they lacked sufficient energy, training, or inclination to perceive it as such.

There were also, as always, some risks in any act of questioning the dominant viewpoint, in those areas where such questioning was societally verboten. People were free to wear, say, and think all kinds of things; but they were not really very free to question what the First Civil War had actually achieved, much less to ask whether another such war might be necessary to consummate the truly free society that abolitionists of the mid-19th century had envisioned.

The tolerance factor had to do with the core democratic flaw through which tired, uninformed, and easily manipulated voters could be persuaded to grant enormous power to madmen and fools. There was a remarkable faith in the wisdom of the people. Voters in Germany had elected Adolf Hitler in 1933, despite indicia of his intolerant views. And yet, after the experience of years of extremely costly war against Hitler, American voters reserved the right to do much the same with a series of extremist presidents in the late 20th and early 21st century. As in Germany, those presidents did not seem extreme when they were being elected; voters in all such instances were pretty confident, time after time, that they were finally getting it right. Only with the post-Depression generation of the 2020s was there, at last, sufficient public humility to obtain ratification of the 30th Amendment and imposition of basic knowledge requirements for those who would vote in national elections.

Because of these fatigue and tolerance factors, people of the slavery centuries possessed a highly developed ability to misconstrue a situation despite overwhelming evidence. As we now know about consumerist democracies, members of the public were typically functioning in a satiated mode of near somnolence, lulled almost to sleep by their comforts, at a time when alertness might have served them better. People simply did not see slavery as a continuing phenomenon, much less a growing one.

Slavery was only beginning to develop during the first century after CW I. The banning of chattel slavery meant that those who wished to own persons would have to do so in more carefully camouflaged ways. Black people were released from their plantations only to endure more than a century of struggle for equality with whites; and even then, their equality was often de jure rather than de facto.

Of course, blacks remained only a small minority of the population, and aggressive enslavement efforts were meanwhile underway elsewhere. For purposes of facilitating a highly affordable middle-class lifestyle, corporations enlisted desperate developing-nation workers (whether located on U.S. soil or abroad) in wage-slave conditions that were often worse than those that chattel slaves had experienced. The plantation slaveowner had a financial investment in his/her slaves, and would lose money if a slave became weaker or died. The wage slaveowner, by contrast, could exhaust the labor of the wage worker with little if any maintenance and upkeep expense, and (except where forbidden by relatively scarce effective union contracts) could simply discard the worker when s/he proved unprofitable.

The U.S. was thus able to exploit its predominant position in the world for more than a generation following World War II, so as to provide an unprecedentedly luxurious life to its middle-class citizens (primarily at the expense of those persons, American and not, who were least able to protect themselves); but in the late 20th century that American position of global supremacy began to fade. Working conditions for whites had been relatively tolerable, though still highly exploitative and oppressive, for nearly three postwar decades; but by the mid-1970s they were beginning to revert to their less tolerable prewar form, albeit in service rather than manufacturing industries. In this sense, blacks finally did achieve large-scale admission into the middle class, only to find that the middle class was ceasing to be what it had once been.

Facing overwhelming fiscal difficulties, reformist administrations of the early 21st century found themselves increasingly unable to help their constituents meet basic needs for security, education, food, shelter, urban infrastructure, and old-age assistance. Slowly, research began to demonstrate that consumerist democracy was delivering a lifestyle inferior to that which American farmers had enjoyed a century earlier – and, of course, vastly inferior to that which tenants had enjoyed under the manorial form of societal arrangement employed in Europe in the 12th century.

Such findings eventually contributed, not only to the passage of the 30th Amendment, but also to the formation of the Freedom Party, with its insistence that people enjoy greater peace, freedom from worry, quality of interpersonal relationships, and liberty of action and self-expression in small, insular communities under the protection of an appropriately trained and competitively selected liege lord.

Decades would pass before the Freedom Party moved out of fringe status and finally achieved power. Once the issue had been brought to public consciousness, however, those decades of recurrent tragedy and trauma served to underscore the plausibility of the Freedom Party platform. The first elected Freedom Party candidate for national office was Senator Perot of Oregon in 2024, but it would be nearly three more decades before the party was finally able to gain control of Congress and begin to dismantle the American slave legacy.

Proposed: You’re Welcome Friday

After Thanksgiving Thursday.

Goals for 2100: Top Governmental Officials Get Day Jobs

It is possible for a person to become wrapped up in his/her day-to-day activities and grow out of touch with the larger world.  This can happen to a president, Supreme Court justice, or member of Congress, just as it can happen to anyone else.

True, elected officials are supposedly in touch with what their constituents want, if they hope to be re-elected.  But this does not necessarily happen.  Such people are often able to win re-election through deceptive political advertising, negative campaigning, and other strategies that tug at voters’ emotions while leaving their larger life situations neglected.  Thus Americans, with their votes, have managed to spend many years in periods of excessive tobacco use, unpopular gun laws, substandard health care, and other circumstances that they actually do not want, circumstances that other advanced nations have been far more able to address responsively.

The suggestion here is not that the president should go back to a high-powered law firm, Hollywood filmmaking, or whatever it was that s/he did before becoming a politician.  The suggestion is, rather, that top leaders should be expected to spend a substantial number of hours, each week, working in a type of job that exposes him/her to a variety of real-life problems that people face.  Examples could include positions as counselors, social workers, nonprofit organization administrators, small businesspersons, legal aid lawyers, nurses, and community leaders.

Such leaders should be exposed, moreover, to real-life living conditions, to some practicable extent.  It is perhaps not realistic to imagine that a president could get a good feel for the life of a homeless person merely by tenting out in a park, surrounded by Secret Service agents.  Nor is it likely that such a leader would have the time to run an ordinary middle-class household.  But there may be some sort of living arrangement that would provide at least some constant reminder of what people are experiencing.  One example might be to live as a guest within a host family’s home and to participate in that family’s decisionmaking.

Such activities would detract from the number of hours available for affairs of state.  They could also distract the leader’s attention from important decisions that a national leader must make.  That is an important concern.  It is not necessarily crucial, however.  Leaders spend much of their time undoing the damage (or reversing the progress) that previous leaders have managed to achieve.  While the distraction of a real life could hamper a leader’s ability to achieve some things, it could also inform his/her judgment and instincts, so that the things that s/he did pursue and accomplish might be more likely to endure — within, perhaps, less of a cultural of constant governmental upheaval.

It is also true that any job, including particularly a job in government, can become encrusted with internal politics, gossip, resentments, and other potentially destructive behaviors.  Leaders, in particular, can become accustomed to their comforts. to the point of being spoiled.  Whether or not the leader in question felt invigorated by regular exposure to the lives and problems of normal citizens, some such removal from a potentially insular world could be invigorating in fact.  There have been too many American presidencies, in particular, that have become insular, inward-looking, suspicious of the press, afraid of the public, and otherwise unresponsive and irresponsible.

The American government of 2100 can be more truly a government of the people, by the people, for the people.  Insuring that decisionmakers are ordinary people, directly or at least vicariously, could help to advance that goal.

Contrarian Position: Eliminate “Free Speech”

The theory is that we enjoy a right of free speech.  But that’s not true.  What the Bill of Rights says is, “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech . . . .”  It doesn’t prevent someone from abridging your freedom to speak within, say, the newspaper, church, or movie theater that s/he operates.  It just says Congress can’t pass laws preventing you from speaking freely.

Of course, that’s not entirely true either.  State and national legislatures can pass laws that allow you to be prosecuted as a terrorist if you say the wrong thing on an airplane.  They can pass laws that allow people to sue you for slander if you say the wrong thing about the wrong person.  They can punish you for saying something that someone else has already said — if, for example, you excessively quote someone’s book.

And then there are the nonlegal constraints.  Everybody knows you don’t badmouth a former employer in a job interview.  Commonly, you dare not say something kind about a person whom you are expected to treat as person non gratis.  You may hesitate to compliment the Nazis for something they seem to have done well; you may hesitate to ask the wrong kind of question, or state the wrong kind of opinion, in Sunday School; you express yourself circumspectly on the street, so as not to get punched in the nose.  Men learn caution when responding to the question, “Does this dress make me look fat?”; women learn to recite that size does not matter.  Our lives are simply filled with situations in which we learn not to speak freely.

So it would be impossible to eliminate free speech.  For better or worse, that has already been done.  What remains is to eliminate “free speech,” i.e., the term, which presently functions as a kind of doublespeak that purports to mean one thing and actually means something very different.  What we enjoy is not free speech; it is, more accurately, a certain degree of constraint upon governmental prosecution of nonpreferred utterances.  Genuine free speech would entail a kind of society that would seem very unfamiliar to today’s Americans.

When the false claim of “free speech” is eliminated, people may find it more difficult to evade the reality of the many ways in which they are constantly taught not to be honest with others or, ultimately, even with themselves.  Identification of problems is, often, an essential first step in understanding and solving them.

There are things in America, and in ourselves, that need improvement.  Let us claim a right to be honest about those things.  Let us acknowledge the ways in which law, society, and self prevent us from exercising that right.  The sooner we can achieve an accurate appraisal of our actual situations, the sooner we can begin figuring out how to improve them.

Proposed: Hillary Clinton Should Become an Actress

I’ve been chuckling, for years, at Leno’s & Letterman’s jokes at the expense of Hillary Clinton — about pantsuits and frigidity and all that.  But in reality, as I view the person she has turned out to be, I think she’s a consummate actress.  I don’t say that critically or disparagingly.  I mean to say she has the face and demeanor of someone who could turn in a compelling performance on film.

If she doesn’t wind up as vice president, she won’t be a major force in the Senate.  She doesn’t have enough seniority or, apparently, enough friends there for that.  There’s even a risk she will lose re-election; that happens, sometimes, to those who reach for the stars and fail.  I hate to see someone with her talents (and even with her ability to stir up controversy) simply wither away.  She’s had a remarkable run so far, as former first ladies go; why stop now?

Needed: Multifunction Typewriter/Printer/Scanner

I want to print an address on a size of envelope that I don’t normally use, or a design on a custom-sized piece of paper.  I don’t want to fool around with a dozen test runs to make sure the thing is configured right.

What I want to do is to see the envelope or custom-sized paper onscreen, courtesy of the multifunction device’s automatic sheet- and envelope feeder.  While the paper is sitting there on the scanning glass, I want to type, correct, edit, and finalize the address or whatever it is that I plan to print.  I want to see my typing superimposed on the scanned image of the paper, exactly where and how it will print.

Then I want to press the Print button and let the machine feed the paper on from the scanning glass to the printing unit.  Of course, if I’m just doing sheet-feed scanning, I want the scanned documents to bypass the printing unit; and if I’m doing automatic sheet-feed printing, I want the blank sheets or envelopes to bypass the scanning glass.

Needed: Universal Basic Biography

Nobody should be treated as though s/he were faceless.  At birth, and at important occasions thereafter, everyone should be entitled to the collection and preservation of a bit of basic audio, video, still image, and documentary information about them.  Important occasions might include turning a certain important age (e.g., 10, 21, 65), achieving a certain life milestone (e.g., graduating from high school or college, getting married, having kids), and being officially recognized (e.g., winning an award, medal, or significant promotion).  The information collected might include pictures and answers to basic questions (e.g., what achievement are you most proud of now?).  The information might be recorded by any variety of business and governmental offices (e.g., photography studios, motor vehicle bureaus) — just as it is possible, in some states, to get a motor vehicle inspection at virtually any mechanic’s shop.  The information might be placed into a webpage that can be edited in response to proven errors but not deleted, and that can be concealed, in part or almost entirely (except for e.g., name and a contact button), from public viewing.

One benefit of this proposal would be, as noted, to give everyone an official face.  With the benefit of a place to comb one’s hair and an opportunity to take a couple of pictures, people could have more respectful and higher-quality photos of themselves on their drivers’ licenses and, in the event of emergency (e.g., disappearance), in the newspapers.  If everyone had an official website, it would be possible to get in touch with them even if they didn’t sign up on reunion websites.  There would be at least one sense in which nobody would fall through the cracks, and there would be at least this one place where nobody was just a bum or other castoff.  There would be nobody in a developing nation who, as in the case of one acquaintance, had absolutely no childhood photos of herself and none of her now-deceased father.

Another benefit of this proposal would be to provide a basis for research and learning about the world’s people.  Instead of having to do expensive and sometimes unreliable census-taking and other fieldwork, the collection of at least the most basic data, one webpage per person, could facilitate basic data analysis (by e.g., country, gender, age).  This would be especially true if personal data, concealed from view for purposes of viewing individual biographical webpages, could nonetheless be polled anonymously for large numbers of people.

There would be security and confidentiality concerns.  Those concerns would be magnified to the extent that the personal biographical webpages were expanded to include more sensitive personal data (e.g., medical information available to persons to whom the patient provides a temporary password), and retained on file for purposes of anonymous research.  It is not presently clear whether international online security and law enforcement will improve to such a point that those concerns can become minimized.  To the extent that the Internet’s “Wild West” days can be consigned to history, public/private cooperation in developing a basic online biography for every person on the planet could be hugely informative, useful, and humane.

Conceivably, such a database could be developed to the point that it would replace some private databases about individuals.  If, for example, a person opted to have his/her credit information recorded here, it might be possible to forbid the collection and selling of such information from credit data agencies.  In this way, the person who wished to correct an error in such reports would have to do so only once, rather than going through the same struggle repeatedly with different credit agencies.  The same could be true of insurance and law enforcement records:  people might be able to gain more transparency about the truths or falsehoods that are being repeated about them by official individuals.  Security might also be improved, given that people may presently be entirely ignorant of incidents in which such data are leaked.

Proposed: The West Berlinization of Jordan

At the end of World War II, western troops faced off against Soviet troops across central Europe.  The result was an Iron Curtain that partitioned the Continent.

I visited Berlin in 1988.  West Berlin was a rich city, surrounded by East Berlin and East Germany.  It was an island of prosperity and freedom within a sea of repression and backwardness.  The U.S. and its allies made sure of it.  West Berlin was a beacon of what the whole of Germany could be, and of what it would become.

Israel and the Palestinians look likely to continue beating the hell out of each other until further notice.  While that trench warfare continues, the more strategic emphasis is upon the cultural bridge to the Middle East that exists and/or can exist in Amman and, conceivably, in a future, liberated Egypt and a future, demilitarized Beirut.

Unlike Berlin, however, that “best of the West” image should be predominantly freedom- rather than wealth-oriented.  Money is not going to impress Middle Easterners who already look askance at the rich emirates to their south.  What is more likely to impress them is religious and cultural freedom and tolerance, nurtured over a period of several decades.  As the saying goes, that which is important is seldom urgent, and (as we may belatedly learn, in our perennial efforts to achieve a frontal solution in Palestine) that which is urgent is seldom important.

Goals for 2100: An Experimental Society

The U.S. was poorly served by the constitutional arrangements that kept George W. Bush in power long after he should have departed.  The U.S. has been poorly served by its health care and educational systems.  Despite its wealth and power, the U.S. often proves strangely incapable of running its affairs competently.

To learn what approaches might work better, and to gain experience with them, the U.S. needs to become a place in which it is possible to test theories of governance and social policy on a large (say, statewide) scale.  Educational, legislative, and even constitutional reforms may be necessary to minimize uninformed resistance to prudent experimentation.

Needed: Ubiquitous Instant Input Microphones

I’m in the grocery store.  I’m looking for something.  I can’t find it.  I also can’t find a clerk to help me find it.  So I give up.  I want to tell the store about it and move on, maybe try again next week.  What I need is a wired or wireless microphone, one in each aisle, that will allow me to speak for up to 20 seconds, once per minute, so that I can register my suggestion or complaint in an audio file on the computer in their office.  If I want to leave my e-mail address too, I might try dictating that, or I might use the one or two microphones in their store that are accompanied by keyboards.

I’m standing in line at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles.  I’ve been in line for a half-hour.  It’s a huge waste.  The election is next week.  I’d like to tell the incumbent that this is one reason why I won’t be voting for him/her.  The incumbent should be required, or at least allowed, to put a microphone there in the line, and so should his/her opponent.

There’s a dog barking down the street.  It keeps me from sleeping.  I could get up, find the phone book or go online, look up the number for the Humane Society or the police, and call them in the morning.  Or I could call 911 and spend the next hour waiting to see if a cop is going to show up at my door at 1 AM.  What I really want is just to use a messaging system that would be designed to help me look up the delivery address for the message that, once again, I want to dictate into a microphone and be done with.

Instead of requiring everyone to install all kinds of microphones all over the place, I want my computer, cell phone, or PDA to connect me directly with a messaging system designed to facilitate quick lookups of the contact identifier for every person and organization in the world.  They’d have gotten that identifier at birth, or when their company was founded, or when they paid their taxes.  Nothing secret about it; this is how I would leave a message for someone whom I haven’t seen since high school.  Their identifier would still be the same, decades later.  I’d punch a few buttons, standing there in the pickles & olives section of the Kroger grocery store, and then I’d leave my question or complaint and be done with it.

Planning for Contingencies: The SHF

One way of planning for possible outcomes is to assign a percentage to each outcome.  If you think flipping a coin gives you a 50% chance of heads and a 50% chance of tails, and if you’re going to get $100 for flipping heads, then you average it out and you find that your average expected outcome is $50.

By that logic, let’s suppose flipping heads would give you, not $100, but $100 million.  Average it out and you get $50 million.  But that’s not realistic.  The choices are either $100 million or zero.  That’s all the difference in the world.

So what we have here is, basically, a “shit happens” factor (SHF).  Whatever you’re planning or imagining, there’s some tiny chance that quantum mechanics will do its magic and you’ll suddenly be transformed into a pretzel.  You don’t assign a percentage likelihood to that sort of thing; you basically disregard it and carry on as though weird things never happened.  You can’t plan for life as a pretzel, so there really is no alternative but to simply tell yourself that shit happens, but not to you.

Or maybe that’s not quite right.  You can’t plan for life as a pretzel, but you can plan for the end of life as you know it.  And maybe you should.  Get a bit of insurance, tell your loved ones that you love them, look at the flowers like you may never see them again.  No telling when a chunk of satellite will come flying out of the sky and hit you on the head.

There have been people, a lot of them, who got up in the morning and thought this was just going to be another day, and then it turned out not to be.  They got in a car accident, or their spouse called at noon to say they wanted a divorce, or an earthquake hit.  And then, suddenly, there was never a chance to go back and finish that crossword puzzle, or make that phone call, or get invited to join the varsity team.  Suddenly you were living in a tent, or they had put you on a bus to the juvenile detention facility, or whatever — and the rest is history.

SHF-informed planning does not just allow a bit of an adjustment in case of crisis.  SHF-informed planning asks what the hell we are doing here and now, when something in our hearts tells us that we are really supposed to be somewhere else.  To make SHF-compliant preparations for your life, it is advisable not merely to have your ducks in a row, but to be getting rid of ducks so you don’t have to worry about their proper arrangement.  No matter what some people may try to tell you, life is more than just ducks.

Needed: Video Time & Place Sharing

This one calls for a mix of Google Earth and peer-to-peer file sharing.

I take a video at a certain time and place.  I go to a version of Google Earth and indicate (a) the place that I am videotaping and (b) the point from which I am videotaping it.  I then enter the date and time of the videotape.

Someone else wonders what was going on at that time and place.  They go to Google Earth, point to that location, specify the time, and gain access to my video.

SAB Highlight: When Was the Sun Created?

Genesis:

1:3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
1:4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
1:5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

BUT:

1:14 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:
1:15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.

Evidently there was no “light upon the earth” before this point.  So the division of light from darkness cited above, as well as the evening and the morning, were occurring somewhere other than Earth.

AND:

1:16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.
1:17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,
1:18 And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.
1:19 And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

The creation of the Sun (1:15) occurred on the fourth day.  How could there be three days before this?

From The Skeptic’s Annotated Bible, which also provides the following link, among others:

In response to the theory that each so-called “day” actually represented an entire epoch, Dr. Jason Rosenhouse quotes Rabbi Natan Slifkin at length, including the following excerpts:

[A]lthough this approach reconciles the difference between a time span of six days and a time span of fourteen billion years, the events of those six days cannot be correlated with the scientific account of what took place during the fourteen billion years. . . .

There have been very ingenious attempts to make the content and sequence of Genesis concord with that of science, an approach known as “concordism.” Such efforts are, however, beset with serious difficulties . . . . [Among other things,] they render the true meaning of Genesis as something only comprehensible to modern man. And yet we see that, although the Torah is binding for all generations, God presented it in a form that would be meaningful to the generation that received it.  The laws of damages refer to donkeys falling in pits, not trucks ramming into cars. It is unreasonable to believe that God gave an account of Creation that mankind was completely incapable of understanding for thousands of years.

If Genesis can only be reconciled with science via obscure theories, reference to irrelevant phenomena, drastic and very difficult textual reinterpretation, and ingenious intellectual gymnastics, then it is not a very impressive scientific account. The most reasonable conclusion is that Genesis was never intended to be a scientific text . . . .

Needed: Bad Vision Goggles

They may already have these.  If they do, they should be used regularly in teaching in health and counseling professions (e.g., medicine, occupational therapy, social work, counseling).

The basic idea is that the student should have the experience of spending a day, or at least an hour, wearing goggles that can be adjusted to simulate various levels of vision loss or disease.  The student should see what it is like to have cataracts, 20/200 eyesight, etc.

Ideally, these would be sufficiently affordable to warrant purchase by each student, rather than having to hand them off from one student to the next.  They should also be sufficiently wearable to permit extended wearing, to facilitate more extended experience as well as research into the experience of sudden vision loss.

Needed: Trashpile-Cleaning Robots

We have mountains of trash. Inside those mountains are all sorts of things that could be better used. Some are recyclable. Some are compostable. Some are still potentially useful. Some are even brand new.

A trashpile-cleaning robot could have a camera and could be connected to the Internet. It could be connected to an electrical outlet, in which case it could work around the clock and could have quite a bit of power to move things.

The robot would look at some trash. As its online database became more refined, it would become better at identifying discrete objects and determining where they belong. Recyclable cans and bottles would be relatively easy; unopened cans of soup might require a combination of a visual inspection, a UPC code scan, and a weighing. Some items (e.g., a sofa) might require a sniff test and human judgment to determine whether it seemed potentially salvageable.

Each of the robot’s judgments would appear on a website. A fully trained robot (i.e., making judgments based upon an online database that seems highly familiar with the local kinds of soda cans and tree branches) might have graduated to automated mode, in which its website would merely record a continuous history of how it has handled each decision. A novice robot might pause at each item, showing on the webpage its determination of what the item is, and awaiting confirmation from one or more supervising humans online.

The robot would not necessarily need to move each identified item very far. It could be accompanied by dumpsters (e.g., one dumpster for aluminum cans) fed by conveyor belts that would turn on and advance just a few inches each time a new item was placed on them. Composting could be done on the spot. The robot could employ a winch to move heavier items out of the way, or could be accompanied by a heavy-duty service robot capable of digging, tugging, etc.

Items preliminarily deemed resellable could be set aside and listed for auction on the website, complete with the robot’s pictures of them and data obtained from the robot’s UPC scanner. Packing and shipping of such items might be partially automated as well.

Needed: Wish List Webpage

There should be a wish list webpage. On this page, people would list their wishes in different categories, according to what kind of thing the person wants. Some people want money; some people want prayers or positive thoughts; some want feedback on the websites they have developed or the creative things they have written; and so forth.

You would list your wishes in each category and indicate how reasonable or important you think each one is. For example, you might wish you had $10 to buy a gift for your mother; and you might also wish you had a million dollars to live a comfortable life.  You might recognize that the $10 request is more reasonable.  Other people would also vote on the reasonableness or importance of your wishes. The webpage would rank your wishes by some formula that would take into account your own ranking and the rating that others gave to each of your wishes.

Of all of your wishes, the world would be able to respond to (and perhaps able to rate) only the one that you considered most important or reasonable. Once you were satisfied on that one (e.g., when you had the money you needed, or when your mother’s birthday was past, or when you gave up on the original wish), you could retire it (or, if you specified an expiration date, it would retire automatically), and then visitors to the webpage would be able to consider the next most reasonable or important wish on your list.

The world’s most reasonable or important wishes would appear closest to the top of the list, within each category (money, positive thoughts, etc.). People who wanted to be able to do something good for someone else could review the categories that matched their own abilities. For example, people interested in making a financial gift to someone else could review the list of financial wishes, vote on how important or reasonable they considered those wishes, and respond (by e.g., PayPal) to the ones they wished to satisfy. People interested in devoting their prayers or positive thoughts to someone could see what was being requested and, optionally, could post notes about it (e.g., “We’re praying for you!”). Wishes could be automatically retired when they met other criteria imposed by the system or by the user (e.g., “I need $100”; “I need the positive thoughts of 20 people”). These criteria could also be taken into account when wishes were being rated (e.g., a request for prayers from a million people might seem unreasonable).

SAB Highlight: Adam Didn’t Die That Day

Genesis 2:16-17:  “And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat:  But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”

Genesis 5:5:  “And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years: and he died.”

From the Skeptic’s Annotated Bible.

Needed: Google Earth with Fewer People

It would be very interesting and informative to have access to a version of Google Earth that would show what the planet would be like with fewer people. This could occur in past and/or future versions. The historical version would show how big Boston was in a certain year, for example, and where its businesses and houses were located. Of course, roads were a very different concept back then. So the future version would show what roads would likely be retained if, say, Boston in 2100 returned to its 1900 population levels.

The future version could also be tweaked to show what happens if people make a mass switch from, say, suburban living to small-town or livable city-center living. Ideally, over time, it would also be tweaked to allow for variables in e.g., water supplies and changes in modes of transportation.

Eventually, botanists might be able to contribute to the future and/or historical versions by indicating what plants would be likely to be found at a given location at a given point in the future. The number of variables would be enormous, and perhaps the project would be capped at a maximum projection date 100 years in the future.  In this sense, the project might best be conceived as a sort of visual wiki.

Needed: Multipurpose Office Buildings

We have homeless people. We also have lots of people who have apartments or other dwellings that are dirty, dangerous, or otherwise undesirable, or from which those people are prone to be evicted due to upheaval or lack of reliable income.

At the same time, we have clean, solid office buildings and retail and warehouse spaces that are sitting empty part- or full-time.  Of course, those spaces were not designed to be used for anything resembling residential purposes. But that might change.

It would seem that architects, designers, and engineers could design buildings for multiple uses, and that doing so could yield important benefits on both sides.

The typical office building is a heartless place from which people flee at day’s end. It is not a very human space. That is often reflected in the behavior of the people who work there, in numerous unfortunate ways.

Instead, an office building could be considered someone’ s home, for at least some purposes of home. It might offer, for example, a private, locked drawer in which a child could keep things of value to him/her, for years on end, without seeing those things lost in the turmoil that many challenged families endure.  Some office spaces may also be available for general residential use between, say, 6 PM and 8 AM, depending on e.g., optimal janitorial scheduling.  As spaces that needed to accommodate people, some office environments might no longer be located in sterile office parks, but might instead emphasize locations in walkable communities.

Office furniture could be designed for multiple uses as well. A couch, for instance, might feature an easily-cleaned utilitarian surface on one side of its cushions, and a more homey fabric on the other.  A desk might be designed to convert to a table.  Sensitive equipment might be equipped with easily used locking covers, or might slide into locking wall panels.

Multipurpose facilities might be categorized according to their degree of function integration.  As families and businesses demonstrate increasing ability to respect the time, possessions, and needs of one another, they might gradually become qualified to relocate to more desirable spaces, or to have more desirable co-tenants share their space, as people move and as various business come into and go out of existence.

Governmental reimbursement for lodging expenses might be spent, not upon rent paid to slumlords who maintain people in circumstances of disrespectful disrepair, but rather to business owners who have opted into multiuse facilities.  Struggling families might receive residential options, not on a week-to-week or month-to-month basis, but rather for a starting period of five years, or ten years, or until a certain named child has graduated from a local school.  Buildings foreclosed for tax purposes might be especially appropriate starting points for a pilot of test of such a program.

Question: Why Don’t Moths Smarten Up?

I was wondering why moths fly toward lightbulbs.  I was thinking it might be because they think that light-avoiding nocturnal predators won’t bother them there.  But I got this other answer from HowStuffWorks.com:

Moths use the moon to navigate. The moon doesn’t move out of position if the moth flies in a straight line. But street lamps are confusing. If the moth flies in a straight line, it thinks the lamp’s position has changed. As the moth continues, the lamp “moves” again. The moth flies in circles, moving closer and closer until it is trapped.

Which makes sense.  But now I have another question.  If light bulbs confuse every moth, why aren’t the populated world’s moths wiped out within the first few nights?  Or, by now, having had more than a century of electric light, why haven’t moths evolved to the point where only the smart ones are left, the ones who have figured out the difference between the moon and a lightbulb?

Needed: Brighter Air

I’m wondering if they can change air so that it becomes brighter.  I guess it would contain some kind of molecule that would hold or reflect light.

One application:  making the atmosphere brighter, so as (perhaps) to reflect sunlight and reduce global warming.  Another application, especially for a biodegradable, light-sensitive, or timed product:  pump it out in the city so as to reduce the need for streetlights.  Especially if you could make it heavy, so that it would tend to settle in the bottom 10-20 feet of the atmosphere, and not outside of people’s high-rise apartment windows.

It could also be handy in the home, at night, in place of energy-consuming nightlights.  Or maybe they could make light-producing streets and highways, such that natural dust or humidity would pick up the light and, again, reduce the need for streetlights and headlights.  Safer for nighttime bicyclists, too.

Question: Why Two Genders?

I just read part of a debate on intelligent design vs. evolution.  People made good points on both sides.  But I still am not sure why there are two genders.

Someone said there are actually three, but they were counting hermaphrodites.  There is not a distinct third gender which is as different from male and female as those two are from each other.

One participant said that two genders gives you genetic diversity, but with more than two you start to run into costs that make it evolutionarily unprofitable.  In other words, nature designs for efficiency, and superfluous genders would be unnecessary and therefore inefficient.  That seems sensible enough.  But wouldn’t we see some species, somewhere, that are (or were) in the process of working through that?  Some kind of bird that has three or four genders, for instance.

It also seems like you could get even more genetic diversity, and could increase the likelihood of survival of the species, if people were able to reproduce regardless of gender.  Like in the situation where the men of a tribe got wiped out by warfare, or where women just get tired of men, or vice versa — why didn’t the ability evolve to reproduce by sharing earwax or otherwise cross-pollinating?  I guess one answer would be that evolution just hasn’t gotten around to that yet.  And that may be.  But I’d think that the force of life, just busting out all over, would have developed that sort of ability quickly, as a top priority.  Am I correct in thinking that cell self-division is the starting point?

Also, if genetic diversity is the goal, why just one mate?  Why not permit or require three- or four-way cross-pollination?

These sorts of question don’t prove anything, which is fine with me.  I’m not trying to prove anything.  I would just like to understand.

Needed: The Lifestyle Lottery

Instead of lotteries that award pure cash to winners (who sometimes blow the money and wind up back where they were), there should be at least the option for a kind of lottery that would put the winner into a certain lifetsyle, guaranteed, for the rest of his/her life.  Or, in case that lifestyle proved tiring, perhaps s/he could have a few options to switch into something else.

So, for example, a winner in the Celebrity Lifestyle Lottery would be given a lovely place to live in a celebrity location (e.g., Malibu, Central Park West, Maui), a celebrity-style chauffeur, annual admission to the Academy Awards, etc., along with a nice weekly allowance.  A winner in the Political Lifestyle Lottery would be introduced to the President and the First Lady, among others, and would be admitted to legislative and judicial hearings and conferences, political TV shows, and so forth.

This sort of thing could probably be provided for relatively low cost.  It would probably be more glamorous, and might also be more humane, in at least some cases, than the present form of lottery.

Proposed: The Internet Library Circulation Department

I have a copy of a book.  I would rather have it in PDF format so I can search it for specific terms and store it electronically.  So I rip it apart and I scan it.  Later, I’m done with it.  I sell or donate it to the Internet Library Circulation Department (ILCD) by sending it by e-mail or on CD.

At this point, my rights in the book cease, just as if I had sold or donated a physical book.  The ILCD could be set up to verify that my copy of the PDF had indeed been equipped with a neutering tag, rendering it unopenable.

The copy at the ILCD would be available to other borrowers, just like a real book.  While it was in use by one borrower, it would not be available to others.  The electronic versino becomes the complete replacement for the physical version.

Needed: The Thanksgiving Doctor’s Message

Thanksgiving can be a mealy-mouthed sort of thing, when people feel a sort of vague gratitude that life is so good, or at least that it’s not as bad as it could be.  One way to focus our gratitude would be to have the Surgeon General deliver an annual message touching upon the various things that can and do go wrong with people.  It could be very entertaining and informative.  And by the time s/he was done speaking, we might be better acquainted with what a miracle our present state of health (perfect or otherwise) is.

Goals for 2100: Free Education

Education is in chains. Hopefully, by 2100, it will be freed.

People love to learn. Not everyone, not every subject, and not always. But in general, if people are given an opportunity to learn something, and if they see it as useful or interesting, and believe that they can indeed learn it, they will.

That does not necessarily apply when other factors intervene. Teenagers, for instance, have a lot to sort out. They are not the best candidates for education — certainly not for education of a coercive nature, which is how too many of them experience it at present.

Education has become more free with the advent of the Internet.  It is now possible to find someone, somewhere, who has already looked into many of the puzzlers that two-year-olds (and older) pose to their parents.  But much still remains to be done.

It is still very much the case that exceedingly knowledgeable people are encouraged to share their thoughts only through professional journals that publish only a fraction of what there is to be known and shared on any given subject, and that they tend to do so in terms that only an educated elite can understand.  We are far from a situation in which people who need to know can learn directly and efficiently from people who know.  This can change, very much for the better, by 2100.

Question: Do Animals Cross in Front of Cars for Protection?

I just tried doing a quick Google search for this, but I don’t want to invest a lot of time in a stray thought, so just let me ask:  do you suppose animals race across the road, right in front of cars, because they know that birds of prey will not dare to dash down and snatch them when a vehicle is so near?

Plainly, this would not apply to deer and other large animals.  It also would not explain every confused gopher or indecisive squirrel who is fated to become part of the pavement.  But it would be interesting to know whether any kinds of small animals do use the onrushing automobile as a shield.

Needed: A Single Dual Monitor

Right now, if you want to use dual monitors, you have to buy two monitors. This may seem logical. But an even more logical thing would be that, if you want to use dual monitors, you buy a dual monitor.

When you must buy two monitors, you must plug dual cables into dual outlets. You must also wrestle with dual positioning. With one piece of hardware that was designed from the beginning to serve as a dual monitor, this would not be necessary.

One stand is capable of holding two monitors. Moreover, it is capable of holding them so closely together that the user’s dual-screen experience could be an almost seamless one.

A single stand, holding dual monitors, could also hold them in assorted landscape and portrait orientations. That way, a user could arrange his/her desktop to open some programs (e.g., the Internet browser) in landscape mode, with a wide view — on, say, the left-hand monitor — while holding other programs (e.g., the word processor) in portrait mode, on the right-hand monitor.

A single dual monitor could also be much easier to move. The two monitors could fit together, face to face, providing very good protection; and with a base intelligently designed to pop off, the monitors and stand could slide into a box not much bigger than a single-monitor box.

After writing the foregoing words, I became aware of DoubleSight’s dual LCDs. At present, they do not have all of the features described above. But they have some of them, so they illustrate the point.

Needed: Easier Dual Computing

I know of a simple way to sell a lot more computers in the U.S.:  dual computing.

Sometimes your computer is not available and working properly.  Its hardware is malfunctioning, or its software is screwed up, or it is preoccupied with video rendering or some other processor-intensive task, or it is going through some kind of diagnostic process.  Or maybe it is working fine, but for some reason it is not able to install and run a piece of hardware — VoIP, say, or some video device.  Or you want to test a piece of hardware while maintaining your connection with the Internet, or while continuing to write up the test process or do some other work at the same time.  Or it needs to be rebooted so that some software can install.  Or maybe it needs to boot into a different operating system.  Or maybe you wish that it *could* boot into some other operating system — Linux, say, or Mac.

For various reasons, it can be handy to have a second computer.  This can be done:  just buy or build a second computer.  That means a whole separate bulky, space-consuming case, and all the ingredients that go into it.  You’ve got extra electricity consumption, extra heat production, and extra noise.  Then, if you want to run both computers from a single monitor, keyboard, and mouse, you have to learn about KVM switches, ghosting, and other problems and fixes.

After losing a large amount of time to some hardware issues last year, I decided to go ahead with the process of setting up two computers.  It has been worthwhile.  I would think, though, that it would be possible to make dual computing more of a common thing — to design a case, say, that would work with two motherboards, or a motherboard that would not only support two computers but that would also be able to combine the forces of those computers for especially demanding applications.  Hard drives could be internal or external; basically, all of the things that a person wants with two computers could be incorporated into one redesigned computer case — permitting, say, removal of a nonworking motherboard (or its processor-supporting daughterboard) from one side of the case while the other side was still powered up.

2120 Hindsight: The Automotive Age

The Automotive Age lingered until about 2040 in America, and even longer in other poor countries. Historians generally agree that the era drew to a close, in the U.S., after the passage of the Rail Transportation Affordability Act (RTAA) of 2037. Until then, annual mass transit passes had been relatively unaffordable, to the point that considerable numbers of ordinary people still had to rely on old individual means of transportation (IMOT) devices.

The RTAA was quite unusual for its time. It was, in essence, a throwback to 20th century concepts of federal government expenditure, of a type that international creditors had largely forced the U.S. to abandon after its “secret” insolvency of 2017. Specifically, federal funding for citizens’ purchases of mass transit passes was facilitated, through the Act, on the basis of an open-ended governmental commitment to make up the difference between what people could afford to pay and current market prices for transit passes.

Creditors allowed Congress to proceed with the Act primarily because, by 2037, the productive capacity of the United States had become competitively undervalued. Continued progress in neural implants, combined with recent liberalization in restrictive freedom-based jurisprudence, held the promise that Americans would soon be offering considerably enhanced productive cognitive and emotive resources to employers. At the same time, further developments in longevity and old-age productivity had justified two substantial increases in individuals’ permanent indebtedness ceilings within the past three years – in 2034 and again in 2036. It appeared, in short, that creditors’ fiscal leap of faith, grounded in solid anticipation of improved returns per person, would ultimately prove justified. Increased access to elevated rail transportation, it was believed, would enable American workers to provide sharply improved levels of profitability for their owners’ benefit.

The RTAA thus fostered a decisive resolution of the long competition between elevated rail transportation providers and IMOT manufacturers. Basically, by 2037, the war was over. IMOTs had been increasingly untenable since the Pavement Desuetude movement of the early 2020s. When the RTAA became law, it was quite clear that the nation and the world would not generally be going back to the land-intensive, agribusiness-disruptive, difficult-to-maintain world of pavement-based IMOT transit. Many vehicle-width roads and bridges, which IMOTs had required since the dawn of the Automotive Age, had already fallen into disrepair when the Desuetude movement began. Motorized IMOTs also suffered the drawbacks of having always been quite dangerous, and of relying upon varying forms of fuels that had become unaffordable, irregularly available, and/or environmentally unacceptable.

Yet several factors delayed the end of the Automotive Age. First, a sharp public and legislative reaction against oversized vehicles, beginning about 2010, set the stage for many years of small-IMOT transit, during which the rising costs of raw materials needed for vehicle construction were partially offset by the smaller quantities of such materials needed per vehicle, as well as by savings in fuel and road construction and maintenance expenses. Possession of an oversized (one-ton or larger) vehicle was not criminalized in most states until about 2021, and of course it was never criminalized for commercial vehicles; but by then numerous judicial decisions had upheld state laws imposing strict civil liability for operation of personal oversized vehicles in vehicular accidents. Because the nation held a substantial inventory of smaller vehicles in 2020, for which their owners had incurred considerable debts and which were then starting to be seen as unsalable, the transition to rail travel was slower than the proponents of rail had hoped. Only as those vehicles and their roads began to fall apart did elevated rail emerge as the unavoidable successor.

It also took many years for the elevated rail network and related features (e.g., various forms of people-movers and automated delivery systems) to develop, following the completion of America’s first citywide prototype in Minneapolis in 2019. It would be another 12 years before national transit passes would finally provide the primary means of transportation for the majority of Americans.

Automobiles and roads, as they had been known in the 20th century, had changed almost beyond recognition by 2030. The change was less dramatic but still profound for trucks, tractors, and other forms of service and commercial vehicles. Even as late as 2040, there were still a few pockets of industry and personal use in which non-rail transportation predominated. For the generation reaching adulthood in 2020 and thereafter, however, automobiles seemed increasingly irrelevant and impractical. There really was never any question that that generation’s children would rely upon rail transit. It may have been this attitudinal change, more even than the several practical considerations just discussed, that spelled the ultimate end of the Automotive Age in the United States.

Goals for 2100: A Return to Medieval Social Interactions

According to Barbara Tuchman (A Distant Mirror, 1978, p. 39),

[M]uch of medieval life was supportive because it was lived collectively in infinite numbers of groups, orders, associations, brotherhoods.  Never was man less alone.  Even in bedrooms married couples often slept in company with their servants and children.  Except for hermits and recluses, privacy was unknown.

No doubt people in the Middle Ages were capable of narrowmindedness and pettiness.  Then, as now, it probably depended upon where you were and who you were.  Some people are not going to do well in small towns; some are not going to do well in office politics.  It is probably healthier to have a lot of people around, so that people who are now isolated will generally tend to have individuals in their daily life who become familiar with their foibles.  In a world that treats everyone as a stranger, it can be easy for everyone to become strange and estranged.  And that’s strange.

Needed: Fully Interactive Help Pages

I am using a computer program.  It does something weird.  I want to be able to show a technician exactly what I was doing and how the program responded.

Suppose the program is Microsoft Word.  I go to Microsoft’s website.  I find the Interactive Word Help page.  This page shows me a mock-up of a working Word installation.  I can choose layout options, and can drag and drop things on the screen, to make their Word layout look just like mine.  Then I can add a dialog box, like if you were using a Paint program and you wanted to add a rectangle; and in the dialog box I can type the text that Word is giving me.  I can save the configuration and send the URL to someone in Microsoft or elsewhere, who can then tell with one look what I’m doing wrong.

Needed: Fade-In Video Camera Date Stamp

Video cameras sometimes provide the option of adding a date to the video.  This typically means that the date is constantly shown in a bottom corner of the screen.  What would be helpful, between the extremes of having the date always shown or never shown, would be to let the user designate how often and how long the date appears.  For instance, I might want to have it fade in, twice a minute, for three seconds each time, and then fade out.  Ideally, of course, I would also have font and color options.

Needed: Google Search Filter

I search in Google.  I get a list of a million webpages.  I refine my search.  Ultimately, I’m down to a few thousand.  Problem:  too many of the results are junk.  Example:  they seem to be automatically generated in response to my search.  I get pages reflecting all of my search terms but having no meaningful content.

I want a Firefox add-on, or some other tool, that will help me eliminate stuff I don’t want.  This means several things.  First, I want to be able to use this tool to enter my Google searches.  I want it to save elements of previous searches (e.g., in Google search syntax, “-dogs” (i.e., the word with a minus in front of it) means “exclude webpages containing references to dogs”; maybe I never want to see pages about dogs) so I can enter them quickly.  I want that because sometimes I have to type the same search terms at length, and it gets tiring and slow.   So then this tool becomes my repository of all the different variations I have used on Google searches.  In this tool, besides storing elements of searches (e.g., -dogs), I can save whole searches, and can mix and match them with one another.

Second, I want this tool to let me store and add to lists of preferred or unwanted websites.  The CustomizeGoogle add-on allows me to enter a list of unwanted sites manually, but I want to do it by clicking next to the unwanted item as it appears on the actual Google search results page.  Ideally, the tool would ask me to select the portion of the text, contained in the brief Google search description of the website, that persuaded me to exclude this website, and the tool would then de-prioritize other search results containing that term.

Finally, I want this tool to draw upon a database of other Google searchers’ decisions.  For any search, people will vary on what they find interesting or relevant.  But when a sufficiently high percentage of people seems to agree that a certain website is just not what they wanted, then I don’t want to have to manually exclude or de-prioritize that website; I want the tool to do it automatically.

Goals for 2100: More Efficient Use of Educated People’s Time

Society invests a fortune in the training of doctors, Ph.Ds, and other sorts of specialists and experts.  Then society requires these people to spend hundreds of hours of their time, each year, dealing with trivial stuff that could be done just as well, if not better, by others.

Example:  filling out forms.  There are rental or mortgage application forms, grant application forms, credit check forms … there is really no end to the number of forms that a person can fill out in a year.  There are times when the trained specialist does need to deal with those forms personally.  But there are many other times when s/he does not.  It would be in society’s interest to make it easy for the specialist to hand off this sort of task to someone — a paralegal, say — who does like to deal with forms, or who is making a business out of it — someone who has not invested years in becoming a lawyer or CPA, and who therefore is not too busy or expensive for the job.

Another example:  commuting.  Society can force the trained specialist to sit in traffic, just like everyone else.  If the specialist were responsible for the forms, the traffic jams, and the other wastes of time that make him/her less productive, then it might be just as well that s/he does have to sit in traffic:  it may remind him/her to do something about the problem.  But for the most part, the highly trained specialist who is spending hours filling out forms, or sitting in traffic, does not have any training or influence in that sort of problem.  The people who create forms and traffic tend to be rich people and politicians.  Many times, those people can afford limo drivers, helicopters, or other ways to avoid the delay.  That’s a world apart from the anthropologist or biomedical researcher whose precious ability to contribute to society is just being dribbled away.

If anthropologists qualified for a special seat on the train, a special diamond lane on the freeway, or other perquisites designed to make the best use of their time, young people might have a different impression of the value of becoming a highly educated specialist.  When the only people who can afford those sorts of perquisites are bankers and politicians, then naturally those are the directions in which young people’s ambitions turn.

By 2100, I hope, society will have recognized that it is dreadfully wasteful to train specialists, and then make it difficult for them to make the kind of contribution to society that they would like to make.

Goals for 2100: Calibration of Decisionmaking Power to Knowledge

It is important to give everyone a chance to be heard, to provide input into how s/he is governed.  Good government cannot ensue, however, when the person providing that input lacks time or knowledge to understand the issues on which s/he would opine.

That principle applies at all levels.  Some may consider it most applicable at the grassroots level, where people sometimes express strong opinions on matters they do not comprehend.  Others may consider it more applicable at the level of journalism, advertising, and other broadcasting, where the power to influence opinion can easily exceed the degree of responsibility with which one exercises that power.

Still others may consider the principle most importantly applicable within the halls of government, where the pressures of time are such that judges and juries do not understand the cases they are deciding and legislators vote on bills they have not even read, much less explored.  The principle may even be considered to apply, broadly, to any instance in which executive power is vested in one person, in public and private sectors alike, when those powers result in ill-informed, corrupt, or otherwise unjustifiable decisionmaking capable of causing great pain or damage.

It is possible to research the extent to which people understand the important issues on which they are voting or acting.  When people cannot or will not acquire competence in those issues, good government and the health of society call for devolution, power-sharing, or other temporary or permanent reassignment of decisional power to those who can and do demonstrate mastery of the issues.

Fundamentally, the principle recommended here is that it is better for the right decision to be made by the wrong people, than for the wrong decision to be made by the right people.  That is not an infallible principle; there are times when it will be incorrect.  Reassignment of the powers exercised by voters, journalists, executives, and government officials should not be done lightly.  But in cases when there is an extensive track record of incompetence or irresponsibility in the handling of serious decisionmaking duties, it may be reasonable to make adjustments to prevent further abuses of power and privilege.

Needed: Governmental Non-Governmental Organization

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) typically function independently of governments for some specified purpose.  Examples include the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Rifle Association, and the World Council of Churches.

There appears to be a need for an NGO capable of addressing the problems of failed countries reliably.  For assorted political reasons, NATO, the United Nations, and other transnational organizations lack that capacity.

An example of a failed state (or worse) appears in the Central African Republic, which “has become virtually a phantom state, lacking any meaningful institutional capacity at least since the fall of Emperor Bokassa in 1979,” according to an organization quoted in The Economist (Jan. 26, 2008).

Involvement of any single government (e.g., the U.S.) can be problematic in situations where the people of a given country distrust that would-be intervenor’s motivations (its religion, say, or its military or monetary intentions).  An NGO with a reputation for focusing upon the needs of its clients could avoid that objection.

The needed NGO would have the purpose of moving into a failed state, taking control, establishing basic institutions and infrastructure, and retaining control for a period (e.g., 20 years) sufficient to support long-term stability.  The NGO would thus be a governmental organization, in the sense of setting up and running a complete functioning government and, very gradually, handing off the control of that government to the people of that country.  But it would still be an NGO, in the sense that other governments would not control or steer it.

This NGO could not simultaneously tackle all failed states.  It would have to focus on one at a time.  Five years after its first apparent success, perhaps, it would be in a position to undertake a second one.  After some decades, the goal would be to reach a position in which there are no more persistently failed states.  At that time, the NGO’s core structure would become inert, capable of being resuscitated within a relatively short time (e.g., a year or two) after the emergence of some new failed state.

Such an organization could excite considerable interest from volunteers.  A reputable organization, adequately funded by (and with a long-term mandate from) a spectrum of nations, corporations, and other international actors, could supplement its first-wave military interventions with second-wave humanitarian interventions.  It might, for example, draw upon personnel commitments from various nations’ armies and Peace Corps-style organizations.

Someday, after developing and establishing its capabilities and methods in relatively manageable contexts, this NGO could conceivably be positioned to address long-running problems in such complex settings as Afghanistan.  Such a development could alter and potentially reduce the number of instances in which various nations consider unilateral military action essential.

2120 Hindsight: The Most Important Contribution by the U.S.

The United States retained its predominant role in the world for a period of about one complete lifetime — that is, from about 1945 to about 2015.  Many of the things for which its people prided itself were cultural in nature.

Examples include innovative forms of music and literature.  The general themes of isolation, distrust, confusion, and loneliness characteristic of much American culture appeared in, for instance, an often inward-looking musical preoccupation with failed romantic relationships.  Those themes were also evident in a concept of lodging in which each family would live alone, separated from its neighbors in sometimes extreme ways (e.g., locked doors, barricades, and even the use of deadly force against intruders).  As a third example, those isolationist cultural themes manifested themselves in American concepts of “government” and “economics,” both of which referred to various aspects of a uniquely confused and wasteful (albeit well-intended) approach to social steering.

Although these sorts of cultural achievements seem idiosyncratic and terrible to us now, they did address felt needs experienced by people living in that country at that time.  As such, they are best understood and appreciated for the elements of rationality that did exist in them, under the circumstances in which they came about.  Nonetheless, among the many ways in which the U.S. influenced the world, it seems clear at this point that the most important one was its spread of the English language throughout the world.

That language originated, of course, in England.  As such, it was not a unique American invention, and was not necessarily the first thing in which a typical American of the period might have taken pride.  Americans were much more likely to talk about their political ideals, many of which drew upon concepts of freedom compatible with the isolation and extreme individuality just mentioned.

An American of the 20th century would tend to consider those American ideals eternal and valuable to all.  Such a person would not ordinarily admit that the various “rights” (i.e., freedoms) were fluctuating, negotiated, contingent, potentially dangerous, or anything of the sort.  This American stance often alienated people from other cultures, who did not or would not embrace American hyperindividualism and therefore did not place the same premium upon the American “rights.”
Thus, while the ideals certainly were thought-provoking and influential, they were not ultimately very enduring or useful across cultures.  In any case, the ideals tended to be based upon the work of European (especially English) thinkers.  Thus, it was the language that America took throughout the world, that facilitated American power, and that proved to be that society’s most enduring contribution to global peace and prosperity.

Needed: Dollar-a-Day Donation Scheme for Freeware

There are all these wonderful software gizmos in the world. So many of them are free, and so many of the free ones are so useful that it is just a shame to let their creators go without significant financial compensation.

There needs to be a freeware registration scheme, available for software (including e.g., Firefox add-ons) and also, perhaps, for other free works (e.g., e-books made available without charge), that will facilitate pay to those creative types.

This is an honor-system arrangement. I honestly do want to give those people a little something; I just don’t get around to it, or it seems like I might already have paid this guy once, or I’m not sure how much I’m supposed to donate, or how much payment is justified for my level of usage.

A little application, running on my computer, keeps track of how often I use the program. If I keep using it, say, several times a week, over a period of a month or more, the app asks me if I’d like to add the program’s creator to the list of people who deserve a little something from me.

These settings are all user-configurable, though I also have the option of just saying to hell with it, charge me $1 per day (or 50 cents, or whatever) and send it to some worthy soul whose stuff I have been using shamelessly. A list is kept somewhere, and I have the option of checking it and revoking payment in case a certain item turned out to be useless after I paid for it. (The deduction may have to come from some later user’s payment.)

In short, I sign up for the program, I designate my contribution level, I install the tracking app, I check the log once in a while, to see who I’ve been paying, but otherwise I contribute to the development of freeware without having to devote any time to it. Just the thing for busy but well-meaning people.

Goals for 2100: Reduced Public Lying

Maybe there are times when it is important to deceive the public.  For that matter, maybe there are times when it is important, or appropriate, to lie in private.  This post is not about those cases.

This post is about the fact that, except possibly in exceptional cases, the public should not be lied to.  What needs to change, by 2100, is the extent to which people are permitted to lie to the public.

People who are capable of lying to the public tend to be those who are in a position to have their opinions heard.  This includes politicians, advertisers, writers, ministers, and so forth.  These are the people who should not lie to the public.

It is hard enough for people to figure out the truth of things, without being misled by opinionmakers who manipulate people’s feelings and concerns.  Finding the truth is a full-time occupation, as people discover when they try to do some educated shopping for a major purchase.  It can take weeks to make a single well-informed decision about what car to buy, where to go to college, or whom to vote for.  There is no good reason to make such decisions even more difficult by fogging up the issues.

There is no such thing as corporate personhood, for instance; it is a legal fiction.  It should not be permitted to ramify on into the further confusion of corporate free speech.

Advertisers have subsidized many forms of beneficial or desired activity.  In other words, we have been bought.  We have allowed producers of unnecesssary, inferior, and sometimes even harmful products and services to persuade us of their essential goodness.  This is a mistake.

Some kinds of lying to the public are based upon laws, procedures, and semi-official traditions.   Formal legal provisions or other actions may be needed to curtail or reduce these.  Other kinds of lying to the public may be better approached through semi-formal or even informal responses.

For instance, religious people have many valuable things to say, whether based on their scriptures or on their personal experiences and insights.  But religious people who claim to have the backing of scripture, or of personal experience, should be subject to public disapproval if their claims are not borne out.

There are limits to all rights.  You cannot use free speech to start a panic by yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater.  You cannot use religion as an excuse to rip people apart with false accusations.  Responsibility is commensurate with power.  The greater your ability to influence people’s thinking, the more closely the rest of us should scrutinize your use of that power.

It is impossible to speak the truth consistently.  There is too much wishful thinking in the world, and there are too many things that are hard to figure out.  But there is a limit to that excuse.  When you get up in front of those people and turn on that microphone, you had better be doing something that is good for the common welfare.

Voicing a contrary opinion is perfectly reasonable; but voicing an opinion (contrary or not) based upon willful deception or deliberate ignoring of important facts is a different matter.  We will be better off when we have less of it.

Virtual Classroom Assignments Could Erode Academic Elitism

I see a BusinessWeek article about virtual workplaces in the classroom. The concept is that business school students are now able to try their hand at solving real-world business problems in a virtual reality context.

Eventually, someone may decide to permit students from multiple business schools to address the same problems at the same time. Suddenly, it would not matter whether you were attending business school at Harvard or at some lowly state university: you would have equal access and equal opportunity to demonstrate your capabilities.

What can be done at business school can be done elsewhere. It should be possible for political science students to address real-world political problems. And what can be done in a virtual context can also be done in a real context. Those business problems and political problems need not be something that a professor dreams up. They can be posted by real people, growing rice in Southeast Asia or handling a civil war in Africa.

It is not that students at Harvard or other elite universities would not continue to shine. I’m sure they would. Some of them, anyway. Some surely would not. The real point is that those who never made it to Harvard — who, ultimately, may not be enrolled in any university at all — may have an opportunity not merely to earn brownie points, but actually to build their resumes by racking up a string of suggested solutions, some of which might be implemented, achieve success, and receive kudos from the grateful poser of the original problem.

Goals for 2100: Home Ownership

By the year 2100, people should own their homes.  Not a mortgage; not a promise.  They should have complete and sole ownership of the place where they live, as soon as they move in.  Not just “homeowners” as distinct from renters.  Everyone.  They may or may not be entitled to lose it by bad luck or stupidity.  But they should start out on a note of confidence and hope, not deep in a hole.

Needed: Rapid Investment in Higher Education

Another blogger somewhere recently suggested that a major federal investment in education could forestall a recession.  Whatever the validity of that claim, it may make sense to offer very low-interest federal student loans to anyone who wishes to return to school now.  Doing so could give the apparently rising numbers of unemployed people something productive to do.  I would recommend making the loans to anyone who is enrolled on at least a half-time basis and is taking and passing at least one course per semester in math, science, or engineering.

The Correct Answers to Most Questions

It depends.
Sometimes.
Check with X.
To a certain extent.
Eventually.
I know it used to be that … but nowadays …
One can hope.
I’m not sure.

Well, It Wasn’t the Bar Exam

[Send to classmates after an exam in statistics]

I am sure it was not the bar exam.  I am familiar with the bar exam.

The bar exam is an exam that continues for hours on end, that poses difficult and indeterminate questions, that leaves you wondering how badly you screwed up.

But that’s not why this was not the bar exam.

The bar exam is written by people who have enormous knowledge of things so surpassingly tedious that you cannot imagine yourself ever reaching their depths of exactitude.  The bar exam explores your ability to parse utterly precise nuances — to such a point that, if you do begin to master them, you may even take a perverse pride in your insight into things that will almost never matter, to almost anyone you will ever know.

Again, however, that’s not why this was not the bar exam.

The bar exam is the last major hurdle before you proceed into a highly lucrative profession — one in which your familiarity with the truth, or your ability to inquire into the true state of affairs, will not be remotely as important as your skill in making reality appear to be whatever your client needs it to be.

That’s why I’m sure this was not the bar exam.

Needed: A Fabric of Enforced Obsolescence

They should design a fabric that holds up perfectly well for a period of, say, three years, or 35 washings — and then suddenly begins to disintegrate.  They could market it as something of a joke, but somewhat seriously too:  “Buy him a new shirt — and prevent it from becoming The Old Standby” — with a picture of a closet that still contains shirts from yesteryear.

Needed: Iceberg Tugboats

There is talk of the Greenland ice cap someday disintegrating, and parts of Antarctica continue to do so. These are potential sources of fresh water for nations conveniently located. It seems that a fleet of tugboats, with specially designed barges, might provide the best devices for pushing those huge hunks of ice into places where their water can be used.

It seems that pushing rather than pulling is the better way — that this is why tugboats, despite their name, are designed and often used to shove. I don’t know how many tugboats it would take to move an iceberg the size of Manhattan. Of course, a tugboat right up against an iceberg would be in danger of being damaged or sunk by huge chunks of ice splintering off of the main mass, so it might be helpful to design relatively unsinkable barges to serve as buffers between tug and berg.

Where to take the iceberg is another question. Maybe they could dynamite it into smaller fragments, and winch them up, on skids, onto melting racks on dry land. Maybe they could park it in a deepwater lock, pump out the surrounding salt water, and let it melt. Maybe they could design a floating water-extraction device that would melt and pump water, from the top center of the berg into an accompanying tanker, at a much faster rate than it would melt in the surrounding icy ocean waters.

Question: Water in the Desert

I am thinking about the western U.S. drying up, and I wonder whether it would help to pump massive amounts of ocean water into a large natural or artificial basin somewhere in Nevada.  This would obviously not be the more authentically natural move, at least not in the sense of leaving things as we found them; then again, if it counteracted our abuse of fresh water sources, maybe it would be authentically natural enough.

The purpose of this pumping effort would be to create an inland sea from which water could evaporate in such quantities as to provoke rainstorms further east.  And that’s my question, or questions.  Lake-effect rain and snow works on the lee side of the Great Lakes.  I am guessing that the Great Salt Lake may be the source of some of the snow on the Wasatch Range.  Do Lake Tahoe and Salton Sea not feed moisture into the atmosphere, or are they just not big enough to make a noticeable difference downwind?  (Or maybe they do, and I just haven’t heard about it.)  How big a salt lake would it take to produce a green streak eastwards?  Could the power of the ocean waves drive a pump that would shove water up over the Sierra Nevada, or would they have to build a power plant to feed enough water to stay ahead of the rates of evaporation and seepage into the ground?  Would the seeping water carry its salt with it, and if so, how far?  Presumably the salt left behind would create a salt flat when/if the salt lake ultimately dried up; would this then create a permanent lifeless zone?  Could they build a glass lid over the lake, so as to trap evaporating water into tanks for pumping or shipping elsewhere in the West?  If they went in the greenhouse direction, could they design the lake as a massive irrigated space, with troughs that would capture the salt and a forest of leafy plants between the troughs, so as to create some sort of tropical ecosystem?

Review: Targus Slam Backpack

I’ve used this backpack almost daily for more than two years. It is bulletproof. I have carried loads of books that would have given Superman a hernia. It has padded my laptop sufficiently to protect it when somebody (can’t imagine who) took it off and put it too close to the edge of the table. A tumble! Oops. But, you know, no harm, no foul.

I still don’t understand the idea of the extension deal, where there’s this space between Part A and Part B of the backpack. I am pretty sure it’s to carry your skateboard. For a year or so, I was using that space to hold a bag containing rain gear, because I was sleeping outdoors a lot.

The backpack has about 85 pockets, and each one works pretty well. When you unzip everything, it sprawls out like an accordion, so it’s easy to jam a new load of crap in it. The elastic still works just fine. Excellent padding in the shoulder straps. The zippers have not yet popped, despite my unremitting efforts to overload it. I wouldn’t buy another one of these because I still don’t like the funky strap extension thing, but I will most likely buy another Targus. If I ever need to, that is. This one is not showing many signs of age.

Goals for 2100: Accurate Valuation

The prices of goods and services should more accurately reflect their true costs.

Presently, for example, the price for a quart of oil is set by a merchant who, in turn, has paid a stated price to an oil company. Both the merchant and the oil company set their prices based upon relatively immediate inputs. For the merchant, there are costs of rent, wages to employees, electricity, and so forth. For the oil company, there are costs of production, storage, and transportation.

There is not presently any responsibility, built into the pricing, for the effects of consumption of that oil. If it gets burned, there is an unpriced cost to the atmosphere. If it sits in an abandoned garage until its container deteriorates with age, there is an unpriced cost to the soil, and possibly the water supply, that some of its nonbiodegradable ingredients will pollute. A different example is a bottle of alcohol. Its price should reflect the costs and benefits associated with its consumption.

In either example, somebody, someday, is going to pay a price, monetary or otherwise, for the transaction’s outcomes. That person will generally not have been party to the original transaction. His or her interests should be more fully represented in the transaction price. While it is impossible to predict all possible outcomes for a can of oil or a bottle of rum, it is not impossible to make progress toward a more responsible valuation of goods and services.

Goals for 2100: Reduced Emphasis on Sex

The 20th century, especially but not only in its second half, was a time of great liberalization of sexual practices. This liberalization had some benefits. It also brought some undesirable side effects.

A reasonable goal for the year 2100 will be to achieve more balanced and constructive outcomes in this area. One step in that direction will be to grant people greater freedom to vary in their attitudes and practices toward sex, according to their ages, beliefs, physical and mental conditions, priorities in life, and other characteristics — indeed, to accord respect to those who honorably decline to exploit every sexual opportunity.

Another step will be to place sex in context by encouraging friendships among people, so that they need not expect the persons with whom they are romantically involved to provide everything that they could get from a broader set of positive relationships.

Enhancement of positive relationships among people in various contexts (e.g., workplaces, communities, schools) may also moderate the general interest in sex: people do sometimes use sex as a way to get affection, when they might instead be getting that (often, in a more reliable form) through participation in a socially healthy environment.

Goal for 2100: Distributed Justice

The Protestant Reformation of the 16th and 17th centuries introduced the idea that people do not need an intermediary between themselves and God — that they have, and are responsible for, their own relationship with the divine.  Similarly, democratic principles give people the responsibility for their own form of government, just as people are responsible for running their own lives, keeping themselves in good health, and so forth.  There are exceptional situations (e.g., sometimes a person needs a doctor); but on a day-to-day basis it seems to be recognized that people are motivated to do it better, for themselves, than someone else can do it for them.

Justice, however, remains mired in the Dark Ages.  There is this persistent belief that people need a specially trained black-robed figure, standing or sitting in an elevated place, to help them achieve justice.  The result is a court system that is extremely expensive (when you include the cost of lawyers and the processes of pursuing justice in this format), very slow, unavailable for practical purposes in most situations when justice is needed, and inferior in terms of the quality of its results in many cases, when decisions are essentially ignorant, too late, or otherwise unresponsive to reality.

No doubt there will always be a place for judges and lawyers, in large-scale and extremely complex matters of dispute.  But for practical purposes, justice needs to join religion, government, and other areas of life:  the power for justice needs to devolve from these judicial power centers back to the people.

This devolution — this redistribution of justice — will require ordinary people to learn new skills.  Just as the idea of praying directly to God may have seemed strange to some at first, so also the idea that you bear some responsibility for justice in your home and your neighborhood (and that you have some authority for that purpose) may feel odd.  But it will also begin to feel better.

The specific manifestations of this redistribution will vary at first.  In some places, people may be authorized to fight it out on their own.  In other places, as people adjust to this newfound responsibility and power, the seemingly wiser approach will be to form neighborhood courts or councils to respond to complaints.  The persons seated on those councils may be fellow residents of the neighborhood, on an elected, appointed, or rotating basis; they may be people who are hired for the purpose, who got college degrees or certificates in dispute resolution; or they may come from some other source.  In any case, people will have greater freedom to experiment and work out a solution that fits their needs, on the most localized basis possible, instead of having it imposed on them by the frequently abusive managers of an unresponsive, out-of-touch legal system.

Likewise, to the extent that physical force is required (e.g., to enforce decisions), neighborhoods may find that something resembling a traditional police or sherriff’s office is needed, or they may instead sign contracts for enforcement services provided by some outside company on a competitive bid.  They may use posses; they may introduce other innovations.  Instances of misbehavior or abuse (when e.g., one powerful person takes control of the justice-oriented machinery in a neighborhood) may be challenged in a formal court or elsewhere; but to the greatest extent possible, people should be allowed and encouraged to find solutions that fit their own needs, in this area as in others.

Proposed: Cycle-Killer

There should be an ad for a motorscooter, Segway, skateboard, or some other transportation device that uses the Talking Heads’ song, “Psychokiller.”  Not that it’s a great song to sell products, except maybe if you’re in an extreme sports kind of mindset.  Being of a somewhat green orientation, I would suggest the “cycle” that is supposedly done in by the advertised product should be a motorcycle, not a bicycle.

Unanswered Question: Tree Leaves

Why do trees sometimes drop all of their leaves at once?  Some trees, some years, lose almost all their leaves in a single day.  Why?

Needed: Earthquake Bell

They should use bells after earthquakes.  They should tell everyone that they are going to strike the bell at regular intervals — every 30 minutes, say, or every hour, or perhaps as the situation requires.  That’s when they will stop all the power tools and all the rescuers will fan out and listen for noises from the trapped.  So if you’re under a pile of rubble, you save your energy, wait for the bell, and then yell or moan as you are able.  If some nearby church starts ringing its bells unsolicited, that would be a good time to stop the backhoe.

Needed: Audiotaped Police Reports

Written police reports frequently distort what was said at the scene of a crime or accident. Investigations would be more accurate if the original police report were made and retained in audio format. The report should be made available at a price, which could be reduced when someone (e.g., a party to the incident, or his/her insurer or paralegal) repays the police by giving them an accurate written transcript of the recording that could likewise be saved in electronic (e.g., PDF) format.

Needed: Permanent Flea Market Stalls Online

I have some stuff that’s not worth much. For example, I have a small adapter for use with a certain kind of computer cable. I hate to throw it away; it seems wasteful. Somebody really might need it. But it’s not practical to go to the time and expense of writing it up and posting an ad on eBay. This item, like many that people do offer to sell on eBay, is not likely to sell within a one-week auction window.

There should be a flea market website that allows me to list this kind of item. Ideally, it would be like a wiki, where users are able to create subcategories that more precisely define their particular item. No, as I think of it, the real ideal would be for someone to write software that asks questions, where users can add to the list of questions or selection criteria, to steer someone to the right place. “What are you selling?” “Adapter.” “Name one of its connectors.” “PS/2.” And so forth.

The flea market should charge a flat rate of maybe $1.50 per month per user (buyer or seller), for up to, say, a dozen purchases or sales per month (more for heavy users), with no additional fees. For that price, the seller can list as many items as s/he wants, using UPCs, ISBNs, or other part numbers or designators whenever possible.

Needed: Backup Olympics Site

My bet: we are going to need a backup Olympics site for summer 2008. Beijing is not going to be able to get its house in order, pollution-wise, in time for the Games. I read the other day that China is a (the primary?) source of particulate air pollution in — would you believe — Los Angeles. You don’t get rid of a problem like that by stopping downtown traffic for a few days.

Some athletes are going to refuse to go. Some are going to go, and are going to be featured on the world’s media with various respiratory problems. The wisest thing China could do would be to support contingency plans now. Otherwise, we are talking about a world-class loss of face — the kind of thing that creates a new verb: “to beijing,” meaning to grossly pollute.

Needed: Random One-Shot MP3 Player

There should be an MP3 player that runs each time I log in. It plays just one song from my MP3 collection and then dies. I’m too busy to listen to music, but I do have time while the machine is booting and I am getting myself organized.

It could also be arranged to run at other times (e.g., a scheduled time, or after a certain event, e.g., after I close Acrobat). While it is playing today’s song, it could be searching my drives for my MP3s, which tend to move around because I keep wanting to store them elsewhere.

Summer Came at an Odd Time This Year

Summer came at an odd time for me this year. It arrived on August 12 or thereabouts. That’s when I started to feel that I was finally getting out from under an overly ambitious load of things to do.

I knew I was expecting too much of my summer, back in May, but I didn’t know what to do about it. The ad hoc solution was to just throw my to-do list into the mix and see what happened. So of course I got tied up in random trivia and felt like I wasted a good chunk of the summer. But not so much after August 12.

Summer hasn’t ended yet, even though school has started. That’s partly because it’s still a hundred degrees outside, and partly because I have a shamefully light class load this semester. I haven’t even come indoors. I’m working at a desk in my garage, having become so acclimated that I don’t even mind it’s a hundred. I actually kind of prefer it.

Needed: Firefox Archive Add-on

There should be a Firefox add-on, called Archive, that keeps a copy of an abstract for each webpage visited. Programmers could build the abstract into their HTML, or perhaps point to a thumbnail, a “table of contents” webpage, a user-generated sticky note, or some otherwise small and easily gleaned indication of what the page is about. The copy of the abstract could be saved like a log file that just keeps getting incremented with every additional webpage visited. The log file could be kept offsite and updated automatically, like the Foxmarks bookmarks synchronizer, so as to render it immune to hard drive crashes, system reinstallations, and the other maladies that regularly befall the browser’s history. The goal would be to generate an easily searchable reference source, for all those times when the user remembers that s/he visited a website about this or that but has no idea now where to begin to look — where a Google search on such a vague recollection would turn up a thousand hits.

Needed: Sci-Fi: Reverse Evolution

There should be a science fiction story in which creatures make a slow transition to other forms of life, in reverse evolution. Like, at some point in the future, people will have developed superior character traits, will no longer need the extreme adaptability that comes with a scattered and chaotic lifestyle, and will come to be more like dogs; and at some point dogs stop humping your leg, generally get tired of sex, and become asexual reproducers, like plants. Hmm … maybe this should be a religion …

Statement of Purpose

My Blogger blog is developing into a repository for long, complex explanations of solved problems, and also for heavy stuff regarding finance, politics, and computers. That’s fine. This one has a different, simpler purpose. I’m bringing over a couple of lists I have started there. Instead of posting addenda to those lists within a single blog posting, I will just post them, here, as separate entries.