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.

Projection: 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.