Curt Doolittle

Author: Curt Doolittle

  • FIVE STRATFOR PREDICTIONS I follow STRATFOR pretty closely. They rely very heavi

    FIVE STRATFOR PREDICTIONS

    I follow STRATFOR pretty closely. They rely very heavily on geo-strategy and demographics rather than some absurd idealism, or pure economics to make predictive trends. (Economics are more derivative than causal when compared to geography and demographics.)

    1) “Turkey will emerge as Iran weakens”

    Well Iran is an economic basket case, so this is better stated as “Turkey is Emerging as Iran Weakens” and Turkey is a country that’s the most sane in the Muslim world. While we probably all want a strong Turkey and a strong Russia, the muslim world needs a credible core state that can hold other states accountable for their actions within the civilization. I just have a hard time seeing turkey become the core state, even though it will emerge as the most important economic power. That culture is still too primitive and mired in familialism to join the first world.

    2) “Russia will use economic tools to build influence in Eastern Europe”

    Well, what do you mean ‘will’? Russia owns big industry in Ukraine through the extensive use of credit, and Russia controls the flow of energy. So either western and Eastern Ukraine split, or Ukraine will have to act as a client state of Russia in every way possible. Personally I think Ukrainians are a sweet people that could join Europe even if Russian’s couldn’t. But the stage is set for at least eastern Ukraine to act as a Russian client state. (Canada’s client-state relationship to the USA for example.)

    3) “Certain developing countries will emerge as economic alternatives to an increasingly uncompetitive China”

    Already happening. The china miracle is slowing down. Not much surprise there.

    4) Economic instability will force change on China’s political foundations

    This one I don’t buy. I think that not enough time has passed, and that they will retain their strategy, as has france, of being a pain in the ass to the rest of the world in order to demonstrate their relevance.

    5) “The tension between economic interests and cultural stability will define Europe”

    Which is saying nothing. Either Europe evolves into a german empire (which is actually what I prefer) or the catholic and protestant countries have to split. Given that the low friction route is to maintain the german empire, I think this will be the result. If we can get the USA militarily and strategically out of Europe, then Germany might get out of her WW2 guilt and take responsibility for Europe once again. (Please). The is the only way I know of to rescue western civilization – to restore the confidence germanic protestant values and mythology.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-06-26 09:07:00 UTC

  • CODING TO PERFORMANCE: MENTAL TORTURE FOR SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS I’m messing with t

    CODING TO PERFORMANCE: MENTAL TORTURE FOR SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS

    I’m messing with the team lately:

    “Speed is a design pattern too.”

    “So, I don’t care if its easy to program – I just care if its fast.”

    “Yes it’s painful. But I pay you once for pain. The user feels pain every time he loads a page. In the pain-economy, you’re pain is just a better investment.”

    🙂

    A good complier in most languages will compensate for the overhead of writing ‘good clear code’. But we are increasingly using languages that aren’t put through ‘good compilers’, and as such, we can’t afford the high cost of that overhead.

    We coded our product for performance. And the price for that lack of overhead is readability. That means that the code is a bit hard to read for a new employee – it’s hard for me at least.

    But, in exchange, I’ve been very happy with our performance. One competitor I’m very familiar with generates about 50MB of peak ram on the server. Our same feature generates just over 4MB of peak memory on the server. We only load what we need for any given request. I think we’ll get to 5MB a request before we’re done. Between the various tactics we use (rarely reloading the page, if ever) only loading sections of any page dynamically (like FB does) , and fetching the data from the client side after the page is presented – all of which are pretty standard fare these days – we have an amazingly fast application both statistically and perceptibly. So coding to speed worked for us.

    The truth is though, that clear code is easier to debug, and easier to maintain. And it’s harder for bugs or un-executed code to creep into the source. But in exchange, adding devs to the product team is difficult. And programming to performance is in itself, slow for these reasons. And our application isn’t small by any means.

    It is, really, much more dense and full of features than the previous generation of ERP/PSA systems that run on desktops. (They look ‘child-like’ to us at this point. Really.) So we have to be very conscious of performance, and conscious of the fact that browsers tend to bleed memory like crazy.

    At present we’re testing out switching ORM’s (the software that maps the program to the database so that developers don’t have to write much SQL) to see if we can make the code easier to write without much of a penalty. But we can’t seem to find a script solution for the browser side that is mature enough for our needs, and is as fast as the way we do it today. It’s better than it has been, but it’s not there yet.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-06-26 08:42:00 UTC

  • THE LEFT CALLS THIS THE SECOND GREAT DEPRESSION. sigh

    http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/139464/j-bradford-delong/the-second-great-depressionFINALLY THE LEFT CALLS THIS THE SECOND GREAT DEPRESSION.

    sigh.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-06-25 14:00:00 UTC

  • PRICE OF IGNORING THE LIBERTARIAN MIDDLE

    http://www.newmarksdoor.com/mainblog/2013/06/the-case-of-the-missing-white-voters-revisited.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NewmarksDoor+(Newmark’s+Door)THE PRICE OF IGNORING THE LIBERTARIAN MIDDLE.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-06-25 13:56:00 UTC

  • WE ALL BENEFIT FROM CHINA’S PIRACY

    http://m.foreignaffairs.com/articles/139452/kal-raustiala-and-christopher-sprigman/fake-it-till-you-make-it?page=showHOW WE ALL BENEFIT FROM CHINA’S PIRACY

    Source date (UTC): 2013-06-25 09:12:00 UTC

  • IMMIGRATION HURTS THE ECONOMY

    http://www.rasmusen.org/papers/immigration-rasmusen.pdfHOW IMMIGRATION HURTS THE ECONOMY

    Source date (UTC): 2013-06-25 09:11:00 UTC

  • ANCIENT GENDER BIAS Under Salic law, calling a woman a whore when you cant prove

    ANCIENT GENDER BIAS

    Under Salic law, calling a woman a whore when you cant prove it was almost as bad as attempted murder.

    (65 vs 45 shillings.)

    Sticks and stones must have come later I guess. 😉

    Source date (UTC): 2013-06-24 18:23:00 UTC

  • DUNE: FUTURE PRESENT In Herbert’s masterpiece, the Mentat (human computer) has r

    DUNE: FUTURE PRESENT

    In Herbert’s masterpiece, the Mentat (human computer) has replaced mechanical computers because, after their ‘singularity’ event, computers became as dangerous as the clones in star wars or the hordes of zombies that are the current narrative equivalent. Or for us libertarians, the organs of the bureaucratic state.

    Working in my chapter on solutions to institutional problems in calculative fields (the politics of investment in the commons and the distribution of proceeds, the common law, the organization of jurisprudence, accounting and banking), and reading a bit of English and Roman law, it seems to me that we have already passed through our first singularity (scientism, socialism, positivism, postmodernism, statistics, dynamic stochastic equilibria, legislative law, and the concentration of banking made possible by computers and the hubris of statistical risk measurement. ) Most of this calculative bureaucracy made possible by the computerization of recordkeeping, accounting, actuarial and statistical data.

    The fact that numbers, in the form of priced and promises, cannot represent the values we attribute to them once ownership of the priced instrument changed, is overshadowed by the ability of nation states and their fiat money to act as an insurer of all this accumulated disinformation.

    But like any problem of measurement under high causal density, its what we choose not to measure, what we cannot measure, what we cannot anticipate that we need to measure, and the inability of contrarians to insulate themselves from the accumulate risk, that creates fragility in the entire system.

    Norms, in particular are an asset that can only be measured by aggregate comparison to those with different norms.

    Trust can be priced. It can. And it makes health care look trivial by comparison. It is an absurdly expensive norm.

    My analysis, which is supported by what we are finally seeing in the data, is that we have already hit one singularity. And the way to correct it is not more computing, which by the process of aggregation launders all future-value information from any price or promise, but by more professionalization of calculative fields alpng the responsibilities of lawyers, doctors, and cpa’s. (albeit privately insured rather than certified.) And the weakening of limited liability protections.

    While i agree that government concentration of capital can create certain institutions, all such institutions can be privatized once economically viable.

    But taxes, laws, our current primitive accounting methods, banking, credit and dent instruments sll launder causal relations.

    This not only creates disinformation but prohibits the population from learning.

    The keynesian might argue that the good that results in the short term is more important than the harm in the long term. And that we can fix those problems when we get there. ( That is, in fact, their argument. )

    The truth is that the problem is approaching more rapidly, and we are nearly powerless to fix it by incremental means. Conversely, we could achieve all the same ends, and prosper even more so, by using known solutions to institutional problems of cooperation, and adapt to guture circumstances.

    But that program of action would require that the progressive program acknowledge that its postmodern failure is as great as its socialist failure was.

    And that cannot happen. Not the least of which is because it is tied too closely now with feminism. And numerically, policy change isn’t possible for that reason.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-06-24 16:20:00 UTC

  • Roman Skaskiw 🙂

    http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE95K0ME20130621Thanks Roman Skaskiw 🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2013-06-24 14:29:00 UTC

  • This argument does not apply as clearly as you suggest to social phenomenon, bec

    http://ex-army.blogspot.com/2013/06/three-ways-to-go-wrong.html?spref=fb1) This argument does not apply as clearly as you suggest to social phenomenon, because of causal density, and un-testability. That we can argue against induction is of course correct as an analytical statement. But that does not mean that we cannot argue in favor of general principles necessary for consensual action. This is the difference between abstract truth and knowledge necessary for action. The first is irrelevant. The second is how humans make collective decisions in commons.

    2) Data will, within the next twenty years or so, give us evidence that eliminates our need for philosophical argument, and instead, will allow us to make empirical arguments. RIght now, voting data, which is demonstrated preference, provides most of the data useful for our arguments.

    This is the underlying problem with current libertarian popular argument: fighting the last war. We fought the war on socialism on philosophical grounds because a) we lacked the data to do otherwise, and b) central planning results show up faster than self organizing results. So the other side had more better data than we did. That’s changed. The problem today is not central planning, or socialism, or social democracy. It’s Postmodernism, which has replaced ‘scientific socialism’ as the religion of choice of the state. So most libertarians fight the last war, using last war’s rhetoric, rather than data against postmodernism. (Which is what those few of us do on the edge of the ‘reformation’ in libertarianism.)

    3) Non aggression is an epistemological TEST to which we can subject statements. It is not a positive proscription for action. Rothbardian/Hoppiean Libertarianism is philosophically rigid, and an attempt at a complete theory, but that completeness is beyond the use of even the educated classes. As such that complexity has been reduced to the single test, which can be employed without such study and rigor.

    We DO have a necessary and sufficient theory of liberty. We just have an insufficient and necessary explanation of morality. Rothbard did a good job but he was wrong in relying upon the ethics of the ghetto instead of the ethics of the soldiery. Ghetto ethics are why libertarianism remains a minority movement. Mises did a good job, but in failing to incorporate opportunity costs he failed to formulate his Praxeology as a the closed science that he suggested it to be.

    Cheers.

    Curt Doolittle.

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-06-24 13:15:00 UTC