http://becker-posner-blog.com/2012/12/breakup-of-countries-no-economic-disaster-becker.htmlTHE BREAKUP OF COUNTRIES IS NO ECONOMIC DISASTER
Actually, it’s a fantastic opportunity.
Here is Gary Becker chiming in on the Catalan secession movement.
To bad he doesn’t turn his attention to what would happen to the united states if we broke up. And how fantastic an opportunity it would be.
Source date (UTC): 2012-12-04 15:41:00 UTC
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2011/01/07/rspb.2010.2504.full.pdfRELIGION FERTILITY AND INHERITANCE.
Source date (UTC): 2012-12-04 03:14:00 UTC
KIEV: FIRST SNOW
Insane traffic. Accidents on hills. Sliding cars. Helpless facial expressions. Men with shovels.
Just like Seattle without the justification for it. 🙂
The weather is like Ottawa. Cold. But the people and architecture are not.
I love this absurd country.
Source date (UTC): 2012-12-03 06:49:00 UTC
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/11/recent-human-evolution-2/WE EVOLVE QUICKLY : BUT WITH CONSEQUENCES
Source date (UTC): 2012-12-03 04:50:00 UTC
THE DARK ENLIGHTENMENT
(Coined by John Derbyshire)
The novel concept that the enlightenment’s optimistic, heroic, equalitarian view of man has proven to be wrong, that the dirty secret of our genome project is that we are profoundly unequal, and that by consequence our civic religion based upon this error, as well as the political system that we use to ritualize and celebrate that religion, is simply a new mysticism that replaces the old mysticism, with an equally false premise.
While I am not technically part of this movement, because the purpose of that movement is to understand, make arguments for, and criticize enlightenment equalitarianism, and not to provide solutions given that we know that it is false, I do, in effect, subscribe to its premise. The difference is, that I am working to solve the problem of political order – cooperation in a division of knowledge and labor – DESPITE our inequality, rather than debate who should or should not have power over others because of either equality or inequality. I have abandoned both the optimistic libertarian as well as rational classical liberal prescriptions for social order, because both of them rely upon a requirement that members of a economic polity ‘believe’ in the sanctity or utility of the same social and political order. Both libertarianism and classical liberalism as currently structured require from their adherents a homogenous preference for means and ends. And as I have argued extensively, it is not possible for us to have these similar means and ends, especially given that women’s reproductive and social strategy is in direct conflict to that of men’s. While it may be possible to compromise between men of different classes, it is not possible to compromise between the genders without the armistice provided by the nuclear family. And the nuclear family is a product of that settled and static agrarian order – an order which we no longer live in. Without that agrarian order the truce between male and female reproductive strategies is broken and both fight through the violence of the state to obtain their preferred order at the expense of the other’s preference.
While we are unequal, it doesn’t really matter which gender, class, race, or culture is superior or inferior unless you are arguing that one group should control another. While it’s true that some groups are superior to others – and it’s true that much of that superiority comes from the distributions of certain talents within that group and therefore the norms that develop to suit that distribution – that acknowledgement doesn’t, in itself, help us at all. Because even if we are unequal, we must cooperate peacefully for mutual benefit – if only so that we do not engage in mutually harmful conflict. And while this is a less positive and inspirational view of man, it is both true and utilitarian, and as such provides us with a superior premise with which we may create constructive institutional solutions to the problem of cooperation between groups with different distributions of talents, and therefore norms and preferences.
If we possess the knowledge that we are unequal and in permanent opposition on desired ends, the question then, is how do we create institutions of human cooperation that do not rely upon a false assumption of equality of ability, interest or preference? The market provides us with some insights, because the market illustrates how people can cooperate on means even if they have opposing ends, or are unaware of each other’s desired ends. But contrary to libertarian reasoning, there are problems that cannot be solved within the market structure because of human moral sensibilities. Mostly, that we create governments largely to make both normative and physical capital investments, which include prohibitions on involuntary transfer or privatization of those normative and physical capital investments. ie: humans consider appropriation of the commons cheating and they deplore cheating. And universally demonstrate that they deplore it, in every conceivable manner without exception. The most obvious example is that it has been extremely difficult to create the normative perception that competition is a good rather than a theft of the commons, despite the pervasive evidence that competition benefits all.
The structural problem with our political systems and our philosophy of government is that we carry with them the idea of an abstract common good that is somehow achievable through intentional cooperation on ends. Rather than achievable through unintended cooperation on ends but cooperation on means. And therefore we rationalize the creation of laws in support of a fictional and unknowable common good, instead of using government as a vehicle for constructing contracts that consist of voluntary exchanges between groups or classes as we do in the market, and prohibiting cheating on those contracts. This contractual rather than legislative government allows us to cooperate on means if not ends in those circumstances where ‘cheating’ would create a barrier to shared investment.
The English managed to accomplish this feat of inter-class cooperation with parliaments and divided houses. Unfortunately, we did not add additional houses for the proletariat and instead, given our new religious doctrine of the equality of man, we collapsed our houses rather than expanded them. As such, what has occurred, is that government is no longer the vehicle by which people with separate interests reach compromise via exchange for mutual benefit. But that we use every political and extra-political process to attempt to gain control of the monopolistic and dictatorial process of law making. In America the conservatives have hired the capitalists to defend them from government and the proletarians and single women (who are the majority of women) have hired the government to extract revenues from the middle classes. The conservatives use think tanks and the progressives use popular media. The list is infinite.
While I am still working out what I believe are the particulars, it is quite possible to have institutions that promote cooperation among people with dissimilar interests. We need not revert to small states – although that would be preferable in almost every way I can imagine. And even within small states, we do not have to conduct constant political competitions all of which are predicated upon lies, because our civic religion and its political institutions are predicated upon the enlightenment lie of human equality of both ability and interest.
The Dark Enlightenment presents us with an uncomfortable scientific reality that is as painfully inescapable for our secular religion as was Darwin for the mystical religion of the church. And I am, in some way, part of this movement in the sense that I acknowledge the truth of human inequality. But that said, I do not believe our political philosophy can accomodate this reality without practical institutional solutions. I am not interested in complaints about an obvious institutional ailment, I’m interested in solutions to that ailment.
To argue that one political system or another will place one class or another in control of other classes is to argue that some group will agree to suffer deprivation without receiving something in exchange for their adherence to norm, custom and rule. This is as illogical an assumption as is equality.
Until both conservatives, classical liberals, and libertarians understand that we require institutions that accomodate the insights of the Dark Enlightenment that do not involve re-nationalization (despite it’s attractiveness) they will continue to spout what is in effect, a religion of HOMOGENEITY OF INTEREST, which is as false as the homogeneity of ability that they criticize in the enlightenment.
Our problem is not in developing a consensus on what is best. It is in developing institutions that allow us to cooperate in complex political orders the way that we cooperate in the market: on means if not ends, using contracts, not laws, because privatization of the commons or ‘cheating’ is too high a transaction cost to be overcome without institutions that satisfy the moral prohibition on cheating.
In this sense, we have our political philosophy backwards. We think we must create homogeneity in order to achieve a collective end. When in fact, we need to achieve multitudinous ends, and can only do so, if we prohibit ‘cheating’. Morality in all cultures is a set of rules that prohibit cheating – transfer of the commons. It is a necessary and irreversible property of the human animal, without which cooperation could not have evolved. And prohibition on cheating, so that capital can be concentrated, both normative and physical, is, after the ability to calculate using money and numbers, the primary institutional development necessary for a division of knowledge and labor – from which all our prosperity descends.
Curt Doolittle
December 3, 2012 11:00AM, Kiev, Ukraine.
Source date (UTC): 2012-12-03 04:24:00 UTC
http://jaymans.wordpress.com/2012/11/30/expectations-and-reality-a-window-into-the-liberal-conservative-baby-gap/THE LIBERAL-CONSERVATIVE BABY GAP
(One of many reasons why whites are becoming more conservative.)
Source date (UTC): 2012-12-03 02:03:00 UTC
HOPPE: DEMOCRACY IS THE SLOW ROAD TO COMMUNISM
Source date (UTC): 2012-12-02 18:00:00 UTC
Happy birthday! Love ya’. 🙂
Source date (UTC): 2012-12-02 16:12:00 UTC
ON MICROSOFT’S FUTURE : YES SURFACE LOOKS LIKE A FAILURE
(From something I posted on Dave Quick’s page)
OK. While I’m thinking about it:
1) everyone knows msft’s problem is a combination of their dependence on OEM’s paired with the threat of suits, especially from governments, if they try to alter this dependence. They must get into the hardware business. but they can’t without buying someone like Asus, Dell or HP.
2) The first concept of a desktop everywhere was a correct prediction. The second conceptual bet, of owning the living room was a failure. This again, is a hardware ownership problem, and a distribution network problem. The software is trivial.
3) Abandoning the pc as a gaming platform in favor of attempts at the living room was a failure. Especially in light of the fact that it was the gaming technology that caused advances in processor demand that fueled increasing creative destruction in the field.
4) Abandoning the application server market to Oracle and IBM is irreversible, and was driven by at least the following factors a) the failure of msft to create sufficiently advanced products for enterprises, b) because of the performance challenges of the architecture and the slow response to the internet c) losing the IQ during the revolution by killing ASP for example rather than improving windows architecture to tolerate transactions rather than processes (and failing to make PHP part of visual studio) and perhaps creating a compiler for it that would give windows an advantage in productivity d) as I have argued for years, because they underfunded their services organization, which did poor work using poor technology and threatened their cash cow of operating system revenue with top customers, and e) letting the sharepoint group kill off both Commerce Server and nCompass, which together, if funded, could have performed as well as the others f) not-in-redmond that ruined the potential for the Navision acquisition to expand beyond accounting.
4) The vast majority of microsoft employees have meaningless jobs with little to no impact where they are totally isolated from the pricing system and supported only by the network affect. Survival is as much political as anything else. The hardware business is much less tolerant of this extremely politicized environment. And the losses from hardware failures more substantial. These employees cannot transfer to that environment. ( I won’t go into the other cultural problems there.)
5) Any management that saw technology as joy has been forced out of the company along with most of the evangelists that actually connected the bureaucracy with the consumers. Much of this management has been forced out largely because there is no technical visionary in the company, and the senior execs are operators, not inventors, so they do not actually know what to do with the business. Furthermore, those that do have been forced out of the company as soon as enough analysts suggest that they would be better at replacing Ballmer. Esp Raikes.
6) Microsoft’s core technology (Windows) is architecturally unsuited for low cost, high performance computers. It was designed to be heavy, and it remains heavy. It should because underneath it’s conceptually still a product of digital equipment’s minicomputer architecture. If you understand this you will also understand that there is almost nothing that can be done about it without some extraordinary invention that alters the user interface (think talking to your box) the way that touch and hi res altered the interactive experience. It is this kind of innovation that makes substantial investment possible. Because it reduces the transaction cost of working with computers – and all information.
When I spoke with Stephen Elop about this over lunch a few years ago it seemed as if he simply couldn’t even grasp the idea. Of course, when he went to Nokia I understood the strategy. But I also understood that he was not intellectually capable of improving office nor or altering the course of Nokia. In few meetings I’ve had with Ballmer (I’m out of the industry so I feel safe talking about it) his only concerns were expressed in global terms and the company’s overall revenue potential in the middle term. But every time I think about it, I can’t get away from the famous email to Buffett that stated that in ten years anything could happen to MSFT. And it has.
Continuing on this thread, Touch eliminates the barrier to use for navigating. It reduces transaction costs. It does not require that the user comprehend abstractions. Gramma would never have had trouble with the ipad the way she had to learn the keyboard.
But touch does nothing for engineering, finance, science, writing contracts, or even making movies. It does very little for content creators.
THEREFORE
Microsoft owns the content creation business. It owns the complex interaction business. It has ceded the application business to the major firms. It has ceeded the consumer to Apple. So microsoft’s market has, like IBM before it, narrowed. It’s narrowed to the need for businesses to have an active directory service to manage security, and the administrative desktop tools (Office) needed for clerical work. IE: Microsoft owns the CLERICAL WORKER. That term includes people who use structured data in its loosest form (verbal arguments and persuasion) to those who use it in it’s common form (financial clerical work) it’s next broadest form (statistical information possible only with Excel or other tools), to it’s creative form (engineering and science). But this is all clerical. The inabilty for msft to control display quality (as does apple) prevents it from being in the visual business.
No one can or is willing to replace Excel, and the vast network of spreadsheets that most companies (foolishly) run on instead of ERP, PSA and other financial systems which are far more expensive to implement. But if someone creates a version of excel that replaces two dimensional functions with n-dimensional processing like sql, then that would be a significant invention that would make the value of the new product worth the transaction cost of changing it.
When Word came out, it’s fundamental improvement was the use of the paragraph marker to store formatting data, which allowed rapid redrawing of the screen. Wordperfect for example, used document level tagging, which stayed in effect until altered. This meant that wordperfect had to redraw or rather reprocess the document. It wasn’t just marketing. It wasn’t just that word was carrying the burden of it’s dos roots. It’s that architecturally it was a flawed model in the newer context. Even though the paragraph marker is the source of all the stuff we hate about word.
Now, If you follow writing it’s split between four camps: text fragments that we use for the majority of our work today (email, text, web pages, forms) , simple word processors (glorified wordpads, which is about all anyone needs), html word processors (formatted text processors), business word processor (word) and writers tool’s (Scrivener and Final Cut models). Fundamentally, the writer’s tool has taken over writing in all professional forms except business writing and contracts. This process will continue.
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN
So the point here is that it’s not worth it for anyone to get into microsoft’s office business YET. It is possible for microsoft to DEFEND that CLERICAL business. It is probably NOT possible for microsoft to expand into the CONTENT CONSUMPTION BUSINESS. It has no advantage there. And any attempts to do so (windows 8) will probably be a failure. computers are NOT general purpose devices any more. They’re appliances. THe operating system is not a competitive advantage, It’s a commodity. And in microsoft’s case, the windows architecture is a liability.
What I have suggested in the past, is that once a competitor has the ability and incentive to eradicate microsoft’s lead it’s actually quite easy to do it with software:
a) active directory replacement
b) an inexpensive desktop appliance with superior user interface for the majority of clerical workers, that provides increased protection from theft.
c) the ability to run a window for legacy windows applications until they are replaced with web based (that this is in process should be obvious) or at least iOS level apps.
d) a spreadsheet with all Excel functions PLUS a sql like or at least close to sql like langage. esp one that handled graphs (not pictures, data structures).
This will consume the administrative worker that accounts for the majority of desktop systems.
My prediction was that Apple would do this as soon as either the iphone/ipad revenue stream threatens to peak, and/or the television strategy that they are starting to roll out fails. It is just too easy for them to use brand preference for apple to displace all clerical systems and support for the simple reason that windows user interface and office features sets are too complex for all but a minority of jobs.
It might not be apple. It will be someone else (who cares abut this opportunity more than I do….)
So, for the above reasons both the environment at msft, it’s revenue stream, it’s product architecture, and the few points of advantage taht their technology possesses are all weaker than the network effect is powerful.
And only someone very visionary can change all that. And that person would have to be CEO.
Source date (UTC): 2012-12-02 14:27:00 UTC
http://www.intel.com/museumofme/en_US/r/index.htmI know I’m a latecomer to tMOM, But it’s a pretty inspirational illustration of how media about ideas can cross into physical reality. It’s particulary sweet that its intimate rather than heroic.
Source date (UTC): 2012-12-02 04:28:00 UTC