Three Novels

I read three novels in the last week or so.

First, "Ship Breaker", by Paolo Bacigalupi. This is set in the same future dystopia as "The Drowned Cities" discussed here. It also has in a supporting role the half-man Tool who was one of the lead characters of "The Drowned Cities". From where Tool is, this seems to be before the other novel. I mentioned that this is being distributed as a Young Adult novel. The protagonist is indeed a teenager; he helps rescue the beautiful plutocrat "princess" and maybe wins her heart. Potentially another YA component: he has serious issues with his father. In fact, that relationship is so dark that I would not recommend this book for young teens.

Bacigalupi has made himself the master of this future dystopia, where the rising seas have vastly disrupted civilization and Monsanto rules the world. It is a chilling vision that he portrays. The narrative arc of the story is simple (single threaded), the pacing is good, it is an easy and enjoyable 336 pages.

Man, one thing I don't like about ebooks is how hard it is to figure out how many pages are in the book. I usually have to go to Amazon or B&N. I wish they would fix that.

Second, "Bitter Seeds" by Ian Tregillis. I think this was a $2.99 special I saw in the TOR blog. Basically, engineered, electrically powered Nazi superheroes fight British warlocks invoking elder gods in the Spanish Civil War and WW II. The story is told with narratives from both sides. It is well written and is a definite page turner. There is a sequel out and a third one due to be released this month. I will definitely read those. 352 pages. Amazon sez it is Tregillis' debut novel -- definitely a good start.

Third, "A Time Of Changes" by Robert Silverberg. I'm not sure how I picked this one up. Probably on sale and I thot, I haven't read Silverberg in a while, and I've been enjoying his stuff for 40 years, let's give this a try.

Then found it is a 2009 reissue (with a new preface by the author) of a 1971 release. I don't remember reading it then which is surprising because I was reading all of Silverberg in the 70s.

The story is of a planet whose culture/religion is based on complete abnegation of the self. Using first person pronouns is "talking dirty". The protagonist rebels against this, catalyzed by his meeting an Earthman who introduces him to a drug that allows people to share minds. You can't love others until you love yourself. The catchphrase of his new movement is "I love you" which you would never say under the old system.

Kind of fun to go back to the hippie ideals of the 60s -- taking drugs and opening up to others lead to a world of peace and love, yay! Of course, it didn't really work out that way, but, it was still fun to revisit those days of heady hope. 304 pages.

Understanding Power

I finished reading "Understanding Power: The Indispensible Chomsky" (2002), Edited by Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel, 416 pages. This is a collection of some of Noam Chomsky's seminars and discussions from the time period 1992 through 1999. I started reading a few weeks ago and was going through it rather quickly before spending a (very pleasant) weekend with my wife and my middle daughter in Ithaca, NY, and then the following weekend spending most of my time watching the NCAA basketball tournament.

Chomsky's speaking style is extremely straight-forward and understandable. At one point he dismisses a lot of modern intellectualism for using fancy words to obfuscate easy concepts as a form of self-aggrandization. He has done a lot of reading including lots of formerly classified government documents.

The first thing that is most striking about the book is how, 15-20 years before the Occupy movement, he has dead on anticipated their arguments. And in the end, it doesn't come down to republican vs democrat or liberal vs conservative, it comes down to class war: rich and powerful and of course doing every possible to keep it that way vs poor and powerless -- or as he says, "superflous population", who are not involved in producing profit. The 1%, or the 0.5% who own 50% of everything via the stateless multi-national corporations, are clearly who is in charge.

It was striking too when he talks about the (never ending) "War on Drugs": incarceration of inner city blacks for drug use or dealing on the street, while in the 1980's $260M in drug money was being laundered by US banks annually, with never a thought of prosecutions or jail time. And here we are 20-30 years later, and now HSBC alone is laundering close to $1B a year in drug money, and still there are no criminal prosecutions, no jail time -- "Too big to prosecute". Similarly, in the 1980's, studies showed that 90% of the chemicals being exported by US companies into Latin America were going into drug production. Were there any investigations or prosecutions of US chemical companies and/or their executives and their bonuses? Of course not! "War on Drugs" my ass!

It's kind of hard for me to try to summarize this book, there is so much there. I've known about Chomsky, the Father of Modern Linquistics and a Linguistics professor at M.I.T., since I was there 40 years ago. I'd always kind of dismissed him as being kind of on the lunatic fringe of the left. But, now that I finally read his words, he is just thinking simple thoughts, drawing simple conclusions, and speaking the truth of these.

Eight years ago (surely not!), I read Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States". I blogged about it at the time, I thought it was leftist-slanted to the point of being unbelievable at times. I had pretty much none of that reaction reading the Chomsky. So I wonder if Chomsky's thinking is actually better, or if I have just evolved that far to the left in the last 8 years? Since I quit working so much and finally retired, I definitely have more time to think about and get involved in politics, and, I think ever since the Tea Party started I've been moving left rapidly. Funny, the Zinn and the recommendation on Chomsky, and "Occupy World Street" before that, all came from my oldest daughter Erica. We seem to be sliding to the left together. She has been very active with Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Sandy and I am very proud of her.

The Chomsky book starts with a discussion of how the US and to a lesser degree the European press are locked into the narrative of "the US is the good guy always starting the peace process" vs "the US is the world's foremost terrorist state; it has not been attacked since 1812 but still manages to invade someplace (basically defenseless) every year or so; and the entire world is scared shitless of it". I had to agree how, every time we start a war with some poor chump, there's always "evidence" -- which no one can verify then or later -- that we've been attacked or are going to be attacked, and we all get called on to support our troops, and, damn it, it's hard not to get sucked in. But, how many times can they keep doing this? I wonder if Obama will be able to complete his 2nd term without invading somewhere.

There's some LOL stuff on the semantics of the mainstream press. A "moderate" government is defined as one that "follows U.S. orders". A "radical" government is of course one that "doesn't follow U.S. orders". See also "terrorist state".

Meanwhile, he gives many examples of cases where maybe 1 courageous reporter finds out that, say, Saddam is willing to get out of Kuwait peacefully, but then basically no newspapers will carry the story. Once the drums start beating, no one want to be a "traitor". He also talks very believably about how reporters and writers who don't want to follow the narrative that their editors want wind up having to find a different career. Because newspapers are businesses, and their main customers are not their readers, their main customers are their advertisers, who are mostly businesses. And the main point here is that, the Republican and Democratic parties are not really different parties, they are just factions of the same party that has ruled the US for the last 150 years or so: the Capitalist Business Party. It's the same message of Occupy, that US domestic and foreign policy are both completely determined by what is best for corporate business interests.

There is a thread that runs through all the sessions: are the corporate interests so entrenched that it is hopeless? Or can people organize and get things changed? In general, he says, keep plugging, keep the faith, keep organizing, have hope. And he also points out where there has been progress. For example, the fight against the popular Sandinistas in Nicaragua had to be done via clandestine operations rather than outright invasion because the public would not support invasion. It comes back to, the people in power will listen to the rest of us if we get loud enough to scare them -- otherwise, they could care less. Discouraging tho that in the 10-20 years or so since he talked about this, the situation seems to be continuing to get worse rather than better. But, still, what choice do we have but to keep fighting the old lizards? Every person in the world has the right to live.

One of his contentions that was new to me was that the US defense budget has for 60 years been about channelling tax dollars into the development of new tech, that can then be exploited by business. I guess that makes sense, the Internet came from DARPA, and that's probably true of the majority of non-medical tech as well. So this is yet another subsidy for business and the rich, as is the NIH budget on the medical side.

I didn't come away with a clear feeling for, why do our .01% rulers want to kill the social safety net so much? It costs much less than the entitlements of the corporations and the rich. I think what he said on this was by suppressing the general populace they are suppressing rivals for power. Hungry children don't grow the brains they should, so they stay an underclass, available as labor if necessary, otherwise they can be held in the prisons (for nice profit margins).

Also interesting, Britain used to have General Welfare and Corn laws up until the 1840's, which basically guaranteed food to everyone. Those got repealed to force people to go to work in the new factories of the Industrial Revolution. This was also when general public education started, to give workers the limited literacy they needed to work in a factory.

I also did not realize that, just as oil has been the crux resource of the 20th century, the crux resource of the 19th century was cotton. The Industrial Revolution started with textiles for clothing.

He also debunks The Great Man Theory, which I've talked about before, in answer to a question about, what about the need for Great Leaders, like Gandhi or Martin Luther King? His take is, these types show up late in the process to take the credit, when most of the real work was actually done by 1000s of nameless, faceless feet on the ground. The standard narrative of The Empire pushes The Great Man Theory to disempower the average person, who is actually who makes the change happen. I couldn't agree more.

Similarly, he has great mistrust of the intellectual class. On the political left and in US labor unions, there is a leader class that wants to hobnob with the capitalists and hand down decisions to the rank-and-file. Wrong, wrong, wrong. There have been very few actually socialist and democratic movements in history. The Spanish Anarchists in the 1930's were one. And at the start of the Russian Revolution, there were workers' councils and coops before Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks took over and instituted state-controlled capitalism aka Communism.

There are many, many more details and facts in this book. It is an easy, easy read. I read it in 16 hours (thank you for that data point, KoboReader). I strongly recommend it. Now to check out what Noam's been up to lately. Wow, here's his Wikepedia page. 84 years old, still going strong. FTW!

Hmmm, reading the Wikipedia article, the start 3rd paragraph in the section on politics may well be the base principle of all Chomsky's anarchist politics:

Chomsky asserts that authority, unless justified, is inherently illegitimate, and that the burden of proof is on those in authority. If this burden can't be met, the authority in question should be dismantled. Authority for its own sake is inherently unjustified.

Back in the book, he also says at one point that he was a horrible organizer, so he wound up being a writer. I can identify with that. I made phone calls for Obama in 2008 and hated it. I've never been much on meetings or crowds, so I can't see myself getting involved there. Plus, this seems like Yet Another Thing that it would be more appropriate for me to leave to the younger people. Well, maybe I'll find my niche to contribute eventually (I certainly don't consider myself a writer). For now at least I can still do $$$.

Hah, I should point out how, in passing, Chomsky mentions modern sports as the "circus" part of "bread and circuses" that our plutocrat masters provide to keep us distracted from how much they are fucking us. How many NASCAR owners (Romney's "friends"), NFL and NBA team owners are members of the plutocrat class? All, maybe? Now, if we could just get them to give everyone "bread" to go with the "circus". Still, I love University of Louisville Cardinal basketball! Go Cards!

Sandman Slim, 2-4

Well, as blogged last time, I thought that "Sandman Slim" by Richard Kadrey, was a decent supernatural noir comic book novel. The library had the other 3 in the series, so I went for it. I read them in 2 days, 4 days, and 2 days -- the OverDrive reader that the library uses shows you the number of days left on your (7) day subscription in its listing of books, so it's easy to notice. I got kind of tired of them. I think the main thing they have going for them is lots of smart-ass, cheap detective dialogue -- or should I say "patter". There are also a lot of pop culture references, which makes me afraid that these won't age well. Also, after a while, I found the christian mythology getting on my nerves. Of course, any christian would I'm sure find these books horribly blasphemous, but still, how about Brahmah creating the universe instead of Elohim? He does introduce lots of other species of magical creatures, which I think is fun, whether in stories like this, or in the trashy SyFy channel series that I enjoy (guiltily) like "Warehouse 13", or "Lost Girls".

The 2nd book, "Kill The Dead" introduces an interesting new character: a Czech female porn star zombie hunter -- nice!. The 3rd book "Aloha From Hell" takes place mostly in Hell, as does the 1st half of the 4th book, "Devil Said Bang". The pacing of these books is of course whiz-bang, and each one does come to enough of a conclusion that you are not left resenting being hung over a cliff too much.

So there will clearly be more of these, I guess I'll keep reading them. I have concluded tho that I did like the Harry Connolly Twenty Palaces series better -- too bad it's been discontinued.

Meanwhile, I have three more novels by new authors, most suggested by tweets or retweets of people I follow on twitter. So, should I read some economics or politics, or am I still on vacation? We'll see, I guess.

Yet Another Supernatural Noir Novel

I read, via eBook from the Lexington Free Public Library, "Sandman Slim", by Richard Kadrey, I think based on a recommendation by William Gibson. Very nicely done, christian and ceremonial magic mythology-based, very fast paced, huge body count. There are three more books in the series, I guess I'll go for them as well. Hard to go wrong with cheap (supernatural) detectives. I've also enjoyed Harry Connolly's Twenty Palaces series of books, which was discontinued after 5, and the first of the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher -- I think there's about a dozen of those. Apparently I'm still on vacation, yay!

YA

I did a reread of "Blindsight", by Peter Watts (2006). Hmmm, I thought I'd blogged on this, but I can't find it. I must have read during the period when I had quit blogging. I thought this novel was the best I read that year -- whatever year that was, see what happens when you quit blogging? It is a very unusual first contact novel. The alien race we encounter is incredibly intelligent but completely unconscious. The contention, that such a race would see consciousness as parasite that does nothing but waste energy, which is not an unreasonable argument. Most mentation is accomplished by subconscious processes, the conscious mind then just chimes in and takes credit.

Another nice twist was that the leader of the small, rushed human expedition was a vampire. Vampires had been extinct for 6000 years but "jurassic park"ed back into existence. They have very different mental organization and are ruthless predators -- just who we need to meet aliens.

The reread was good. The main new thing I noticed this time through was that garden variety homo sapiens was being pretty much consigned to the dustbin of history, being replaced by cyborgs, AIs, and, of course, vampires.

I also noticed in an afterword a reference to the novel "Permanence", by Karl Schroeder (2003), and decided to give it a try. A good read, with some interesting use of new science. One of these concepts was that habitable planets could exist around brown dwarf "stars", and that these could be closer together than normal stars. Another was some ideas about consciousness similar to "Blindsight": that technological, conscious races become so because they are poorly adapted to their ecological niche. As eons pass and the race becomes better adapted, it will become increasingly unconscious and instinctive in its behavior. Also some good astro-archeology with artifacts of defunct alien interstellar civilizations.

I wonder if this was published as a Young Adult (YA) novel? The protagonist is a woman in her late teens, and there is a definite subplot of her hooking up with the right guy, i.e., we got us a chick flick here as well as a good hard sci-fi space opera. I know "Hunger Games" was YA. I've got the new Paulo Bacigalupi "Ship Breaker" on my iPad, it was listed as YA, the synopsis says the hero is a teenage boy. So does having a teenager as the protagonist make a novel YA? Seems like there are others ("Jumper" by Steven Gould comes to mind) that have teenage protagonists but weren't called YA. So I guess I'm confused by the YA designation.

Regardless, I've always loved stories with kids or teenagers as the protagonist. They make me think of how much I would have enjoyed reading them when I first started shoveling this stuff in, at age 12 or so.

Free stuff! I was going to buy some of Peter Watts' older stuff, but couldn't get the eBook for the 1st book of a trilogy he had published: "Starfish", "Maelstrom", and "Behemoth". Then found out, these are all available for free at his website. Also all his short stories. Pretty cool!

Karl Schroeder also has his novel "Ventus" available for free at his website. It's interesting how more options for obtaining books keep popping up. Nice!

Flashback

So when I picked up the new Culture novel at the Lexington Free Public Library, I also picked up the latest Dan Simmons, "Flashback". Simmons is a great author, having won awards for science fiction, mystery, and horror, and having also published mainstream novels. What a great trip to the library!

I start reading "Flashback". It's set in a near future (25 years) dystopia. The American Empire has fallen due to the horrible decisions of 2008 and 2012 re not cutting social services and fixing the deficit, and encouraging the Arab world, and not nuc'ing Iran, and not realizing that anthropogenic global warming doesn't exist but was just bad modeling, and getting rid of all but 26 of our nuclear weapons, and abandoning Israel, and, pretty much every (neocon) republican talking point of the last 10 years -- except for abortion and creationism, mercifully.

It really made it hard to read the book. Simmons seemed to be going out of his way to prostelytize on this stuff, and talking about how he doesn't like socialism, Boulder CO, or the Denver Art Museum. It didn't seem to be just story development, it seemed like he was seriously getting stuff off his chest. That aside, it was a classic cheap detective story, with great action, a lot of fun if it weren't for the chorus of right-wing dog whistles throughout.

Well, I would guess that Simmons is successful enough that he's made it into the 1% -- net worth over $2M. And somehow, it seems like a lot of people when they get there decide that it's time to become Libertarians -- "I got mine, fuck you".

My wife and I had a few years where we paid 6 figure federal taxes. I was happy and proud to help my government and those not as lucky as I had been. There was still plenty left over. Maybe it comes back to being afraid that the government is going to take all the results of your hard work and give it away to the undeserving. Somehow I just never felt that way.

More and more it becomes apparent that the policy of the US is to maintain our standard of living at the expense of democratic principles, the rest of the world, and the planet itself, and that seems to be what Simmons is in favor of. This is just flat out wrong. If we don't get sustainable, we are going to get a collapse, and not just an economic one.

A New Culture Novel!

Just finished the latest Iain M. Banks Culture novel, "The Hydrogen Sonata". I so love his totally post-human, galaxy-spanning Culture civilization. The main movers of the Culture are actually the (artificial) Minds mostly embodied in ships ranging in size from moderate to "that's not a moon, that's a battle station". They all have smart ass names, smart ass vehicle classes (Thugs, Hooligans, ...), and are constantly engaged in smart ass dialog. But, their key feature is that they are trying to optimize every situation; they are firmly committed to the principle that in a post-scarcity economy, complete and utter altruism is the only outlook on life that makes any sense.

Most of the conflict in a Culture novel usually comes from their dealings with a less advanced civilization, and basically using carrots, sticks, and whatever else is available to get everyone involved to Do The Right Thing. In this case, there is a non-Culture cousin civilization getting ready to Sublime -- move to the 7th and 8th dimensions, where space is mostly full rather than mostly empty as it is here -- and some less advanced civilizations squabbling over all the great gear they are leaving behind, with a 10,000 year old man thrown in just for fun.

Damn, I love these novels!

Three Library Books

Visited our most excellent Beaumont Branch of the Lexington Free Public library. Came home with 3 novels.

First, "The Alchemist", by Paolo Bacigalupi. I would suspect this is a chapbook -- not clapbook, as I first wrote. Paolo has broken out as a science fiction author with near future tales of global ecosystem catastrophe. This short story is a fantasy -- in the preface he says he wanted to try something different. It is a very pleasant read, with a nice fairy tale feel.

Secondly, "Redshirts", by John Scalzi. I would characterize this is a meta-story that borrows from the Star Trek mythos. Sometimes I like meta-stories more than others. The first I remember was "Beasts", by John Crowley (1976), where you gradually realize that the characters are mostly fairy tale and fable archetypes placed in a science fictional background -- it was magical and charming. Even better from Crowley was the award winning "Little, Big" (1981), where the characters themselves by the end have realized that they are characters in a fairy tale. More recently, I loved the stories within stories of "The Fractal Prince", by Hannu Rajaniemi, about which I blogged here.

But on the other hand, I remember blasting Heinlien's "The Number of the Beast" in this blog post to the effect that "reusing literary figures is a kind of a cheap ploy, and I usually interpret it as a lack of imagination". And I remember my first reaction was annoyance when a writer as good as Dan Simmons ended the award winning "Hyperion" with the characters linking arms and singing "We're Off To See The Wizard".

"Redshirts" I reacted to somewhere between these two extremes. The fact that Star Trek is pop culture (and a favorite of fanboys) rather then more general archetypes made it a little cheezy for me. Like I was wondering, could someone who had never seen Star Trek, or who wasn't vaguely a Trekkie, have enjoyed this at all? I guess they probably wouldn't have picked up a book titled "Redshirts" -- no, they wouldn't have gotten the reference, would they, they might still have picked it up randomly?

"Redshirts" also seemed to end rather abruptly, and then was followed by 3 short addenda, told from the viewpoint of three somewhat ancillary characters. I liked the third of these, but this still seemed gimmicky -- almost like alternative endings, or fan fiction. I guess I mostly like getting sucked into a main narrative and staying there.

Finally, "The Cold Commands", by Richard K. Morgan. Sequel to "The Steel Remains". Morgan broke out in 2002 with "Altered Carbon", which I thought was great. After a couple sequels to that, he did "Thirteen", which was very good as well. Then he switched to a sword-and-sorcery fantasy, but very gritty, and with a gay protagonist, and explicit homosexual sex scenes. I'm always up for some good sex with my action and adventure, but the male homosexual stuff definitely sets off my "yuck" reaction.

Reading the full library edition, with dust covers and all, I always enjoy reading the synopsis, "about the author", etc. -- kind of like appetizers for the main course, the book itself. This was one case where that was a mistake, because the synopsis says "the characters are going to be doing this", but apparently "this" got pushed to the 3rd book. So the pacing seems off throughout. Aside from that, a good read. The homosexual stuff seemed toned down a bit (phew) -- and a lesbian sex scene I of course found totally unyucky. I'm hoping Morgan will get back to sci-fi after this fantasy trilogy concludes.

On a different topic, I made the decision to retire (rather than work at a new 50-60 hour per week startup) Labor Day weekend of 2012. So it's been 4-1/2 months now. I sleep late; exercise every morning; go to lunch a few days a week; and read, fool around online, blog in the afternoons. I cook 2-3 times a week. I haven't been playing as much music as I expected due to the arthritis in my hands acting up. The long and the short of it is, I'm acting like I'm on a prolonged vacation, and will probably continue to do so until it no longer seems appropriate. My mind seems to be smoothing out with regard to worries, ambition, etc, like ripples in a pond dying down. Getting in touch with my inner buddha -- or my inner complete slacker, one or the other. I did have an idea for an iPhone app last week that I'm exploring -- very slowly. But from this point on, I think I will only work again if it's something I (or conceivably a good friend) come up with.

Occupy World Street

I just finished reading "Occupy World Street: A Global Roadmap For Radical Political And Economic Reform", by Ross Jackson. Jackson is a former IT guy who cofounded a software company that supports the financial industries. PhD in Operations Research from Case Western, a Canadian now living in Denmark.

The first 50-60% of the book is kind of depressing:

• Has the US really bombed and/or invaded that many other countries since World War II?
  
• Has the middle class of the entire developed world pretty much gone nowhere since 1980 and Reagan and Thatcher invented trickle-down economics? While CEO salaries and corporate profits have outpaced GDP growth?
  
• Are the WTO and the IMF designed primarily as instruments of economic colonialism, loaning developing countries money that is pocketed by corrupt elites or returned to the developed countries as consulting contracts, and keeping the developing countries in a permanent debtor status?
  
• Is "free trade" designed to keep developing companies from protecting fledgling new local industries via tariffs, so that they remain nothing but sources of raw materials and slave/cheap labor for the developed countries manufacturers -- developed countries who used tariffs and other tools of "sovereign trade" to protect their new industries in the 19th and 20th centuries?
  
• Do the executives of large corporations really not mind trashing the earth if it means they get their $10M bonuses and their billionaire lifestyles?
  

Sadly, you realize that the answer to all these charges is probably a resounding "yes".

Of course, this is against a backdrop of the ecosystem collapse that we are heading into, with global warming, extinction of 1/3 of the species on the earth, continued rising population, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, monoculture farming, and endocrine disruptors in the water supply. He also includes GMOs (Genetically Modified Organisms) in this list, which I would not classify as the same level of problem as the others.

Interestingly, he also contends that we have passed or are right at "peak oil" -- which means that we have used over half the fossil fuels on the planet, such that supplies will from here on out decline and continuously increase in price -- leading to an economic collapse to match the ecological one. And he points out, this is a one-time supply. If we run out before we have alternative energy sources in place, we are totally screwed, there will be no energy to drive civilization.

He talks about books on the collapse of civilizations, including "Collapse" by Jared Diamond, blogged here. He reaches the same conclusion that Diamond did: that civilizations usually collapse because of ecological catastrophes. This time, tho, the difference is we're talking about possibly the whole world.

In discussing how we got here, he contrasts the current system vs a new system that would try to address these problems rather than ignore them in favor of continued wealth extraction by the world's wealthiest.

Current system:

1. Cartesian/Newtonian worldview.
   
2. Growth economy.
   
3. Good of the merchant class most important.
   
4. Globalization maintains status quo with US on top.
   
5. Corporatocracy (the Empire).
   
6. The Neoliberal Project.
   
7. Continuous war -- from the War on Communism to the War on Terror.
   

New system:

1. Quantum, holistic worldview.
   
2. Sustainable economy.
   
3. Good of everyone most important.
   
4. Localization creates micro, eco-friendly, local markets worldwide.
   
5. Democracy.
   
6. The Gaian League.
   
7. Peace, and a peace dividend.
   

There's a lot of good information on financial systems that I did not know about (I'm thinking about finding an economics course online), with discussions of currency regimes, derivatives, default credit swaps, and lots more. One point what was emphasized is that GDP growth has been proportional to energy use -- which implies serious problems for a growth economy if energy availability starts to decline. There's a very good discussion of financial bubbles, and how they are now pretty much baked into our unregulated economy.

The discussion of The Neoliberal Project (or "wealthism" or "financial colonialism") is fascinating. From WW2 until 1980, there was pretty much growth and prosperity for many, and no financial crises. Then, Reagan and Thatcher and Neoliberalism:

1. unrestricted movement of capital across borders in a currency regime of floating rates without capital controls;
   
2. removal of all restrictions on the free flow of goods and labor;
   
3. minimum government regulation of markets;
   
4. removing of all subsidies to domestic industries;
   
5. privatization of state enterprises.
   

This is pretty much what you are required to sign up for to join the World Trade Organization (WTO), with its sister organizations the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Number 1 above is what allows the big money on Wall Street to engage in currency speculation such that they can loot and bankrupt a small country, such as they did with Iceland and Thailand. All in all, they all screw the current Have-nots to the benefit of the current Haves. But there are signs that the Have-nots are starting to wake up.

All of this leads to the horrible inequality we are seeing in the world today, both between and within countries. And studies show, inequality is bad, producing poorer health and less happiness for starters. This applies to everyone, not just the Have-nots. Many studies lately have show that even Republicans want a more equalitarian society than what the US has developed into. Increasingly the .01% billionaires seem to be horribly unhappy, driven, sociopathic power and money addicts.

So then on to what a better system could look like. Note, he characterizes quantum theory as showing that "everything is interconnected", which I would not. And, he chooses to use James Lovelock's Gaia Theory, which I would not particularly put in the scientific mainstream. But, to me, his slight misappropriation of science is far outweighed by the overwhelming economic and social evidence for the need for something new.

He divides the population of the world into 3 groups:

1. the Cultural Creatives -- us, the cool kids and hipsters. In 1999, 26% of the population, now 35%.
   
2. the Moderns -- the corporate hacks and yuppies, $$$. 49% in 1999.
   
3. the Traditionals -- the christian dumbasses. 25% in 1999.
   

He also talks about the 100,000s of NGOs (Non Governmental Organizations) now in the world, and the impact they are having.

Overall, the new system comes with only two core values:

1. Sustainable development, or eco-economics;
   
2. Human rights.
   

There are many amazing examples of new more holistic agriculture and manufacturing, including Ecovillages (the first of which in the US is in Ithaca, NY).

Finally, there is the new government structure of the new system:

• the Gaian Trade Organization.
  
• the Gaian Clearing Union. This maintains an artificial "currency" for international exchange, and frees the US dollar from its role as the world's currency, allowing us to decrease our deficit without decreasing the liquidity of the world's cash supply.
  
• the Gaian Development Bank.
  
• the Gaian Congress.
  
• the Gaian Commission -- the executive branch.
  
• the Gaian Court of Justice.
  
• the Gaian Resource Board -- administers both nonrenewable and renewable resources. This has got to be the hardest piece.
  
• the Gaian Council -- the council of "wise elders" with veto power. People like Nelson Mandela and Jimmy Carter.
  

One thing interesting about all these new bodies is that they have very little power. The emphasis is on local groups making locally correct decisions. They seek to truly level the playing field rather than keep it slanted to the US and its allies as it is now. Part of why China is booming is that it refused to play by the US rules. So this gives the rest of the developing world, smaller countries who don't have the size or clout of China, a chance to maybe do the same.

Finally, he talks about, how do we get there? Surprisingly, some of the paths seem possible. The Old Lizards really aren't going to like this approach at all tho. So that the Powers That Be will instead of course want to continue to become more obscenely rich at the expense of everyone and everything else.

One thing he didn't talk about, except for a passing reference to Newt Gingrich touting space exploration as a solution to limits to growth, is just that: space exploration, asteroid mining, etc as source of more materials. But, despite my most optimistic, futuristic outlook, I would say that we will not be able to get an interplanetary economy going anywhere near in time to help with the ecosystem collapse we are facing. Plus, the problem is not just sources, it also sinks. We still have to control growth, or we will wind up living (or dying) on a planet that is all one large garbage dump.

This seems like a really long summary. I guess there is a lot there. There were dozens of FFTKAT (Fun Facts To Know And Tell) that I have omitted for the sake of brevity.

I recommend this book highly. It is a fairly quick read, 336p. I read it in 2-3 days -- ha ha, cool, Kobo reader tells me I read it in 13.6 hours! Lots of new (economic) concepts for me, but well explained and very comprehensible. Joe Bob sez, Check it out!

(Too Much) Music In

Man, so much good music! But it seems like I just cannot find enough time to listen to it all to where it sinks in. Between new albums from known favorites, and the 2 fabulous new Brooklyn bands I seem to find every month, and going back and mining gems I missed like Tom Waits, and ripping my vinyl to MP3 (which I basically haven't started yet), there just ain't enough time!

My current sources of new music are:

1. An email every Tuesday from Amazon: MP3 Newsletter. Usually 20 or so recommendations. I'll usually listen to any indie / alternative that look interesting. (Note, I'd still like to have someplace to buy music from other than Amazon (or Apple)).
   
2. Lexington Herald-Leader Friday Weekender section, In The Bins column lists newly releaased albums and albums to be released the next Tuesday. Plus their music critic of 30 years Walter Tunis usually reviews a few albums a week.
   
3. The Rolling Stone RSS feed. It has around 10-20 items a day, usually one or two videos of new songs.
   
4. Word of mouth (particularly Chris Cooper).
   

I got somewhat signed up for Spotify but haven't been using it. I unsubscribed from its email notifications "so-and-so is listening to blah" almost immediately. Way TMI.

OK, enough whining, let's get down to it! (Gotta get down to it!) This is acquisitions from the start of October to the start of December.

• Dave Matthews Band, "Away From The World". I think about half the people I play music with don't like DMB. My daughters all liked them in high school (particularly my middle daughter), and I always liked it pretty well myself. I checked, my smart playlist of 5-star songs "Serious Medicine" has 7 DMB tracks in it (out of 115), so I guess I like them a lot. This album is a good effort. This is the first time that I noticed that some of the instrumental sections of multiple instruments playing the same theme reminds me of some of Frank Zappa's orchestral stuff. 3 stars.
  
• Van Morrison, "Born To Sing: No Plan B". This one more jazzy that the last one. Very nice tunes. Some of the same world-weary lyrics as his last album: "Playing in the background, some kind of phony pseudo jazz". I classified this album as Pop, Van's 3rd genre, along with Rock and Blues. 3 stars.
  
• A.C. Newman, "Shut Down The Streets". Very nice tunes, extremely listenable. 3 stars.
  
• Grizzly Bear, "Shields". Man, another great Brooklyn band! From the catchy and distinctive opening riff of "Sleeping Ute", the 1st track, to the last track tour-de-force "Sun In Your Eyes", which became the 115th 5 star track (out of > 16,000) in my iTunes library. 4 stars for the rest of the album.
  
• Benjamin Gibbard, "Former Lives". At some point I am going to go through the 3300 "Alternative & Punk" tracks in my library and break them down into more atomic genre. Benjamin Gibbard, along with his bands Death Cab For Cutie and The Postal Service, will definitely go under Emo. Very nice songs. Aimee Mann featured on "Bigger Than Love". 3 stars.
  
• Of Montreal, "Daughter of Cloud". Their last couple of albums hadn't been up to the crazy energy of "Skeletal Lamping". Well, they're back, with Kevin Barnes at his snarky, gay, obscene best, with great ELO backgrounds and vocals and, of course, bongos! 4 stars.
  
• Andrew Bird, "Hands of Glory". Much folkier than his earlier stuff, and as such, somewhat lacking in the quirky charm of the earlier stuff. 3 stars.
  
• Donald Fagen, "Sunken Condos". OK tunes. Donald apparently is still a player. The best Steely Dan followup album is still "11 Tracks of Whack", by Walter Becker. 3 stars.
  
• Beach House, "Bloom". This is the 2nd I have by this husband/wife duo from Baltimore. Very nice tunes. They remind me of the other excellent husband/wife duo Tennis. Wikipedia says their genre is Dream Pop. Another genre for the big split. 3 stars (almost 4 tho).
  
• Dirty Projectors, "Swing Lo Magellan". Another great Brooklyn Band. Really distinctive voicings of both melodic and rhythmic instruments and vocals. In "Maybe That Was It" it sounds like the guitarist is playing the tuners on the guitar, very odd. 4 stars.
  

While doing this post, upgraded to iTunes 11. It created duplicate entries for ~400 tracks, not sure what that was about. Hopefully OK now.

Synchronicity

Weird. Posted as a response to Walter Tunis's article on the death of Dave Brubeck.

Very strange, this past Saturday 12/1/12 went to see the internationally renowned guitarist, the inimitable Ben Lacy at Azur. The first song he did was "Take Five". Talking to him later I told him he had to do "Blue Rondo a la Turk" as well. And he posted 3 days later that based on the positive reception of "Take Five", he was working up "Blue Rondo a la Turk" -- but that it was really hard (yeah right).

After he did "Take Five", I googled when it came out. I would have thought early 60's. My (3 years) older brother, who graduated HS in 1966, was a jazz fan in HS, so I heard Brubeck, Miles, Nina Simone, etc, when I was 10-15 YO. I was surprised to see it was 1959.

Within the last year, I watched Ken Burns "Jazz", loaned to me by a friend. The West Coast Jazz movement (Brubeck) was the only thing that kept the jazz of the period from being completely dominated by the (junkie) East Coast scene.

Anyway, one word: synchronicity.

Economy of Plenty, Part 4

So I'm totally churning here. I'm finding more and more stuff, bringing it here, throwing it up against the wall, seeing what sticks.

As Tim O'Reilly has been talking about Economy of Abundance rather than Economy of Plenty, I was considering editing my posts and changing everything. Nope, not happening. For one thing, I have also come across references to this concept as Post-scarcity Economy. This seems to be very science-fictiony -- right up my alley. But, with 2 optional names, I'll stick with Economy of Plenty.

O'Reilly is actually talking about something that exists now, in that, for digital goods -- an eBook or a MP3 track of music -- there is no natural scarcity. It has to be created artificially. Like when my public library has only 2 "copies" of a given eBook -- LOL, they have infinite copies. Hence the huge market for pirated music, movies, books worldwide. And, as 3d printers continue to come down in price, soon the same thing will be true for lots of physical objects as well.

Here's O'Reilly talking about "The Clothesline Paradox" and new economics.

I mostly talked about what I call "The Clothesline Paradox" - the way that our economic measures favor value captured from the economy rather than value created - and why we need to change that. Tim Berners-Lee and the people who created the open source software that powers the internet didn't capture very much of the enormous value they created for themselves. It was captured elsewhere in the economy. Meanwhile, the titans of Wall Street are very good at capturing value for themselves while actually destroying value for the economy as a whole.

Here's a slideshow of this same material.

Here's a post that does a nice analysis of post abundance. I posted this response:

Nice post. I've been researching this and done several posts lately. Not near as well organized, more on the order of thrashing around. My blog is portraitofthedumbass.blogspot.com.

Your tiered system intuitively seems like the wrong model to me, not sure why, I need to think on that.

One thing I have seen is that my children (36-29 YO) seems to be much less materialistic than our generation. They also seem to be somewhat immunized to advertising.

My 33 YO graphic designer daughter in Brooklyn has done a lot of pro-bono work over the years. She finally cut back on that a few years ago and made some money, now she's done a lot of work for Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Sandy. In her community, and in software development communities, especially open source ones, there does seem to be a "reputation economy" growing up, which is often mentioned as a sign of a post-scarcity economy.

So, with so much as cheap as it is, and a billionaire unable to get a better smartphone then anyone else, maybe we're almost there already? Just need universal health care and some serious tax reform.

Google autocomplete also suggests Economy of Plentitude. That seems to have been coined by these guys. Their mission statement:

Inspiring, engaging, and challenging Americans to re-examine their cultural values on consumption and consumerism and initiating a new national conversation around what “the good life” and the “American dream” mean.

They've got a book, and a video. I like the video. Apparently mostly the brainchild of Juliet Schor, a Sociology prof at Boston College.

Here's another short post on Economy of Abundance.

One of my favorite sci-fi authors, Charles Stross (@cstross), had an interesting post on his blog re, what makes a billionaire want to make even more money? Three theories:

1. "It becomes a habit". And amongst businessmen I know, just because you get (filthy) rich you don't change how you do business -- you do it right.
   
2. "It becomes a game", trying to rack up the top score. Larry Ellison comes to mind.
   
3. "you're trying to build up a war chest that will buy you a very expensive toy one that isn't currently available at any price, so that if you want one you'll have to sink billions of dollars and years of your own time into building it." Think Elon Musk saying he wants to retire on Mars.
   

All three reasons make sense.

How Much Is Enough

Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.

Epicurus

I finished reading "How Much Is Enough? Money and the Good Life", by Robert and Edward Skidelsky (British, an economist and a philosopher), 2012, a couple of weeks ago. Their article "In Praise Of Leisure", which I cannot recommend highly enough, contains about 70% of the preface. I discussed and quoted that in my 3rd Economy of Plenty post.

The book is a quick read, 218 pages, and written in very common-sensical prose. I almost thought about rereading it before writing this post, but decided to proceed on the single reading. I will summarize the book's 7 chapters a chapter at a time.

Chapter 1, "Keynes's Mistake". This reviews Keynes article from the 1930s, which posited that once productivity had increased by a factor of 8 or so, how we would be living in a utopia for all. What happened instead? Almost all of the increased income from the increased productivity ended up in the pockets of the 1%. With many fine charts, facts, and figures. Keynes's error: to assume that material wants are naturally finite.

Chapter 2, "The Faustian Bargain". Reviews ideas of utopias. Hmm, I didn't know that the devil as "old Nick" was a reference to Nicholai Machiavelli. The history of how money-making as a goal got out of control. Never heard of Mandeville, who apparently was somewhat of a predecessor to Hegel and Marx. Marx thought capitalism had to end eventually because it was unjust -- but he never quite figured out how. "Greed is good" is a very new concept, throughout prior history, greed was bad and considered immoral. The Faustian pact: "the devils of avarice and usury were given free rein, on the understanding that, having lifted humanity out of poverty, they would quit the scene for good". Oops.

Chapter 3, "The Uses of Wealth". The good life, according to Aristotle, Pericles, Epicurus. "Use values" vs "exchange values". Acquiring money is a means to what ends, according to Western, Indian, and Chinese tradition? One thing I found out in this chapter is that I am not a liberal. "Liberal thinkers have insisted on public neutrality between rival concepts of the good." -- I am not a relativist, I believe there are absolutes. I judge a culture number one by how it treats its women, children and minorities. Apparently liberalism changed from emphasizing tolerance to emphasizing neutrality in the 1960's.

Chapter 4, "The Mirage of Happiness". The definition of happiness through history, and the economics of happiness. More fun charts. Is happiness aggregrative, i.e., a function of your entire life? Is it uni-dimensional or multi-dimensional? The conclusion is, happiness ≠ The Good Life.

Chapter 5, "Limits to Growth: Natural or Moral?". They argue that global warming does not necessarily mean that we need to reduce growth, a pretty non-PC position. They compare deep environmentalists, "who value nature as an end in itself", and shallow environmentalists, "who value nature as an instrument of human purpose". Gaia is discussed. And they introduce a concept I really like: "harmony with nature", which is one of the components of The Good Life. Their best example of harmony with nature: gardening.

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need. -- Cicero

The pear tree near the house in our back yard is definitely coming down, I will have a vegetable garden next spring!

Chapter 6, "Elements of the Good Life". So we finally get our shopping list, and it is a good one. First tho, the attributes of what makes something a Basic Good are discussed. These are concluded to be:

• it must be universal:  world-wide and world-view independent.
• it must be final:  it is not a means to an end. It must be the end.
• it must be sui generis (of its own kind/genus):  atomic and not part of some other good.
• it must be indespensible:  "anyone who lacks it may be deemed to have suffered a serious loss or harm."

So here are their 7 Basic Goods, the elements of The Good Life:

1. Health. "The full functioning of the body, the perfection of our animal nature." Sounds like universal health care would help with making this available to all.
2. Security. "An individual's justified expectation that is his life will continue more or less in its accustomed course, undisturbed by war, crime, revolution or major social and economic upheavals." Of course, when I did computer security, I would always say, there is no such thing -- we should all become Buddhists. But I understand the principal here and agree with it as a Good.
3. Respect. What Mitt Romney did not have for the 47%. Some relative level of equality, in all forms, is probably a prerequisite for respect. "Where the rich behave with lawless arrogance, the poor with impotent resentment and politicians with obeisance to money, inequality has exceeded the mark."
4. Personality. "The ability to frame and execute a plan of life reflective of one's taste, temperament and conception of the good." It would hard to conceive of any kind of Good Life that did not have rampant individuality, the more the better. It also implies the concept of private property.
5. Harmony with Nature. As discussed above. I want my garden.
6. Friendship. They include family in this Good. Plus they distinguish it from community, which does not imply a reciprocal relationship between the participants.
7. Leisure. "That which we do for its own sake, not as a means to something else". What floats your boat. What you love. What would do if money were no object? (This Allen Watts video has been floating around the web lately).

   Throughout history this has included participation in things like sports, art, crafts, music, and citizenship. Note we are talking participation rather than spectatorship.

So how do we achieve these? "The state's first duty is to create the material conditions of a good life for all." We realize that growth for is own sake is not part of The Good Life.

Chapter 7, "Exits from the Rat Race". "Darwinian capitalism", with its buddy "social Darwinism", must be reigned in. We must "reverse the onslaught of insatiability". Social Catholicism is examined. Hmmm, with the fall of the USSR in the 1980's, capitalism was declared the winner in the race of world ideologies -- which undoubtedly accelerated the growth of the out-of-control, rape/pillage/loot capitalism that we now have.

They also identify the fact that it is cheaper for employers to have fewer employees working more hours than more employees working fewer hours because that minimizes their overhead for benefits. This could be fixed by legislation to limit the work week. "The Dutch work fewer hours than the British yet enjoy a higher average income".

They propose (gasp, socialism alert), a basic income for all citizens. Lots of good arguments why this won't lead to generations of slackers worse than what we see amongst trust fund children.

In even more heresy against the 'Murrican Way, they discuss ways to "reduce the pressure to consume":

• sumptuary laws, which, dating back to ancient Greece, forbade various forms of conspicuous consumption. LOL, is that foreign to modern thinking or what? Well, excessive conspicuous consumption was part of what led to the French Revolution. Man, if Romney had won the election, I was really afraid we were totally going that way. At least we have a little breathing room now to try to fix some of this.
• consumption (or expenditure) taxes. We are used to sales tax, but these would be progressive, based on annual consumption or (highly priced) single items. So you pay a higher tax rate for consumption over $100K a year and/or for your Rolex. Hell, we all grew up playing Monopoly, which has a Luxury Tax square. Of course that dates back to the 1930's, when tax rates were actually much more equitable than they are now.
• reduce advertising!!! Gawd, would we all love that!!! They point out that whereas some ads provide useful information about necessities, far more have as their purpose creating a desire for something that is not a necessity.
  My add-on thought was, how about a tax on every advertising transaction? Just like microtaxes on stock market transactions would probably quickly reign in the zero-value-add programatic trading on Wall Street, you wonder what a tax on all marketing transactions would do to all the Internet businesses for whom ads are their main source of revenue. It might make some of them have to come to grips with what their real value-add is.

I've missed a lot here, but hopefully you get a feel for it. I really do highly recommend this book, it is a quick, easy and very informative read. I finished it 3 days after I started, reading at most a few hours a day. I'm getting more interested in economics, it had a lot of good background information on economic history, as well as philosophical history.

Two Books

So last week finished "The Fractal Prince", by Hannu Rajaniemi. This is the 2nd book of a trilogy, following "The Quantum Thief", which I have already proclaimed to be the definitive sci-fi novel of the 2010's. There are so many neologisms in this book, it was really helpful for me to go to the handy glossary of terms for the first novel in wikipedia for a quick review.

That said, what a cool read. An "Arabian Nights" tribute, stories within stories within stories. At one point a story that includes one of its figures retelling the same story causes a person infected by the story to go into an infinite recursive loop, presenting to the outside world as catatonic. A great read. Looking foward to a year or so after the 3rd book comes out, reading the three of them end to end.

Just yesterday, I finished "2312", by Kim Stanley Robinson. The ultra-wealthy have mostly moved to Mars. Earth is mostly a still a mess 2 centuries after the oceans rise 11 meters. The rest of the inhabited solar system: Mercury, asteroids, Jovian and Saturnian moons; are mostly a coop based on the Mondragon Accord. They wind up being a post-scarcity, semi-anarchic utopia reminiscent of Iain M. Banks "Culture". A lot of implicit and explicit commentary on current politics, particularly climate change denialism. An excellent read.

Note, this was the 1st book I read using the Kobo reader. I linked to these books on the Kobo website. This is what Carmichael's, Louisville's oldest independent bookstore, is using to sell ebooks. The reader is a little buggy but not too bad. Better than the IndieRead reader.

Children Do Not Get To Choose

Posted this to Facebook the 23th. Figure it's long enough to go here. This blog I clearly see as my external memory. Not sure what I see FB as. Man, I am definitely cutting way back on FB and Twitter after the election.

Begin post:

Poor people "entitlements" vs rich people "entitlements" == blue collar crime vs white collar crime.

Blue collar crime == bank robbery, net $5-10k, 5-10 years jail time.

White collar crime == embezzlement, net $1-5M, 6-12 months in a country club jail.

$$$billions in preferential tax treatment to corporations and "investor class", but heaven forbid we should try to feed the 20% of children in the richest country in the history of the world who are hungry. That would be SOCIALISM!!!

Children do not get to choose to be born, nor do they get to choose their parents. If our basic goal is, "maximize the outcome of every child", how can that possibly be wrong for our country?

The game is rigged. We need above all else campaign reform and repeal of AU so our democracy is not for sale!

Next, try, try to rein in the military-industrial complex, so that the US can quit being, by a large factor, the biggest arms dealer in the world.

Finally, my greatest disappointment in my BFF Barack Obama, get rid of indefinite detention, ground the drones, restore the rule of law and constitutional rights, and in doing so, restore the US to being a shining beacon for the rest of the world.

Tiger! Tiger!

There was an interesting article in Scientific American about the many psychological characteristics shared by successful CEOs, top surgeons, and psychopaths: "fearless, confident, charismatic, ruthless and focused".

BTW, you can see if you are a psychopath by taking the handy, online test here. I was 44th percentile for primary psychopathy (a lack of empathy for other people and tolerance for antisocial orientations) and 12th percentile for secondary psychopathy (rule breaking and a lack of effort towards socially rewarded behavior). And I did not game the test, I answered honestly, I swear.

A while ago, I was thinking about Ayn Rand, "Atlas Shrugged", and "Going Galt". First off, the whole "Going Galt" thing is such a complete crock. All you misunderstood and unappreciated executives, don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out. There are plenty of ambitious people who would be more than happy to take your jobs. I have blogged before about "The Great Man Theory" and concluded that it is completely bogus.

We are all Atlas. Every one of us, from Bill Gates to an armless, legless veteran homeless somewhere.

But the SciAm article reminded me of the thing I realized thinking about "Going Galt" -- that the main message of one of my favorite stories of all time is the exact opposite of "Going Galt". The story says that all of us have the seeds of greatness within us, and will step up if necessary, as opposed to, what, being handed "greatness" by your parents, and stepping down when you don't feel appreciated enough?

That story is "The Stars My Destination", by Alfred Bester, 1956, blogged about my me here. The anti-hero protagonist is an everyman whom events push into becoming "ruthless and focused". If you have not read this, I highly recommend it. It is very commonly mentioned as one the greatest sci-fi novels of all time. It is amazing that, despite first coming out in 1956, it still has edge. And it comes in at only around 180 pages. I include an except at the end, after the "SPOILER ALERT"s.

After review, I stand by my conclusions from "The Great Man Theory":

"If they decided to opt out, the forces of memetics and history would push someone else into the role."

So, moving into a better, more equitable world of the future, we should all us be ready at all times to tell the "job creators" who are "Going Galt" with themselves or their money, "don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out." And, "Here, have some nice new taxes!"

So psychopath/normal or alpha/beta males? I've talked before about alpha vs beta males in humans here. I think that the alpha/beta male difference is more physical, and probably has a genetic component. The psychopath behavior seems to be newer, more software/mentally based. Maybe less of a genetic component?

The title of this post is a poem of Blake's that opens "The Stars My Destination". In Britain, the novel's title was "Tiger! Tiger!".

Tiger! Tiger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

And here's Gully Foyle's identity poem that he recited to himself attempting to keep his psyche from unraveling:

Gully Foyle is my name
And Terra is my nation
Deep space is my dwelling place
(And death's)/(The stars) my destination

Here's another bloggers read on the SciAm article. I like his conclusion:

"The problem is keeping the psychopaths under control of people with normal moral intuition."

i.e., a strong government with strong regulatory powers. When the psychopaths have $$$ billions, nothing else will have the power to do it.

* * * * * * SPOILER ALERT * * * SPOILER ALERT * * * * * *

* * * * * * SPOILER ALERT * * * SPOILER ALERT * * * * * *

* * * * * * SPOILER ALERT * * * SPOILER ALERT * * * * * *

Here's Gully Foyle's rabble-rousing speech from the end of the book:

"You pigs, you. You rut like pigs, is all. You got the most in you, and you use the least. You hear me, you? Got a million in you and spend pennies. Got a genius in you and think crazies. Got a heart in you and feel empties. All a you. Every you...

Take a war to make you spend. Take a jam to make you think. Take a challenge to make you great. Rest of the time you sit around lazy, you. Pigs, you! All right, God damn you! I challenge you, me. Die or live and be great. Blow yourselves to Christ gone or come and find me, Gully Foyle, and I make you men. I make you great. I give you the stars."

Twitter Digest: #biking

#biking Car turns right in front of me, I backpedal to engage my coaster brake like I'm 8YO. #LikeRidingABike #MuscleMemoryFail

I was in the bike lane heading north on Newtown Pike, a car turned right in front of me onto Short St. After noticing I didn't have coaster breaks, I did hit the hand brakes. I would say that the reflex failure cost me 0.4-0.6 seconds in hitting the brakes.

OH #biking. 5YO: "Why is the ninja riding a bike?" (A: To keep his face warm.) #SheAskedTheWrongQuestion

Ha ha. At the Legacy Trail start at the Loudon Ave YMCA, there was a pee-wee football game in progress, with lots of kids around. Head warmer really helps nose and cheeks when temperature is below 50. I like that this is a classification error: for the 5YO girl, ninja overrode cyclist.

#biking past Lexington Fed Prison. Late 1978 installed a DEC PDP-12 there for data analysis on dream deprivation of prisoners dosed w LSD.

In response to a query from my brother, I thought about this more. Actually it was in late 1977. I started working for DEC (Digital Equipment Corp) in July 1977. This was the 1st time I went on site -- and I did not install the system, I tweaked a magtape driver to attach a magtape for backups. The PDP-12 was a kind of 12, kind of 24 bit minicomputer -- a dual PDP-8, which was a 12 bit minicomputer. About as powerful as a current garage door opener.

This was some NIH study being run by a UK professor. I would guess that the prisoners volunteered in exchange for perks. Congress shut down this kind of research a few years later.

Music In

Time once again for our favorite feature, Music In. We have some great contestants and fabulous prizes, so let's get started!

• Block Party, "Four". One of my oldest daughter's fav bands. More rock than dance as I remember their earlier stuff being. Very good quality. 3 stars.
  
• Tom Waits, "The Heart of Saturday Night" (1974). After how much I loved Tom Waits' 1st album "Closing Time", I was a little disappointed with this one, his 2nd album. But it did grow on me the more I listened. 4 stars.
  
• CHRY, eponymous. Three tracks from the latest band of my nephew Max in Portland ME. Very good quality, good tunes. 3 stars.
  
• Deerhoof, "Breakup Song". Every time I get something by these guys, I look them up on Wikipedia and remember again: San Francisco group, 2 guys and the singer who started with them right after she got to the US from Japan 10 years ago. They consistently produce very unique and excellent music. 4 stars.
  
• The xx, "Coexist". Very nice tunes, ethereal male and female vocals. 3 stars
  
• David Byrne & St. Vincent, "Love This Giant". Much anticipated collaboration between 2 of my favorite artists. No real breakout fabulous tunes, but some nicely catchy ones that capture both their quirkiness. Their voices work well together. They featured horns for all the orchestration, and one of the arrangers was Lexington native Kelly Pratt. I like this nicely surreal video. 4 stars.
  
• Tom Tom Club, "Downtown Rockers". Another Talking Heads descendant. First thing from them in a long time. I think that basically Tina Weymouth and her sisters like to get together and sing cheezy dance tunes in unison. 3 stars but just barely.
  
• Aimee Mann, "Charmer". What a mature and accomplished artist Ms. Mann is. She cannot but write a good song. No real standouts tho. 3 stars.
  
• Ben Folds Five, "The Sound Of The Life Of The Mind". Ditto for Ben Folds. Great to see the Ben Folds Five recording together as such again. They do a good job of recapturing their early energy. 4 stars.
  
• Rickie Lee Jones, "The Devil You Know". Hmmm, this reminds me a of a remark I made about Cat Powers "Covers" album: "don't do smack before going into the recording studio". This is an album of covers, which Ms. Jones has done before, but, ouch, these are so low energy. 3 stars, but only because I am such a fanboy.
  

My iTunes music has passed 16,000 tracks.

Hi? Hi!

Two weekends ago, I was in NYC seeing my oldest daughter's (fabulous) new Brooklyn apartment, and attending the World Maker's Faire in Queens. My son, daughter-in-law and grandaughter Lucy came up from NC for the Faire and a visit as well.

The Maker's Faire was cool -- great to see so many people wanting to do and make things rather than just consume. The 3d printing stuff was a little disappointing -- kind of seemed like PCs in 1980, still waiting for the killer app.

But the main reason for this post is Lucy. She was great for the two days they were there. She was 19-1/2 months old at the time. So fascinating to see her young mind growing:

• She knew and could say peoples names.
  
• She knew the name of everything she liked to eat. She learned about "mini-kiwis" over the weekend.
  
• She knew colors and shapes.
  
• She knew animals and the noises they make. A trip to the Brooklyn Zoo was great fun.
  
• She knew cars, bicycles, and airplanes. She pointed at a plane flying overhead and said "airplane".
  
• She knew "walking", "running", "spinning", "dancing", "right side up", "upside down".
  
• Her dancing moves included arm waving, hip swiveling, bouncing, and waving her upper body back and forth from the waist.
  

And she sang:

• The Wheels on the Bus;
  
• Two alphabet songs;
  
• Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star;
  
• Ha Ha This-A-Way;
  
• Old McDonald;
  
• Itsy Bitsy Spider.
  

After dinner on Saturday, we took turns walking with her outside the (mediterranean) restaurant. She is a great eater, but after she was full she was ready for action. When I was walking with her, she wanted to go up the steps of a brownstone. At the top she said "Open". I showed her the door was locked, got out my keys, showed her that they didn't work. "Please" she says. Too cute.

But the real reason for this post was to note how she did "Hi? Hi!". Her mind would wander and she would just be running subconscious processes. Then, her consciousness, her "narrative I", would wake up. "Hi?", she would say -- hunh, what's this, what's going on here? Then her consciousness would remember herself, and "Hi!" she would say -- it's Lucy, I'm back, I'm alive, how cool! Woo-hoo!

Complete and utter joie de vivre. She would do it every hour or so. It was so, so cool.

Economy of Plenty, Part 3

The article by the two professors "In Praise Of Leisure" says maybe everything I am trying to say:

Keynes's essay challenges us to imagine what life after capitalism might look like ...

But so accustomed have we become to regarding scarcity as the norm that few of us think about what motives and principles of conduct would, or should, prevail in a world of plenty.

Keynes was well aware of the evils of capitalism but assumed that they would wither away once their work of wealth creation was done.

It is only our culture's poverty of imagination that leads it to believe that all creativity and innovation—as opposed to that specific kind directed to improving economic processes—needs to be stimulated by money.

Quoting economist Harry Johnson, 1960:

we live in a rich society, which nevertheless in many respects insists on thinking and acting as if it were a poor society.

End of quoting.

That was not the ancient view of things. Athens and Rome had citizens who, though economically unproductive, were active to the highest degree—in politics, war, philosophy, and literature.

The beginning of sanity in this matter is to think of scarcity in relation to needs, not wants.

Considered in relation to our vital needs, our state is one not of scarcity but rather of extreme abundance.

Interesting, this definition of the science of economics:

Economics, says a recent text, studies "how people choose to use limited and scarce resources in attempting to supply unlimited wants."

So if economics is based on the assumption of scarcity, maybe we need a new science? Even the noun "economy" has as synonyms "thrift - husbandry - saving - frugality - parsimony". So "economy of plenty" is maybe an oxymoron.

Of course, there will always be the rich and the ultra-rich. They just need to realize that we don't need to have the poor. Everyone can have enough to eat and they can still have their yachts, airplanes, helicopters, and multiple estates.

Maybe a positive sign as we look for the Death of Capitalism? In the tech world, we now have Kickstarter, where you can raise millions of dollars to start a company or create a product without having to beg for money from -- and indebt yourself to -- banks or venture capitalists. (Weird, "indebt" is not a word, but "indebted" is ??? WTF???)

Well, much to think about. How do we get there? I guess next thing for me is to read these guys' book, "How Much Is Enough? Money and the Good Life" and see if has any action items. I will be sure and report on it.

Economy of Plenty, Part 2

Despite spending almost 2 months thinking about last week's post, "Economy of Plenty", I still rushed to get it published. I think I did not address the questions raised with possible answers. Instead, I just listed three things to make taxation in the US more equatable, which is a first step towards putting a birth-to-age-21 social safety net in place. So let's look more at, what an Economy of Plenty would look like.

So the goals are:

1. More equitable distribution of wealth and a universal minimum standard of living.
   
2. No child left behind, ever.
   
3. 20 hour work week.
   
4. Full employment if desired.
   

So, the 1st and 2nd goals are what the 3 points at the end of the last post addressed. Also, let's look at the minimum wage. How would you level wages? I saw a post somewhere that if income were distributed evenly, the average salary in the US would be around $196K per year. That's around $98/hour if you work 50 40 hour weeks. So that is probably an upper limit on the minimum wage. If we target $50K/year for a living wage (with usually two wage earners per family), that goes down to $50/hour for two 20 hour work weeks.

How would we get to a 20 hour workweek? We got to our current 5 day, 40 hour workweek with paid holidays pretty much solely based on the efforts of labor unions. Unfortunately, unions have been stripped of much of their power thanks to "right-to-work" states. Maybe the internet could lead to a resurgence? Somehow I don't think so.

So many of the new, information age jobs don't seem like they would be amenable to unionization. Say software development, where there is a well know factor of 10 difference in productivity between the best and worst developers. If I'm one of those high-end developers, am I going to agree to the same wages as a low-end developer?

Additionally, there is so much startup activity and entrepreneurship going on in technology companies, that often workers have equity in the company and put in far more then 40 hours, hoping to build the company to a level of success that they would have a liquidity event which would result in a huge windfall for them -- millions to billions of dollars.

But, there is a trend among startup companies who are in it for more than the money to organize as cooperatives, where, after 1 year of work, you become an equal shareholder in the company. So all employees share equally in the success of the company. 37signals is the poster child for this. Such a company might reach a point where it chooses quality of life over more money and created a shorter work week.

There is also very much a "reputation economy" in the software world, particularly where FOSS (Free Open Source Software) is concerned. Having dozens of heavily-used libraries on gitHub earns you the respect of your peers -- and is now also quite often the basis of getting paying jobs.

For big technology companies, offering a shorter workweek might be a recruiting advantage. Can they afford it? Look at Apple (probably a bad example): last year, $25B profit after taxes, 60,000 employees => $433K profit per employee. If they doubled those employees, at a $100K salary, that would be an additional $6B overhead, so say, $17B profit for 120,000 employees => $141K profit per employee. That's still pretty decent profit. And they could still afford to pay CEO Tim Cook his $378M, which I am sure he earned.

Currently there is negative unemployment for software developers. So if we can retrain people from older industries, there will be some jobs for them. But, as the robots do more and more, are the other options than everyone working for software companies?

What about employment in virtual worlds? I read recently that gold farming (grinding your way through lower levels of role-playing games to build up characters that you then sell) is now a $3B industry. I know many young people who would like to work in World of Warcraft, or Call of Duty. Can where be other types of jobs created there? Say maybe, that after a certain level, you go on salary to the game company as a guide or mentor?

But, come on you say, do you really believe that this can work? The long and the short of it is: money is software. We haven't been on the gold standard for 50 years. So getting this stuff to work is just a question of getting the parameters of the money machine tweaked. Inflation is not a problem of having too much money, it is a problem of having a scarcity of goods. And our premise is, in an Economy of Plenty, there is no scarcity of goods.

An immediate exception to that is land/property/housing. So everybody won't be living in a McMansion. But they should be living in an apartment or house with enough bedrooms for their family members. And they should have enough food to eat, universal health care, merit-based educational advancement through college, and, of course, a smartphone, to help make them smart.

Going back to the Bertrand Russell article, there was one quote I will take exception with. The quote is:

... a man should not receive wages in proportion to what he has produced, but in proportion to his virtue as exemplified by his industry.

I would say instead:

... a man should not receive wages in proportion to what he has produced, but in whatever amount is required to make the system work.

So I am convinced that the Economy of Plenty is totally doable. And I think that the alternative is a dystopic plutocracy, where all power and wealth is concentrated in the hands of an ever fewer number of people, particularly as life spans lengthen. But the question is, how do we get there?

Economy of Plenty

Fred Pohl over his 60 year career has written many stories with crazy insights into politics, economics, and our beliefs. His novel "Jem" may be the most cynical indictment of consumerism ever written. He's still writing. I subscribe to his blog and he still occasionally skewers the hell out of the powers that be.

So when I was a kid, probably a teenager, I read his story "The Midas Plague". Here's a synopsis (from Wikipedia):

"The Midas Plague" (originally published in Galaxy in 1954). In this new world of cheap energy, robots are overproducing the commodities enjoyed by mankind. So now the "poor" are forced to spend their lives in frantic consumption, trying to keep up with the robots' extravagant production, so that the "rich" can live lives of simplicity. This story deals with the life of a man named Morey Fry, who marries a girl from a higher class. She is unused to a life of consumption and it wears at their marriage. Morey eventually hits on the idea of having the robots help him to consume his quotas. At first he fears punishment when he is discovered, but instead the Ration Board quickly implements his idea across the world.

Somehow, this always made sense to me. Robots make everything, there's plenty of everything for everybody, right? What does an economy like this look like?

At the start of the 20th century, the occupation that consumed the most manpower was farming. That is now handled by 1-2% of the population.

The industrial revolution created new classes of jobs -- or better, new species of jobs in the ecosystem that is the economy. People left the farm, but in recent decades those jobs have been transitioning to robots -- and there was just an article floating around about the new generation of robots that will take over pretty much all manufacturing jobs. Here's another one. Here's yet another one. Eventually there will be no physical jobs that robots can't do.

And white collar jobs are not immune to automation. In fact, probably most of the 8x productivity gains that the US economy has achieved in the last 50 years have come in white collar work thanks to computers.

So what jobs can't be automated out of existence? Not doctors. Not Foxconn slave girls. Not drivers. Not soldiers.

Maybe software development? Overall, the consensus seems to be that the machines aren't making too much progress at being able to program themselves.

I have for years now had hope that software could answer the question of how to create a growth economy that doesn't eat the world. Software is like language: it is generative. You can always add another clause to any sentence; you can always add another feature to any piece of software. So maybe, like Estonia, we start teaching first graders to code. A recent article on the Flynn effect in Scientific American suggests that the 3 points/decade IQ rise is primarily from improved abstract reasoning -- just what is needed for working with computer logic. (Sorry I can't link to the article, it's behind a pay wall.)

But, back to the original question. If robots can make everything, what does everybody do for a job? And if nobody has jobs, who can buy the stuff the robots make? We are currently in an Economy of Scarcity, which assumes that no one has anything and has to earn everything. But if the robots can make everything, why aren't we in an Economy of Plenty, which assumes that everyone has automatically earned everything they need to live, just by being born? Or, at least until age 21. Children do not choose to be born, nor do they get to choose their parents.

As mentioned above, in the last 50 years, productivity in the US has increased by a factor of 8. So are workers now working 1/8th as much? Are workers getting 8x the pay? I think we can safely answer, no and no. Instead, the haves have managed to keep it pretty much all for themselves. Corporations are doing just fine. Executives are doing just fine -- with US CEOs making ~200x what the average worker does -- 10x or so more than most of the other industrial democracies in the world. It's just the rest of us that have been left behind.

80 years ago, two renowned thinkers addressed this same issue. It is very sad to read their musings and see how far off they are -- or, maybe instead, to revisit these ideas, and see if we can do something with them.

First, "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren", by John Maynard Keynes, 1930. "In the United States factory output per head was 40 per cent greater in 1925 than in 1919." [Twitter digest] He thought all this increased productivity would lead to utopia for all of us! What a socialist loser! Course Ayn Rand wasn't around then, he clearly didn't understand the importance of Job Creators. Other quotes:

Let us suppose that 100 yrs hence we are all of us, on the average, 8 times better off than we are now.

Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while.

The love of money as a possession will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity.

All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard.

Here is another overview of the Keynes paper by one of my favorite bloggers.

Here is another article revisiting Keynes, by an economics professor and a philosophy professor.This is adapted from the opening of their new book "How Much is Enough?: Money and the Good Life", which I will be reading before too long.

Second, "In Praise Of Idleness" , by Bertrand Russell, 1932. Also written at the start of the Great Depression. Many of the same thoughts as the Keynes, but the arguments are somethat more pointed. Here are some quotes:

Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders, but those who give advice as to what orders should be given.

Throughout Europe, though not in America, there is a third class of men, more respected than either of the classes of workers. There are men who, through ownership of land, are able to make others pay for the privilege of being allowed to exist and to work.

The small surplus above bare necessaries was not left to those who produced it, but was appropriated by warriors and priests.

The conception of duty, speaking historically, has been a means used by the holders of power to induce others to live for the interests of their masters rather than for their own.

The war showed conclusively that, by the scientific organization of production, it is possible to keep modern populations in fair comfort on a small part of the working capacity of the modern world. If, at the end of the war, the scientific organization, which had been created in order to liberate men for fighting and munition work, had been preserved, and the hours of the week had been cut down to four, all would have been well. Instead of that the old chaos was restored, those whose work was demanded were made to work long hours, and the rest were left to starve as unemployed. Why? Because work is a duty, and a man should not receive wages in proportion to what he has produced, but in proportion to his virtue as exemplified by his industry.

This is the morality of the Slave State, applied in circumstances totally unlike those in which it arose. No wonder the result has been disastrous.

The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich ... When I was a child, shortly after urban working men had acquired the vote, certain public holidays were established by law, to the great indignation of the upper classes. I remember hearing an old Duchess say: 'What do the poor want with holidays? They ought to work.'

Oddly enough, while they wish their sons to work so hard as to have no time to be civilized, they do not mind their wives and daughters having no work at all. the snobbish admiration of uselessness, which, in an aristocratic society, extends to both sexes, is, under a plutocracy, confined to women; this, however, does not make it any more in agreement with common sense.

In the past, there was a small leisure class and a larger working class. The leisure class enjoyed advantages for which there was no basis in social justice; this necessarily made it oppressive, limited its sympathies, and caused it to invent theories by which to justify its privileges.

But if we fix it?

Above all, there will be happiness and joy of life, instead of frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia. The work exacted will be enough to make leisure delightful, but not enough to produce exhaustion.

Follow the link and read the whole thing. I have not read much of Russell, I think I will have to read more.

Ha ha, putting their Wikipedia links in, both were British nobles, Keynes a baron and Russell an earl. Well, their hearts were in the right place, regardless.

One thing that is mentioned in several of the papers and articles mentioned above is that the target should be something like Athenian Democracy. The existence of a slave class (which we are replacing with robots) enabled the (male) citizens of Athens to get involved in government, the arts, and all forms of creative activities. There are also multiple mentions of how our work, work, and more work has lead us to be passive consumers of culture, rather than active creators of culture.

So, what, am I a utopian? Yes, I am. We are increasingly heading towards a dystopia with income and wealth unequally distributed probably worse than in the time of kings and emperors. How do we fix it? I think We The People will have to take the bull by the horns and fix our government.

1. Figure out how to control the power of the corporations, the ultra-rich, and the military-industrial complex and all their lobbyists. Getting rid of Citizens United is a start. Online, open government should help too.
   
2. Reform the tax code such that all taxes on investments, particularly dividends and capital gains, are taxed at a minimum at the rate of wages. Why should income earned without any "sweat of your brow", for which you possibly have little or no time investment, be taxed less than labor, which costs you one minute per minute of your life?
   
3. If we decide that we can't get rid of economic parasites that extract wealth while adding no value, such as high frequency or program equity traders, then they should be taxed at a minimum of 50% -- you're just hacking the system, as pointed out by Mark Cuban, the rest of us will take at least half of your ill-gotten gains. Other companies in this category: insurance companies? Other?
   

I believe that the primary goal of the US government and of every government in the world should be simply: to maximize the outcome of every child born. What are the arguments against that? How can we go wrong if that is our goal? As opposed to now, when we have 15 million children in the US living in poverty without enough to eat.

The other thing we need to fix when we fix this is to also get out of a growth economy, before we completely eat the earth. We have to figure out how to grow at a rate that is sustainable and environmentally neutral. Germany is taking some real leadership actions re this. Here's an article. "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell."

Coal Mining Robots -- RSN?

So, coal is still "Kentucky's ace in the hole". And I see "Friends of Coal" license plates everyday. And there was just an article today in the Lexington Herald-Leader, about how the EPA's forcing scrubbers to be installed on coal-burning power plants lead to a boom in coal mining in western Kentucky, where the coal has very high sulphur content.

Also, did you know, "Coal keeps the lights on"?

But, unfortunately, pregnant women are not allowed to eat fish caught in our beautiful lakes, and the rest of us are only supposed to eat them once a week, because of the hight mercury content in the fish from all our coal-fired power plants putting the mercury in our water.

Weird that recently, coal has been taking a beating, from natural gas. Fracking (and other new techniques?) have produced a great surplus of methane, and utility companies are flocking to the much less environmentally harmful fossil fuel.

But back to coal. The last (Massey?) mine disaster was maybe 29 deaths? All the bodies that were recovered were autopsied. 1/3 of them had black lung -- and these are miners in their 20's.

So, seriously, WTF, why are we still sending people down into these hellhole mines? Why aren't the miners sitting in air-conditioned offices, in comfy chairs, on the surface, operating telepresence robots? That technology is not available? Seems to me it should be totally doable. So WTF has the University of Kentucky been doing with the 10s-100s of millions of research dollars that it has for the coal industry? I guess saving miners lives is somehow way down towards the bottom of the priorities list.

Two Books

So I was trying to get the 2nd of these books read by yesterday to turn it in on time at the Lexington Free Public Library, but I wasn't going to make it. So I pulled up my LFPL bookmark in my browser and 30 seconds later had renewed them both for another month (I finished it today, they'll go back tomorrow).

Really nice tech at the LFPL site. Books I want to read that they don't have yet, I search for and then save the search and voila! a to-read list aka Saved Searches!

William Gibson and others have been recommending the Sandman Slim series, 4th book just released. All available as eBooks at LFPL, hell yeah!

So the 1st library book I read was "Time Travelers Never Die", by Jack McDevitt. The bulk of his work is astro-archeological SF -- exploring ruins of departed stellar civilizations, of which there may be many. This is totally not in that genre. I spent the first 1/3 of it trying to figure out what it was. Then read (later rather than sooner, not sure why) one of the cover blurbs that compared it to the all-time classic movie: "Bill and Ted's Fabulous Adventure". And realized, it was completely correct. This is "dumbass American twits get a time machine and become posers throughout history". Enjoyable, I guess, but, I don't really think I can recommend it. 2 stars.

2nd book, which I just finished today, was "Up Jim River", by Michael Flynn. The first novel of his I read was "Elfenheim", about space aliens stranded in a 12th century (or so) German village. Flynn is a very good writer. Next, I think I read his "The January Dancer" a few years ago. "Up Jim River" is the sequel to that. Hard to characterize these. Space opera, Star Wars in scope but all human, legendary human commonwealth of supernatural powers (nanotech AI) has passed, replaced by celtic League vs sinister mandarin Confederation. Main characters are basically mostly League FBI agents searching for various foo. Flynn writes well, these are very good reads. 4 stars.

I wonder if Romney/Ryan have a plan to privatize our public libraries? If it can put money into the pocket of someone who is not working for that money, probably so. It's a sacred trust, after all.

Only One Path At A Time

So I was out walking this morning and at one point started thinking about the route I was going to take biking this Sunday. When I snapped back to the here-and-now, I was disoriented and didn't know where I was. So this somewhat refines an earlier conclusion of mine: that our minds have only one set of circuits for following paths. Hence the confusion when you think about following a path while actually following a path. I think I blogged this before with regard to becoming disoriented while driving if you think about how to drive somewhere else (but I couldn't find it). This generalizes the conclusion to be independent of mode of travel, be it on foot, by bike, or by car.

Of course it could mean that I have only one set of path-following circuits. Maybe other people have more than one?