Explaining the socioeconomic tyranny of exponentials, via examples students can relate to: Let’s say kids are given the whole period to complete a lab. Some students work faster than others because they’ve got a better sense of the underlying theory. So they finish early, meaning they can then move on to work on other stuff. Students struggling with the lab don’t get that opportunity, so their other works looms waiting to be done, increasing their stress and likely reducing their capability. So next time, the students who finished early are more likely to finish early AGAIN, and the students who struggled are probably even further behind.
The economy is like that. If you earn more than what you need to survive, you can invest the excess into yourself — maybe a class, maybe just reliable healthcare, maybe things to reduce your stress and enhance your productivity … meaning your earnings will grow even more, even more exceeding the threshold — creating a virtuous cycle.
But if you earn too little, you’ll have to make up the difference by working a second job (blowing through your personal health capital), or taking on debt, or some other mechanism that negatively impacts your productivity … meaning you’ll need even more debt (or whatever), a vicious cycle.
Sure, in real life, there’s a lot of noise there. Your cost of living fluctuates and so does your earning potential Small chance events can put you over the break-even line, or drag you under it. Life is pretty precarious right on that line. But the effects of small bits of luck (good or bad) become massively amplified by this exponential factor. Yeah, it’s possible that you boost your earnings by hard work alone — but once you clear that break-even line, most of the heavy lifting is going to be done by the network effects that create the exponential feedback loop.
I wish I could end this with a simple solution. I don’t have one. But understanding the exponential aspects of life at the break-even leads me to believe, strongly, that we need to flatten out the curve proactively.
A US flag with 35 stars in the field, created after West Virginia was added to the Union.
So there’s a controversy with Nike again, because Nike pulled a line of shoes showing the so-called Betsy Ross flag. (You’ve seen it — it’s the one with a circle of 13 stars.) It’s not entirely clear why Nike did so. Some sources says it’s because Colin Kaepernick asked them to (and if so, it’s not clear why he did, although Vox claims it’s because “he argued, is pulled from the era of slavery and doesn’t warrant celebration”). Further investigation seems to indicate that some white nationalist groups have started using the “Betsy Ross flag” as an emblem.
It’s been two years since I woke up to a country I didn’t recognize, and I’ve spent a lot of time wrestling with what that means. I suspect that won’t be ending any time soon.
Over the course of this administration, my social media feeds have been peppered with reactions to outrages that were virtually unimaginable (in my bubble) before — an accelerating dash toward authoritarian or even dystopian policies and attitudes: Endorsing political violence. Calling for imprisonment without trial or even evidence. Designating a free press “the enemy of the people”. Caging children.
I am stunned. Although I spent the last week cautioning people from assuming a Clinton victory, although I told myself it’s never over until the ballots are cast, I realize now that I never actually entertained the possibility of a Trump victory. I had too much faith in the basic decency of the American people, in the strength of our institutions, in the essential goodness of the American experiment. I understand now that I was naïve.
It is possibly the only thing I understand.
I haven’t seen exit polls or autopsies. I have not read commentary or watched spin. Right now I am working from the barest electoral facts, which is a majority in the electoral college and a majority of the popular vote. I have no intellectual escape route: For this result to be announced, something has gone terribly wrong somewhere among something I thought I understood. I don’t believe that widespread electoral fraud is feasible. I don’t believe that polling so consistent can be consistently wrong together. And I don’t believe that the American people would elect to the highest office a buffoon who is open about his racism, misogyny, and narcissism. But at least one of those things has happened.
Very soon – already, I suspect – there will begin the quadrennial nodding of heads and reading of bones to discern the “true America”. We’ll hear the lessons people should learn from this – what Clinton did wrong, what Trump got right. It will take only a day or so for this to crystallize into paeans about the wisdom of the American voter, where the consensus is that Democrats moved too far too fast for a country not ready for the change. This victory will become, in hindsight, inevitable. And the cycle of bullshit will begin again.
But it will be a darker time. We just held an election that, more than ever before in my lifetime, offered two stark choices: The America of the future, or the America of the past. We had a chance to move past our history, to begin a new covenant that recognizes how our country is changing and celebrates that change, that preserves core American values while accepting new circumstances, that would fashion itself into a beacon for the 21st century. And we had the opportunity to plug our fingers in our ears, scream loudly, and stamp our feet demanding that we somehow travel back to a mythical time that never existed, an America of the past – a time where vast swaths of the population suffered routine indignities and oppression for the crime of being different, when people knew their place and were slapped down for thinking about leaving it, when the accidents of your birth mattered more than the content of your character.
We were engaged in a battle for the soul of America. And the good guys lost.
I don’t know what’s coming next. I have one foot over the abyss and am trying right now just to regain my balance. This election has taught me that I do not really understand my nation or its people the way I thought I did, and the way ahead is shrouded. But I do know history. I know that it never ends well when a people chooses an erratic self-absorbed, willfully ignorant, and simply hate-filled leader. I know that it never ends well when a nation decides to scapegoat a fraction of its population to avoid demographic fact. I know that it never ends well when an aging power becomes aware of the fragility of its status and turns inward to root out the supposed enemies sapping its vitality. We’ve seen this play before.
And perhaps that’s the core of my anger and disappointment. Our grand experiment to transcend history, to do better, to be better than what came for … that lies broken on the floor. We are just as scared, as easily manipulated, as damaged as anyone else. We can be swayed by empty slogans and schoolyard bullying and adolescent appeals. Despite falling in line with fevered calls to recognize American exceptionalism, the electorate has rendered America ordinary. I wasn’t prepared for that.
I read a primer in Vox on the developing fight between Apple Computer and the FBI, and it spurred three distinct thoughts in me.
The basic contention is whether Apple should be forced to disable a security feature on the phone of the San Bernadino shooter, so that the FBI can brute-force the phone without fear of it nuking itself after some number of bad guesses (10, I think, but I’m not sure).
Firstly, the author includes the line
The concern is that the government is trying to take advantage of a particularly odious defendant to set a precedent that could have much broader implications.
Well, duh. The defendants in all important civil liberties cases look like terrible people, because those are the people the state most egregiously assaults.
Secondly, there’s a thing I don’t understand, and would love to hear from someone who knows: To change the behavior, it seems to me, Apple would have to craft a special iOS update. But after that, the crippled update would have to be installed. Won’t it require knowing the passcode for that to happen? Can Apple force an update down the pipe even to phones that are locked? It seems to me that the request of the FBI is not only odious and an offense to the safety of citizens. It might also be technically impossible.
Thirdly, I am a little disappointed — assuming what I’m about to say is actually true — that the NSA or other competent agency doesn’t have the capacity to read out the non-volatile memory non-destructively somehow. They could then run an iPhone simulator with the copied data and brute-force it. Every time it froze or self-erased, the agency could just reboot the simulator and try again. This would take time but then you wouldn’t need any sort of help from Apple.
Or maybe the NSA doesn’t want to admit to having such a capacity. 🙂
{Originally penned 2015 Apr 26and recently rescued from the Drafts folder}
So there have been police confrontations (and possibly even riots) in Baltimore over the past 12 hours, but apparently CNN didn’t feel compelled to cover them. Instead they kept with covering the White House Correspondents’ Dinner where various people, including the President, got to make jokes. Justification for ignoring the major story a mere hour’s drive north included:
“You can find a live feed if you actually want to watch what’s going on”
though apparently not on CNN, a 24-hour news network to which people (supposedly) turn for exactly that — live coverage of significant events.
Also offered was this gem:
“People will be informed….They’ll find out all of what happened in the streets of Baltimore by this time tomorrow”
I sort of thought that informing people was exactly the role of — and I repeat myself — a twenty-four hour news network. But hey, maybe I’m old fashioned. And this could easily be spun into a “death of old media” story about how traditional news renders itself irrelevant by ceding the breaking stuff to the Internet., and get off my lawn, and all that. But I want to go a different direction.
This is not just CNN old-media cluelessness. This is a symptom of rot at the core of our democracy. The opinion-shapers and policy-makers of the Republic gathered in that room, and it was shown for all to goggle over. They entertained themselves and rubbed shoulders and celebrated just how accomplished and how connected they are. And they are! All the big names in politics come out and make nice with the so-called journalists tasked with covering them. A big messy live situation? That would ruin the ambience.
The WHCD has become a festering boil, a signal of the decline of American reporting and the rise of what might be called the journalism-industrial complex. All that matters to the powers that be is a navel-gazing exercise of petty partisan politics and vast egoism. While real people march and protest and die, the influence-peddlers of our day can’t be bothered to even note it in passing.
For everyone who has counseled the citizens of Baltimore (and Ferguson and…) that “violence is not the answer” and that it would be better if everyone just protested peacefully:
1) As has now been documented extensively, the protests were by and large peaceful — and even more by and large, ignored by the national media.
2) Violence certainly is an answer — and one which history shows can be quite effective in prompting change. See for proof the French Revolution, or the American Revolution, for that matter. Of course violence is a random and uncontrolled beast, and the odds are that the reaction it prompts will not be the outcome desired… but usually, something will change. For people who’ve spent their whole lives trapped in a system crushing them without end, any change might be welcome, at least at first.
Would you prefer peaceful protest to violent outbursts? Would you see people advocate for the redress of grievances without resorting to threats or damage to property or even lives? Then address the systemic evils, the in-built hardships and unspoken oppressions, the things done not through active racist thought but through the far worse passive racist without-thought. You want people to respect the police? Then demand that the police behave respectably. You want your cities to be bastions of peace? Then save them from being cauldrons of hopelessness.
Above all, if you want this problem to “just go away”, pay attention to it — and for love of all that is true, pay attention even when the fires have gone out and the windows have been repaired and the next big distraction comes down the tube. This problem has been centuries in the making and we’ve squandered five decades or more in addressing it — it won’t ever go away until we finally put it away.
On this day one hundred fifty years ago, a scruffy, scrappy, but determined general accepted the surrender of his well-born, well-dressed, and traitorous counterpart, effectively ending a vast sedition launched in the name of slavery, orchestrated by cowardly politicians, and fought — like most wars are — by poor men dying at the behest of rich men. There was no nobility in the losing side; there was no honor; there was only the proposition that one man might justly hold another as property, and that in support of that one twisted principle, oaths may be broken, loyalty suborned, and a great democracy threatened with sectarian dissolution.
Stragglers of the Confederate army fought on for a few more weeks. Their descendants, stragglers of history, fight on today. Their cause is equally dishonorable, equally seditious, and, thankfully, equally ultimately futile.
Sorry for being so obvious. But I’ve read his latest ill-informed anti-immigrant screed and couldn’t stay quiet.
Buchanan’s thesis is that we were once a unified country but now since 1960, we’ve been in decline. First off, it’s a little suspicious that the magic time was exactly when Pat Buchanan (born in 1938) had just reached majority age. Nearly everyone looks back on their twenties as the halcyon days. It’s the moment you first achieve independence from your parents, when you come into your own agency, and when you (most likely) start paying attention to the world around you as if you were a part of you. That is, how the world is becomes your frame of reference for how the world should be. But really that’s just the drug of nostalgia, and it’s no different than Homer Simpson declaring that “rock attained perfection in 1974 — it’s a scientific fact”
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Buchanan then pivots to alerting us to the existential threat to America poised by unaccompanied children fleeing violence. He of course invokes sainted Ronald Reagan of blessed memory: “For, as Ronald Reagan said, a nation that cannot control its borders isn’t really a nation anymore.” I’m not exactly sure how he squares that with the open borders of the Roman Empire, or the British one, or indeed, most of US history. But whatever.
Buchanan also invokes the Federalist papers and John Jay’s comment that “Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people – a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs. … ” This might have made good propaganda, but I’m fairly sure that Jay’s words would have irked the already-numerous German, Scottish, Irish, Danish immigrants who had fought in the Revolutionary War to help establish this nation.
Buchanan asserts “We were not a nation of immigrants in 1789″, which is just laughable. Heck, Andrew Hamilton — another of the authors of the Federalist Papers — was an immigrant to these shores. While many of the colonists were born in America, many had travelled here. And above all of that, you might want to ask a Native American, who might remind you that all the White guys were immigrants or recent descendants of immigrants.
Buchanan also says “The republic of the founders for whom Jay spoke did not give a fig for diversity. They cherished our unity, commonality and sameness of ancestry, culture, faith and traditions.” This certainly makes one wonder about the long, drawn-out, sometimes-vicious fights in the Continental Congress between (usually) the New England and the Deep South contingents. Oh, also all that time and effort spent trying to square the circle on the South’s “peculiar institution”.
This brings up the largest hole in Buchanan’s argument. We used to be all one happy, unified, uniform family? What drugs is he on? Look at the treatment of any minority population in the US (and, hey, we do actually have some and always had): the Native Americans, the Blacks, the Chinese. Heck, look at how the Irish were treated. It’s a little hard to swallow that we were a unified culture. Instead, we had the in-power culture (more or less the WASPs), who then simply declared that other cultures were backward, uncivilized, and plain old irrelevant. Buchanan’s reasoning boils down to “There was only one culture — as long as you ignore all the other ones.”
It is nice that Buchanan admits, obliquely, that maybe not everything was rainbows and unicorns: “And though the civil rights movement had just begun, nowhere did black peoples enjoy the freedom and prosperity of African-Americans.” That’s right, in the magic year of 1960, White culture finally started to grudgingly offer some semblance of fairness to the Black population, a mere century after the bloodiest war in American history and the abolition of outright slavery.
Quibbling with Attorney General Eric Holder’s assertion that America is “a fundamentally better place than we were 50 years ago,” Buchanan laments that nonetheless “We are no longer one unique people ‘descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion’.” But the fact of the matter is, we never were. You can only pretend that we were by ignoring the reality, twisting the history, and unlearning the lessons. You can only pretend we were when you define “real America” as “exactly and only the small patch of ground I grew up on”.
As evidence of how far we’ve fallen, Buchanan lists a bunch of things:
We are from every continent and country. Nearly 4 in 10 Americans trace their ancestry to Asia, Africa and Latin America. We are a multiracial, multilingual, multicultural society in a world where countless countries are being torn apart over race, religion and roots.
We no longer speak the same language, worship the same God, honor the same heroes or share the same holidays.
But he says these like they’re bad things, whereas I think they speak to the enduring strength of this nation, to adapt, persevere, and improve itself — to strive always to become a “more perfect Union”. For someone who sings of “American exceptionalism”, Buchanan misses what makes us exceptional: Not the fortuitous vast natural resources, or the particular spot of earth on which we stand, or the world’s oldest free trade zone or the world’s oldest constitutional republic, not a fictitious single language or single culture. We are a nation of peoples, a weird and wonderful dream bringing together cultures, and languages, and experiences, and hopes and aspirations from all that humanity has to offer. America the nation is an idea, not a place or a people. And that is largely unprecedented and ambitious.
A final comment: One of the things that so disturbs Buchanan is that “Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee are out of the pantheon”. And I say, Yea! to this, and good riddance. The triumph of the American spirit is that we can finally reject these traitorous and seditious, fundamentally dishonorable men who abandoned the United States and its Constitution, not to mention their own sworn oaths, in a parochial construction of duty to defend a heinous state founded on the noxious principle that some humans have, as a divine right, the right and even obligation to own other human beings. (If you’re one of the revisionists who want to argue that “the Civil War wasn’t about slavery”, I suggest you read the ordinances of secession, or indeed, the Constitution of the Confederate States. See also an analysis of slavery in the Confederate constitution, or a similar analysis.)
And I mean that non-ironically. I don’t like paying taxes, but I am proud to do it. Taxes are not only necessary to maintain the way of life we value. They are a direct investment in the very concept of civilization. Taxes are the explicit statement that we are a community and we have a communal responsibility to each other. They are also the explicit recognition that no one is in this alone, that no one is solely responsible for his or her own success, and that we are, to some measure, dependent on each other.
Yes, I inveigle against waste and fraud, just like everyone else. Perhaps even more so, because they are a violation of this trust, that the communal burden be fairly borne and communally valuable — that no individual benefit unduly. But the current fetish on minimizing taxes (even at the cost of undermining society) boggles my mind. It reeks of hubris and solipsism.
Taxes are a burden but not all burdens are bad. Jingoists like to lecture us “Freedom isn’t free” — and indeed, it isn’t. Part of the cost — not the lion’s share, but not a negligible one — is directly an economic one: The taxes we pay. You cannot defend a nation, or provide speedy justice, or protect the innocent, for free. You cannot offer hope and opportunity, or discover new cures, or build a better future, for free. The American project, whatever that turns out to be, is bigger than any one person or any one group. Taxes are part of the sinew that binds us into one nation.
Taxes help make clear: We are all in this together.
So again, I say, Happy Tax Day!
(For your amusement, here’s a link to the original income tax forms.)
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