I keep getting more pro-government as I get older

Is it because I keep getting smarter (i.e., better educated)?

Big government, our one shot against crazy storms
In our age of devastating droughts, wildfires and hurricanes, the federal government is more important than ever
http://www.salon.com/2012/01/26/big_government_our_one_shot_against_crazy_storms/singleton/

I have never been one who thought the best government was no government, but for a very long time (actually, perhaps up until reading the above mentioned article) I felt strongly the idea that the government which governs best, governs least. Ironically, as I considered ideas for my own government (recall my plans (fantasies I guess might be more fairer given my age and achievements to date) of building space stations), they were always quite monolithic and encompassing. I guess what I find so objectionable (and haven’t developed any ways I feel are fool proof (fool resistant, nothing is really fool proof 😉 to avoid in my designs) is the corruption that appears to be inevitable in any government structure. Since our government today is clearly an oligarchy and elections are just a sham to placate the sheeple (yes, I really do think that, it is not just hyperbole) it is very easy to feel that (our) government is a huge waste of resources and needs to be minimized or even eliminated. The problem with that idea, though, is the real problem isn’t government, it is the parasitic oligarchy that runs it to their own benefit. If we could (somehow) get our government to actually represent the people again (i.e., do the greatest good for the greatest number while simultaneously minimizing the misery of the rest (a huge challenge at any time, but vastly more so when being operated by the afore mentioned parasitic oligarchy (I like that phrase, expect to see it more often ;-))) then I suspect the vast majority of people would stop their complaining (well, the critical thinkers anyway, by which I guess I mean the tiny fraction of people who actually think would change their minds).

As the article so clearly discusses, only our government (well funded by taxes!) has the capability to act to ameliorate the effects of large-scale disasters and without that counterweight, a sufficiently large disaster (and Katrina comes close) will trigger a negative feedback loop in our economy as huge swaths of our country’s citizens join the ranks of the poverty stricken, thus are incapable of contributing.

I guess I object to the traditional descriptions of socialism I read about in Europe where the tax rate is so progressive that people lose any incentive to work once they have reached a certain point. Conversely, by making the social safety net so all encompassing, they are simultaneously robbing people of incentive to do a damn thing to begin with. I believe there has to be a happy medium where we can have the upward mobility that gives me the realistic opportunity to build upon my inspiration and perspiration to join the ranks of the 0.1% while also providing enough of a social safety net to allow a citizen to easily recover from setbacks that might make him homeless and destitute (to which I had the ‘honor’ of experiencing for nearly a year after I got my MBA (and without great friends that took care of me, I might still be in the gutter (or be dead by now))). I discuss some ideas on where that sweet spot might be in an earlier post, so I won’t go into them again here.

I guess, after reading this article, I would have to say that by the standards of today’s GOP (which, btw, I left at least a decade ago), I am now a prime-time liberal socialist. Just like banking regulation held off cyclical crashes for decades (so long, in fact, that everyone forgot why the regulation was put in place to begin with) at the expense of ameliorating the peaks, I now realize that taxes must increase on the rich to some higher level (note that this is taxing my (fantasy?) future self) to smooth out the opportunities of the nation’s population as a whole. I am still quite reluctant to consider the idea of 90% tax rates (or indeed, pretty much anything over 50%, I think 35-40% (if fairly applied to _everyone_ in that tax bracket (or higher)) is probably a good area to investigate), but given how regressive payroll, unemployment and social security taxes are (meaning that poor people pay a vastly higher proportion of their income in such taxes) I think that our tax system needs to get tilted toward the upper end (I am already on record as being extremely upset that people wealthier than I pay a lesser percentage than I, so clearly this capital gains BS needs to go).

Our country has gone a long way down the road of being penny wise and pound foolish. Our infrastructure is starting to fall down around our ears and despite the high unemployment our government is incapable of doing what needs to be done to keep us from joining the third world. Of course, I am sure a very large part of that is due to the parasitic oligarchy (see, I told you you would see that again) blasting the sheeple with nonsense (sheeple being so quick to lap up said nonsense, doanchano) to make them think that they have to make even greater sacrifices to subsidize even greater transfers of tax dollars to the already obscenely wealthy.

How to change any of that? I think that as long as the parasitic oligarchy (there I go again) is in control, we are all just whistling Dixie (what the hell does that mean, anyway), but heck, it won’t stop me from bitchin and whinin, it is what I know so well how to do.

The replicator is almost here…

The Pirate Bay Introduces ‘Physibles’: Napster For Physical Objects
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120124/03113717519/pirate-bay-introduces-physibles-napster-physical-objects.shtml

I have been keeping an eye on this 3D printing idea over the last couple of decades. It is still very much a niche industry, but it is evolving at pretty steady pace and it is easy to see that it will eventually reach the logical conclusion of being able to make nearly anything based on nothing more than a CAD drawing (suitably detailed, naturally).

I think the idea of tucking the potential copyright issues related to more tangible things (like the products produced by the CAD files) into the back of the noggin as we address the SOPA/PIPA issues going forward is a smart thing to do (which, naturally, means there isn’t any chance of that happening). Personally, I think that unless the powers-that-be manage to torpedo the Internet (or neuter it to the point that ability for people like me to reach people like you becomes impossible) that our society (indeed, the world’s society) will move to the point where the only currency is value added. This is related to my idea of the pure virtual economy that I keep thinking about but haven’t put fingers to keyboard yet, but I see on the horizon (again, if not blocked by the current oligarchy) that there will be essentially no utility to organizations like the Hollywood or music industry, just people that provide raw content (like my ‘original content’ posts) or people who aggregate and/or comment on other raw content (the bulk of this blog). This, of course, means that people can no longer rest on their laurels, but must constantly add value to something and further, it would mean that there is absolutely no value in the current system of Hollywood and the music industry with gatekeepers taking huge cuts of the profits to do little to nothing (to be fair, in the early days, they did provide added value through marketing and promotion, but that value today is rapidly approaching zero). Naturally, that terrifies the oligarchy because taken to its logical extreme, what today accounts for wealth and power will tomorrow not mean a damn thing and basically once everyone else realizes this (which, given their sheeple tendencies, I figure they are quite safe at this time), they are now going to live like trolls shoulder to shoulder with the other homeless hedge fund managers.

Yeah, but you have to sit around _naked_!

How Now, Brown Fat? Scientist Are Onto a New Way to Lose Weight
http://healthland.time.com/2012/01/26/how-now-brown-fat-scientist-are-onto-a-new-way-to-lose-weight/

I have read about this ‘brown fat’ conundrum many times. I am coming to the conclusion that what has really set us apart from our ancestors is two fold: 1) we used to have greatly restricted caloric intake during the winter and it appears that that annual stress actually helps clear out the arteries and keep our cells ‘younger’ and 2) by insulating our houses and bodies (i.e., getting out of the weather) we have ‘turned against’ millions of years of evolution optimizing our body’s for conditions we (as a species) no longer experience. As such, I suspect that starting a few thousand years ago (maybe as much as 10K) humans who had lost the ability to retain brown fat as adults were no longer at a disadvantage (meaning that up until that time, if they had lost such ability they would likely die before they could breed), so that ‘feature’ started to creep into our population.

I suppose that you might be able to encourage the formation of the brown fat as they suggest, by subjecting yourself to cold and misery, but really, anyone that dedicated is also going to be able to eat less and exercise more, which is the only tried and true way of shedding the lard. Clearly, if you drop the temp in your house, but put sweaters on to compensate, you are just freezing your family for naught. I think in today’s society (at least in what is left of the middle class in the US), this is meaningless information. Interesting, but meaningless, at least at this time.

Now, obesity is a very complex issue and there are no single ‘magic bullet’ solutions, and I am convinced this won’t change the overall dynamic. However, if a way to encourage the body to produce brown fat AND trigger that fat to regularly metabolize white fat, then I can see this being a way to help people reduce weight. However, an obvious side effect to me is that being so treated during the summer would probably be miserable as you are probably going to feel like you have a strong fever and be drenched in sweat all the time (sort of like how I feel whenever I visit the Philippines).

Maybe it is so, but maybe it ain’t

Predictions about the death of American hegemony may have been greatly exaggerated
http://drezner.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/01/22/predictions_about_the_death_of_american_hegemony_may_have_been_greatly_exaggerated

The word ‘hegemony‘ in the title really caught my eye, particularly when paired with the phrase “greatly exaggerated”. Based on my understanding of history the US is on the cusp of the same slide that happened to the British a couple of centuries ago except I feel due to the modern nature of information flow, I think the downfall will be greatly accelerated. As such, I was prepared to be quite skeptical of the article and the early paragraphs only confirmed my assessment:

So, America is doomed, right?

To be honest, this sounds like a lot of pious baloney. As Michael Beckley points out in a new article in International Security, “The United States is not in decline; in fact, it is now wealthier, more innovative, and more militarily powerful compared to China than it was in 1991.”

Our wealth is concentrated in the few (the ‘dreaded’ 1% to which I aspire) and those few have little to no incentive to increase their wealth when it might risk their social standing (briefly, since I can’t find the post(s) I discussed this before, since wealthy people already have everything they could possibly need they have no financial incentive to help the economy grow. Indeed, give that much (if not all) of their wealth and social status is inherited, they are (as a class) incentivized to reduce vertical mobility in the general population as a way to decrease the probability of their negative vertical movement), so the ‘now wealthier’ bit is totally misleading, our innovation as a society is being suppressed via the very patent and trademark system originally intended to foster such innovation and (as noted below), our military has been designed to stop an opponent that will never materialize. So to me, the exact opposite of ‘pious baloney’.

However, I soldiered on (I was there already) and continued with the rest of the article. While I am _very_ skeptical that the idea of spending 30% of our treasure on a military that has no realistic opponent (see here for details), I did feel elements of truth in most of the rest of the article, so for those of you (and I am using the ‘royal’ you, which means me too) who are laying awake at night running through scenarios to deal with the coming apocalypse, I suggest reading the rest of the article because it provides some hope that the world really won’t end shortly.

Specifically, the idea that due to the skyrocketing labor rates in the conventional cheap labor locations (granted the rates are still low, but keep in mind they still have huge shipping costs to deal with) is making things cheaper in the US (though that has to be caveated with the reality that a lot of new US manufacturing is highly automated) so manufacturing is actually shifting back to the US. Also, our deleveraging is proceeding well according to other countries that have gone through the same or similar events. I am a bit more skeptical on the energy front, particularly when he so casually mentioned ‘ethanol’, but I feel with the proper government incentives (that damn socialism again!) we could dramatically reduce our energy needs by increasing efficiency and decreasing utilization (such as through insulating our homes). However, I am not convinced that there will be such a dramatic change in demographics that in as little as 20 years we could achieve such a dramatic reduction in demand that we could eliminate our dependance on volatile Middle East reserves. However his arguments do not seem bogus to me, just stretched in the wrong direction.

As I have said multiple times before, I would be ecstatic to be wrong about my predictions of the looming apocalypse. I have no real desire to have to do back breaking work for 8 months out of the year (and plenty of work, just less back breaking, the other 4 months) just to survive and I would rather have the opportunities to explore some of my manifold ideas that might catapult me into the rarefied world of the 1% and finally give me the opportunity to do what I really want to do: build space stations for the masses.

I just might have to vote for Obama!

I wrote this several days ago and thought I had published it, but noted just now it was still in draft, so here she be…

If that idiot Gingrich wins the nomination then I will finally be motivated to vote this election, for Obama! As much as I detest Obama (nothing personal, I detest politicians in general and my hate goes either way (Bush II was amazingly bad, it seems he couldn’t do anything right)) I really loath Gingrich. Just like that idiot said he would never vote for: Paul (see here for my opinions on Paul), I will never vote for him. I am happy to sit out the election entirely if the decision is between Romney and Obama (I detest each equally and figure they will do equally bad jobs), but I can’t stand the idea of having that blowhard idiot Gingrich as President.

Its the end of the world as we know it…

Subculture of Americans prepares for civilization’s collapse
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/21/us-usa-civilization-collapse-idUSTRE80K0LA20120121

I freely admit that I often talk of the brewing apocalypse and expend thought considering what approaches to take to ameliorate the effects of a societal collapse. However, in my analysis there is so little that can productively be done that it almost makes preparation pointless. Then, of course, there is the whole anarchy effect and anyone ‘smart’ enough to have prepared just becomes a big fat target for those who didn’t prepare and the more aggressively you prepare to defend yourself (meaning loading up on arms and ammo), the bigger and fatter target you become. As such, unless you can some how prepare yourself in a near total vacuum (surely you will tell friends and loved ones, right? You have just ensured that you will have at least 10x more mouths to feed!) your preparations, no matter how elaborate, will be inadequate. Since I personally only have a thin veneer of civilization myself I know how incredibly easy it is to swing into anarchy (note, though, that anarchy is unstable and almost immediately devolves into gangs, dictatorships and/or strong man groups) when civilization collapses. Our culture (unlike, evidently, the Japanese culture, where they patiently waited for help after the tsunami) seems to favor riot responses and dips into anarchy, so unless you have organized yourself to be a large enough, strong enough group to defend yourself from attempts to extract your hard gotten gains, you are just building up a stock pile of resources for someone like me.

Having said all that, I have advocated taking steps to prepare for bad things happening, but doing such preparations in such a way that nothing is wasted in the event that bad things fail to materialize. If you want to be able to survive in the event that the infrastructure collapses, why not act to live off the grid now? Having a huge diesel generator and thousands of gallons of fuel sounds like great insurance against bad times, but do you realize just how difficult it is to start a huge diesel generator without properly functioning batteries? And what happens when the fuel you set aside turns out to have been deteriorating and being eaten by microbes and fungus in the intervening years? During the last great blackout many companies realized that without proper maintenance backup generators are a very expensive and totally useless waste of resources. So, if you want to be able to survive without any infrastructure when the infrastructure collapses, don’t wait, get off the grid now! The same with stored food, start a rotation and work to nearly exclusively eat the oldest portions of your 2 year supply of preserved food, that way, none of your food will be older than 2 years when (if) the collapse comes, not to mention you have worked out which suppliers actually suck and how to prepare interesting meals with those raw materials. Spend the time _now_ to develop the skills and harden your body for the constant back-breaking effort needed to produce enough food to survive on yourself. Realize _now_ that your backyard is not large enough for you to survive, or realize _now_ that a fruit tree doesn’t supply fruit a little bit each week during the year, but all at once over a period of a week or two and learn how to preserve the food for a year or longer.

Living independent of society is very challenging (to put it mildly) and while I expect riots, etc. when (if) our society collapses, I fully expect something to replace it pretty much straight away and without knowing what that is going to be (gangs, local strong man, etc.) you have no idea what is appropriate preparation. So, unless you want to live like old-style hippies off the land in some location where it is just too damn far for the refugees to come after you, why bother with all that effort? It is almost certainly likely to be totally wasted in the event of total societal collapse and if the collapse is local (like with Katrina), help will (eventually) show up and the best preparation is just to have a bunch of batteries (which, of course, you have to use before they go bad) and a week or so worth of food and be done with it.

More educational industrial complex

The ugly truth about “school choice”
The Koch brothers want you to think the movement’s about racial justice and empowering parents. They’re lying
http://www.salon.com/2012/01/24/the_ugly_truth_about_school_choice/singleton/

I have an early post on the educational industrial complex that was converted from my early email ‘posts’ before I started this blog. Education is an important topic to me (see here for more) and I have been trying for a long time to come up with some sort of generic method to produce not just a more highly educated population, but one that actually has critical thinking abilities (in other words, pretty much the exact opposite of the sheeple our current system produces today). I am not sure I have any really good ideas on how that could be done, though I favor the idea of having cohorts of students with wide ranges in education be responsible for teaching each other under the guidance of an instructor (one-room school house paradigm) and recently I tried to interest a friend in the teaching ‘biz to try to interest investors in the idea of a ‘flip school’ based on on-line teaching (something I might aggressively pursue myself if I didn’t already have a half dozen other projects I am really interested in (or already am) pursuing) that I think has a lot of potential. However, I have come to believe that the current push towards charter schools, vouchers, etc. are just attempts (that appear so far to be quite successful) to move education from the public sector into the private sector so rich people can siphon off even more tax dollars to get even richer. Perhaps there are some rich people that actually think they are doing the right thing, but it seems to me they do not have the greatest good for the greatest number in mind when they are making their plans and racism and/or elitism is really the driving force.

I have no love for bloated government, but in my experience when private enterprise takes over it does so via the oligarchical favoritism that leads to worse performance at a worse cost. As such, I am now favoring keeping the government in control over such things as the social safety net (social security, Medicare/Medicaid (which I think should be default available for everyone), unemployment, etc.) despite its inherent inefficiencies. Perhaps if we were to block the oligarchical gimme of tax dollars to the already wealthy somehow while privatizing these sorts of things (I imagine going the way of non-profit co-ops would be a good approach, but only if they also remain regulated so executives can’t get million dollar salaries) then I could see shrinking the government’s involvement in things like education, social security (see http://sol-biotech.com/wordpress/2012/01/18/retirement-insurance-or-what-social-security-ought-to-be/), etc. Until then, I strongly object to these efforts to extract tax dollars to further enrich the wealthy.

The government _can_ search your mind!

Judge orders defendant to decrypt laptop
http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/24/tech/web/judge-defendant-decrypt-laptop/index.html?hpt=hp_bn6

This is a follow up to an earlier post.

So it is official now, the government can compel you to testify against yourself, so we can officially cross off the fifth amendment from the Constitution. Since I have no doubt that the government could get a judge to OK them putting some sort of keystroke logger on the machine, or indeed a camera focused on the keyboard, I find it boggling that it is now going to be enshrined that our own thoughts can be compelled from our very noggins. So what now if she doesn’t tell? Will they waterboard her?

A naysayer in the world of the military industry complex

America, arms-dealer to the world
Munitions is the one U.S. industry that’s booming — with devastating global consequences
http://www.salon.com/2012/01/24/america_arms_dealer_to_the_world/singleton/

Here is this guy’s bio:

William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel. He has taught cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy, officers at the Naval Postgraduate School, and currently teaches at the Pennsylvania College of Technology.

This guy is clearly a past card carrying member of the military industry complex, yet here he is suggesting that perhaps, just perhaps, our country’s military is way past the point of diminishing returns on our defense dollar investment. He also mentions the highly dubious sale of arms and weapons to Iraq and quotes an Air Force officer questioning if they can even maintain the weapons, let alone field them in any sort of meaningful battle (and against whom? Iraq is friends with Iran, much to the consternation of the US).

Anyway, I highly recommend the article (of course, I wouldn’t have posted it here if I thought it was a waste of time). I have written some of my own thoughts on military spending here.

Flipping the big red switch

10K Reasons to Worry About Critical Infrastructure
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/01/10000-control-systems-online/

Whether our nation will be plunged into the stone age at the behest of a nation state, terrorists or bored hackers, it is simply a matter of time before it happens. Granted we don’t know how many of these detected systems are important, but I feel quite sure that even if it is a small percentage, the number of systems is huge. The main thing we got going for us is the shear size of our country and the vast number of systems with little or no interconnection, meaning there are a whole lot of systems that need to be hacked. Having said that, I suspect that there are a rather limited number of actual independent control systems and once you have hacked one, you have hacked 30% or more of the rest of the system. Also, we are talking about basically a random scan of the ‘net, one would presume that nation states would be focused and targeted and indeed would utilize social engineering and even ‘boring old’ espionage to accomplish their goals.

Things are going to get really interesting at some point and the more heated the US diplomatic rhetoric gets the more likely someone is going to flip the big red switch and we will all get to experience life in the stone age for at least weeks, likely months, presuming, of course, we have enough remaining economic organization to even rebuild the systems.