Evil Rocks

I think the reason people get so het up about autism and its possible causes is due to a deep reluctance to accept responsibility for poor mate-choices. Who wants to find out they're a bad parent because of who they married? Nobody, that's who.

I described this project to a friend as "my million words of crap". Many of my ideas are utter.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the inimitable Jay-Z on the subject of Sisters and Bitches:

Sisters get respect, bitches get what they deserve.
Sisters work hard, bitches work your nerves.
Sisters hold you down, bitches hold you up.
Sisters help you progress, bitches'll slow you up.
Sisters cook up a meal, play their role with the kids,
Bitches in street with their nose in your biz.
Sisters tell the truth, bitches tell lies.
Sisters drive cars, bitches wanna ride.
Sisters give up the ass, bitches give up the ass.
Sisters do it slow, bitches do it fast.
Sisters do their dirt outside of where they live,
Bitches have niggas all up in your crib.
Sisters tell you quick "you better check your homie",
Bitches don't give a fuck, they wanna check for your homie.
Sisters love Jay cuz they know how 'Hov is,
I love my sisters, I don't love no bitch.

Tell it, brotherman.

[ed: this entry is a wee bit overwrought, so its extra credit. not necessary reading, in other words.]

Innovation does several things: obsolete entire industries, make more goods with less labor, and build new objects to change the human experience of life, sometimes referred to as "labor saving devices" - I find this definition of Innovation's products to be a little tacky and overly rosy-goggled about how we humans use the devices in question.

Take the car for example: without a car, you're extremely limited in how far you can get around and how much you can get done in that time. In possession of a car, you decide that more things that were once not critical to your survival feel more so and so you spend the time you in theory would have saved using the car on tasks you would not have otherwise done without the car. Net labor saved: zero. Work done in the same amount of time, much greater. Let us set aside for the purpose of this post the effect of poorly-estimating travel+traffic times and the stress that arises from setting out on a list of tasks (that you didn't necessarily have to do) and not accomplishing some due to poor time-budgeting or acts of God (eg: traffic, children tangled up in your drivetrain).

What technology is really good at is making existing industries more efficient (see chip design and manufacturing gians Intel and AMD for clutch examples) over time, and reducing the number of workers required to make a given product. There's an interesting progression of technological efficiency improvements: look at the beginning of the industrial revolution most particularly the weaving industry and how it was shaped by the first engineer/tinkers. Massive textile worker unemployment was the result. As time goes on, the semiconductor industry doesn't add a whole lot of jobs (here and there, of course, but not huge job growth for everyone), but they certainly improve their widget to worker ratio very impressively over time. The massive job losses at the end of the cottage textile industry in Britain and the semiconductor industry's ability to progressively make more stuff with fewer people (and those few jobs remain in engineering and design rather than manufacturing which is mostly done by robot these days) are two points on the continuum of Amount of Stuff Generated by A Given Amount of Workers.

This view upon the world has an important insight for the American economy: when we sit on our laurels (which we're totally entitled to do from time to time because we *do* kick ass, take names, steal your girlfriend and buy your natural resources on a regular basis) and orient towards a consumer economy, the manufacturing sectors become more and more efficient (as is the natural progression of the capitalist system) while at the same time we don't create the new industrial sectors to employ those laid off by increasing efficiency rates. This results in long-term unemployment across the most important sector of the American economy: the middle class. The most recent go-around saw us orient towards a consumer economy fueled by cheap credit to unemployed fast-food workers - hardly a recipe for global economic domination.

We want steady job growth. Full employment is neither possible nor desired - some people should always be looking for work, otherwise there's no pressure on existing laborers to improve their own efficiency. People insist on thinking about "a good job" where you get it and keep it your whole life - nothing could be further from a healthy economic view: there are always more workers than jobs and one should always be working to improve skills, knowledge, efficiency - remember what happened when the whole country grew complacent? Our manufacturing sector stagnated to the degree that normally staid forms of investment (i.e. property, stocks and bonds) became the force driving our economy's growth.

Steady job growth in a world where companies are perpetually going out of business and becoming more efficient (and employing fewer people) depends on the formation of new businesses and new industries. Restaurants and boutiques will not supply the kind of job growth that we need to keep pace with the increasing population size, but they can contribute. In addition to job growth we seek to enrich individuals by paying them for their labor. American companies are more than willing to pay laborers, but the people in question must have skills that will make the company money - eg scientists, researchers, lab assistants, engineers, &c. No longer is a high school education enough to get a "good job" with excellent personal growth opportunities, and as my friends who choose not to go into academia will see, the traditional liberal arts degree won't either.

I'm wary of advocates of a "green business boom" for a variety of reasons. My primary concern is that it still takes oodles and oodles of oil to produce widgets and get them to the site of demand. My secondary concern is that any discussion of these things in the context of a "boom" will end sourly with much of the commoner investor class' money lost in the subsequent bust.

However, boom and bust may simply be part of the natural industry-birth cycle. I can see a rational case for that: a new industry emerges (like microchips or aerospace) and capital flocks to everyone in the industry. As time moves along individual companies are more or less successful and the charlatans run out of bullshit to feed investors as their competitors hit the market with real products and begin to see cashflow. The more companies that go bust, the higher the downward pressure on the industry, and the companies whose business models are sound survive and are rewarded with high stock valuations.

In theory.

What tends to happen is that the industry's promising/innovative companies get taken over by Business School students who paper over everything negative in order to run the stock price up in the near term so they can sell their stock options and profit off golden parachutes when forced out by investors for incompetence. The parasites end a lot of companies this way, unfortunately. Occasionally this doesn't happen (Google, Apple), but you'll note the ways in which each of the special cases are special. Google's initial engineers maintained control of the company for a long time, allowing them to develop their technology fully before handing the package over the b-schoolers. Apple was never considered a good enough bet by the b-school vultures and so was never taken over and run into the ground; counter-example: Microsoft and the Mediocre Manager.

I hope that by now we agree that two key side-effects of innovation in an economy are a steady rate of business death and a steady rate of job loss. We seek, then, to build an economy that rewards innovation and does not reward entrenched, powerful and potentially stagnant competitors.

The flipside of this is that unless workers skill up on a regular basis, the best policymaker's intentions will be unable to keep significant numbers of people employed. We see what happens when politicians decided to keep employment high without insisting on re/upskilling: an economy dependent on building roads, bridges and laying track for employment. Roads are infrastructure, not a core part of a modern economy! Modern economies are founded on the ability of institutionalized innovation to make the same thing better, cheaper or faster than the guy down the street.

We need to suffer catastrophic change in our homegrown industries before we'll see a return to job growth and wealth creation. The challenge of bringing supply and demand closer together will force manufacturing to serve smaller geographic markets (because the limit of shipping costs for heavy goods as the price of oil increases increases as well, non linearly, towards infinity). This ties into the theme I harp on frequently: as the capital costs to getting into the fabrication industry continue to crater thanks to the burgeoning 3D printing technology and companies like Ponoko/eMachine Shop American industry will shift away from manufacturing 100 million units in a factory designed specially for those machines towards factories that can churn out out a relatively good version of any basic machine, be it washer/dryer combo, refrigerator, oven (and forty years from now as thin-film manufacturing gets cheaper, displays as well) from parts they either have on hand or can source within a day from a local supplier. This style of manufacturing decreases the gap between the supply and demand by several orders of magnitude on the transportation front and can eliminate any number of middlemen involved with transport or warehousing or even retail.

Once these catastrophic changes come through the pipe and the dinosaurs institutionally incapable of change die and vomit forth their entire employment rosters we'll begin to see some change. This may not happen during this particular bust, but happen it will. Cottage industry everything!

I suppose that if you don't actually have money in the market, predicting its movements becomes a matter of opinion synthesis.

But still I win! I predicted a major leg down recently (mostly just from keeping my ears open and finger on the increasingly frantic pulse of economic boosterism) and it's nice to get a wee bit o' validation.

I encourage others to track my failed predictions, because I have no incentive to do so.

I just exited out of a text message because that was a quicker way that text, rather than using the delete function on my phone. Classic case of Doing It Wrong.

Our government cracks me up: the ongoing battle between the Administration, Lawmakers and Military hinges on the symbolic jet fighters. Do we need 187? More? Less? None?

I come down on the side of radical technology forecasting: human-piloted machines have no role in the sky. Drones will be able to fly faster, pull harder turns and shoot more accurately. More to the point, I doubt the usefulness of aerial dominance in a world networked by satellites where we no longer bomb civilization centers.

Today it struck me that the appropriate metaphor for memetics is not viruses competing for brain-computing space but that individual ideas are rather like the proteins that make up our bodies. Normally they work together in complex mutually catalyzing reactions to produce the wonders of biology that we're all familiar with - hemoglobin and red blood cells, cerebrospinal fluid and brain-toxin filtering/purging - but occasionally as in the case of Alzheimers and Mad Cow disease malformed proteins radically disturb the normal functioning of the biological system. Prions, they're called.

The metaphor has deep implications for how we understand the world: in a world where there are brain-viruses we must eradicate or risk the extinction of our species we have no choice but to wage infowar on our ideological enemies. In the new paradigm we try to avoid the inherent conflict of viral warfare by saying that ideas are a natural part of the human condition - they do not ride us or control us or replicate through us, but we are constituted of them and inseparable from them. The question becomes not how do we eradicate all hostile memes, but how do we identify where an idea misfolds and to become a prion instead of an intellectual protein.

It's the difference between killing all insurgents and politicking them out of the insurgency.

I love music, lots of and different kinds. I have low standards for enjoying things, like collecting (obsessively) and always thirst for new things.

This week (in between Spring term and Summer term) I laid hands on a truly staggering amount of music to chew through:

• The entire Queen discography. I am currently on album 5 (Jazz) of like 18 live, non-compilation discs.
  
• Eminem's Infinite
  
• Eddy Grant's Very Best, which my friend pointed out is hardly the Best of anything but I needed the track Electric Avenue. I needed that track because while aforementioned friend and I were oot and aboot drinking down on lower east Burnside we stopped in at Union Jack's to look at some titties. This was my first ever visit to a strip club (three years too late, gimme a break), and I realized that physical beauty and the quality of sexiness are two entirely different things. The girl dancing to Electric Avenue had the most strident voice I've ever heard. Obnoxious, loud, generally speaking she grated upon the ear. Nor was she particularly attractive. However, she moved gracefully and sexily enough on stage that I realized that sexiness and physical beauty (at least as constructed by Americans) have very little to do with each other. This makes sense: as I've noted before it's the skill of inhabiting one's body to the tips of every organ that conveys that impression of sexiness. Not to digress excessively, but she was also wearing roller skates while dancing. Awesome.
  
• The whole of Roots Manuva's discography. He's a weirdo for sure, but I like the british rap musics.
  
• The Reel Big Fish discography (minus the two albums I already have).
  
• The Mad Caddies discography.
  
• The Beatles discography, which next to the Eminem download is the most exciting acquisition of the week.

When I graduate (if I ever do), I'd love to work for beans in a clean tech manufacturing startup. That would be awesome, and I'd have the stock to fund a trip to Europe for a master's degree.

Ladles and Jellyspoons, I give you Peter Fox:

It seems that we always want something for nothing. "Healthcare for all!" I hear from all sides. Single payer system! Leverage the purchasing power of the entire country for cheap drugs! These are all great ideas, and they all revolve around the heuristic flaw of mistaking the symptoms of high healthcare costs for the problem when the disease is truly the financialization (or securitization, I lack a precise-enough word) of healthcare.

A certain historical narrative holds that at one point in decentralized, small-town, Main Street America [ed: don't take the narrative seriously] there was a consistent doctor-to-community ratio. The ratio varied, but was constant within bounds. Doctors cared for the people in their communities, the standard of care (relative to today) was low, life expectancy low and the pharmaceutical industry was duping the poor American every which way. Then Big Business got its act into gear and employed many Americans in the design and manufacture of goods to be sold around the world. This type of employment gave many families health insurance, I believe. Globalization hit and manufacturing jobs fled the country, and every smiling child with an American dream and the dedication to sacrifice their best years to med school went into the medical industry because they saw doctors' kids arriving at school in BMWs.

The hospitals paid the doctors out of the massive profits the fiscalization of the medical industry brought in. Profits in the medical industry come not from selling goods or making things but through ordering tests and CAT scans and PET scans and X-ray imaging and providing 400 dollar mucous capture systems. NOT VALID PROFIT MAKING IN MY BOOK. In my book, legitimate profit-making comes in a few forms: doing the same thing better/cheaper/faster or creating and monetizing new ideas. Medical research brings new ideas to the fore. The practice of medicine should not offer the fat margins of innovation and entrepreneurship.

This system of corruption [where the hospitals paid the doctors because the doctors wrote the prescriptions and the insurance companies generally just wrote checks to cover it all] only developed to its current sophistication because for so much of our history health insurance has been a part of life for most people. Unluckily for everyone involved, lots of people don't have health insurance these days and their plight only now highlights to the rest of the country how fucked the medical system is.

You see, it's not insurance's fault. They bear a degree of responsibility for not nipping this in the bud, but their business models do not actually involve you being healthy but merely paying for your ass when the bills come due and otherwise taking the monthly payments. We call this amortization in polite company.

It is not the fault of insurance, and all our own fault. We have allowed the brain-virus of unfettered capitalism to infect the delicate machine that is medicine. I begin to think that a healthy public and a very profitable medical industry are mutually exclusive (and I take full responsibility for propagating the meme and will continue to refer to the system as the medical industry to make a point). That thought leads naturally to ones questioning not merely outsize pay to hospitals and insurance companies but also to doctors themselves. I do not argue that doctors should be paid well, but for them to be among the most wealthy in our society? Puh-lease, they're nothing but glorified body-mechanics. I hear "Good enough for med school!" from time to time in my bio classes, and I always shudder like someone's tonguing my butthole without permission and then think: you want to put your fingers in me. Glorified mechanics! I have nothing against mechanics, but the guy who works on Fords does not drive a brand-new Benzito.

I propose to get the profits out of medicine. Single-payer healthcare is all well and good but anyone who accepts that as the ultimate solution is buying the medical industry's self-serving myth that it's an insurance problem and not a medical problem. It is a problem with professionals: all professionals think that their area of expertise offers the right solution to any given problem.

For example: EMS are trained to stabilize patients, and get them to the hospital, so when the housemate passed out at work they just carted him in! Billed his work's insurance for the ambulance trip, but imagine if he hadn't had insurance and they'd talked him into the ambulance anyways! I call that extortion and unfair business practices. Imagine instead, the EMS on the scene actually had homeboy's best interests at heart - they probably would have told him that he passed out and he'd be fine. However, because the Greatest Grocery Store Employer In The World is properly insured and their managers properly trained, they called him an am-blee-ance to run him into the hospital. Needlessly! Insurance bears the brunt of a medical profession that has convinced the people they always know best and the right answer is to just get the test done, insurance will cover it anyways. We see how this harms the uninsured and the liberals jump to the conclusion that the government should provide health insurance, free, for everyone. Bullshit.

Treat the real disease, people: overpaying for medical care. The problem is not in the financial instruments erected to pay for healthcare, because amortization is a good idea. The problems (twin): a shrinking population able to afford medical care due to a poorly-managed innovation and entrepreneurship economy to provide Good Jobs; and a medical industry whose solution is always to order more tests and do more imaging and charge more for everything. One root cause is beyond the scope of this essay; the other is perhaps beyond the scope of American politics.

I landed a spot in a plant ecology lab recently, and by "landed" I mean that I showed up at lab meetings uninvited and did silly things that nobody else wanted to do (for example, building Magic Boxes in the basement. I like building things). My strategy was simple: stick around for long enough, I figured, demonstrate your ability, your intelligence and your drive, and things should happen. Every time I interacted with the senior researchers, I'd smile and remind them humorously that while I enjoy building things and in fact make money doing just that in my copious amounts of free time, what I really wanted out of my time in their lab was my own research project (because they want me to build machines, and I want to do research).

Which finally came through!

---

Right here I took a two-day break trying to guess the correct level of detail to include in this update; too much and The Man will be able to identify me. Too little and I run the risk of not disclosing anything interesting at all. Candid Engineer in Academia refers to her research as Mangoes - this works well when you are developing a particular something but is far less semantically helpful if as in my case you are doing research on how to make the plants behave in the lab as in the wild.

---

This project of mine is strictly undergraduate research - I am to run down a hunch about a specific factor in relative growth rates. The factor in question is a symbiotic one, and so plays to my love of symbiotic relationships at the small scale and complex systems at the large scale.

To obtain reasonable p-values, I believe that I will track 300 samples as they grow over a two-month period. Buttloads and buttloads of plants. Nevermind the hard work, by the time this summer ends, I should have everything all written up (I'm a gangster: writing doesn't phase me) and I'll accrue another small grain in Phase One of Plan: Lifelong Resumé Padding.

Five years ago, we didn't have rapid and cheap genetic sequencing. Five years ago, nobody could name the seasonal flu due to it being just another flu. This year, there happens to be a slightly more virulent and slightly more aggressive flu virus going around; our advances in genetic sequencing technology has allowed us to track the disease's spread across the entire globe scaring everyone shitless about how quickly viruses propagate through the population.

Fortunately for us, the virulent ones are rarely the really nasty ones. There's a tricky combination of incubation period and transmission rates and some other factors that basically lead to the evolutionary continuum between lethal and rapidly spread. NB: there are some particularly badass exceptions: Ebola comes to mind. HIV would but it has relatively special transmission vectors (sexual contact).

So chill out, everyone. We're at this weird place in technological development where we can watch the world happen in realtime (through the magic of advanced semiconductor sensors and the twin magic of human statisticians and pattern-watchers like the brilliant souls at the CDC), but we have yet to track these disease observations over a long enough time to give us context. I imagine a day where sequencing costs so little that scientists who track disease spread mount sequencers on public transportation to track spreads of subspecies and watch in realtime for mutations and host species-transfers. By that time, they should have a year or so of data and scares like the current Swine Flue overreaction should fade due to cultural exposure. Yes, we'll continue to name the dominant viral strains, but the freakouts will be much more moderate.

I just found the greatest research hole evar:
in your science indexer of choice search for [chemosynthesis] and [primary production] and set it to sweep as wide a net as possible. Your mind will be blown.

Barry Ritholtz, accidental nü-media financial baron, sets the stage, sets the hook (to mix metaphors) and at some point throws his hands up and says "look I can just do it better. Watch" and will then proceed to launch his own.

I like New Yorkers, some of 'em.

I agree with Jonathan Rauch in that I think the role of journalists will probably trend towards developing a stable of bloggers to call on for comment at any given time - who *are* experts in the field. Blogging allows the real experts in a field to speak in their own voices, present their own opinions as derived from years of experience and illustrative stories and anecdotes. Their credibility comes from a history of blogging on the topic (one they work to establish), a readership who respects them and understands their background and conflicts of interest. I have faith in my fellow netizen's ability to parse noise from the 'personal diary' type blog.

There's this thing about developing one's writerly voice that grownups have tried to drill into me since I first hammered keys - namely, everyone has one. The way that people write on the internet varies, but I hazard that the majority uses first person voice and the minority dispassionately report pure facts (possibly distributed 80/20?). The internet fostered a completely unnoticed explosion of the first-person voice in pop culture, especially when contrasted against the stripped-down third-person descriptive exsanguinated and otherwise entirely dispassionate, inverted pyramid my mother could never persuade me to use. (My shit rambles to this day!) You can trace this to the behavior Stross describes in the video I linked to previously on early incarnations of the net - how nobody knew that anyone was archiving the usenet forums, much less that someone was archiving everything and that it was never going away. We know that networks are highly influenced by their initial states: we see this in ecological models for maintaining diversity, social networks (facebook/myspace should be a cliché by this point) and by the same token, dominant forms of expression on the internet. Personal voice.

One of the core tenets of healthy micro-community development involves regular knowledge transfers between generations: most importantly between the elders and the youngsters [old people have a dramatically different view of the world from kids parents, what with having been born at the beginning of an exponential growth in technological complexity driven by the semiconductor revolution and cheap oil]. As I repeat whenever anyone gives me the opportunity, I now bring the glorious logical construct that is biological determinism (not to endorse determinism of any kind, but its implications for this discussion are very thought-provoking) to bear full force on the interesting trend and community-development guideline elaborated above; knowledge transfer between generations is critical and the dramatic shift to first-person voice in blogging and pop culture.

I venture that personal writing ventures like this one will become de rigeur in the knowledge-worker circles and from there self-select for quality. A hypothetical journalist from thirty years hence will probably have their beat, Mr. Rauch, no doubt. They may even write long investigative pieces and examine many different facets of a story. However if you examine Rauch's Journalism as practiced in our pop media, you'll notice THAT NEVER FUCKING HAPPENS.

Journalists have a brilliant self-taught myth: that journalism does this thing. Most of the time interesting angles are ignored, or all but the most sensational details left out (but that's not the journalist's fault! Those critical views were stripped out for the sake of length limits! If you advocate this argument, then your machine for producing this fine art you call Journalism is broken and you need to fix it because it is simply not accomplishing its primary function anymore. Try the internet). These men and women, convinced that they must pursue objective truth at all cost, grow up into mindless regurgitators of opinion. Outliers like Olberman and Limbaugh exist but a) that's televised media and I prefer to focus on written due to our initial thought constraints: intergenerational knowledge transfer and b) what precisely do you want to call those outliers but the invasion of first-person writing into the impenetrable thicket of Journalism [also, parenthetically, c) don't expect me to take television seriously.]? Keith and Limbaugh both understand the objective truth fallacy and so both present a carefully tailored fiction that sounds just good enough to pass.

Our foooture-journalist must offer something more than the professionals in the field knock off for their local e-community after a day of lab work (speaking of, I know you feel I owe you words on my labwork, but forget it. there's nothing going on there, just Science, and as I am learning Science is a slow and brutally grinding process. I'm spending the time there to teach myself every way to do Modern Science, because Modern Science follows entirely different rules from what I now dub Archaic Science. I will give you words on how to distinguish Modern Science from Archaic Science in due time in place of words on the lab work). As I mentioned, this may range from extremely long, information-rich and well-researched pieces to simply covering a beat and reporting on an industry, a field of technological development, local events or tax policy. Technical journals and industry magazines should be making the jump right about now, but I don't know if there's going to be nearly enough money left in the Journalism industry to keep all the mags and rags going (although the trend may run in reverse when e-paper matures fully. I can see some hipsters putting together a slick bit of retro magazine-ware ten years from now. I love this century!) considering how my view going forward is that journalism will evolve towards documenting professional e-communities. In first person!

I just watched a video of Doctorow and Stross speaking (oh god I love the internet) for an hour and a half. I really like Stross, his theatrical perspectives on everything crack me up.

However, I would like to address something that neither author on stage discussed: the model of peer surveillance. When everyone's personal surveillance becomes so good that they can store any interaction with authority and present it as evidence in formal courts of redress.

Somewhat idealistic, but entirely do-able. Sousveillance, my kin.

[Ed: Comments back on, but screened.]

Sparse posting; finals. Summer session I study all three quarters of Physics with Calculus! I tell myself: This is going to be like summer camp for your brain, Rocks-o! We're not entirely sure that I buy it.

Lots of plumbing sucks. I humbly present the Evil Shower Process:

1. Turn heat to most hot, faucet instead of showerhead.
   
2. Wait for hot water.
   
3. Cool stream to taste.
   

Ta da!