Category: Uncategorized

I had lunch with two intelligent women today, my wife Tamara Bavendam and a former student of hers, Soojin Park. They’re both high-functioning physicians, each with their own network of similarly high-functioning friends. We wondered what fraction of people are so pleased with their jobs that they aren’t seeking a better situation. Among Soojin’s circle, she felt less than 30% are satisfied, including herself. Tamara feels that perhaps 10% of people are pleased, again including herself.

We all agreed that Tamara’s estimate seemed more accurate. If we consider the economy as our real-world Operating System, this one has some serious defects for most of its users. Deconstruct the eOS and ask, who programmed this system, and why is it so buggy?

Perhaps it’s because each economic protocol is designed by a seller or an employer. There are two primary relationships in an economy, seller/buyer and employer/employee. When rules or customs are formalized, it is invariably by the seller in a purchase transaction, or the employer in a job situation. Of course not all employers and sellers can make their biases stick, since the other party is free to seek alternative employment or purchases. But in those new circumstances, the rules will also be laid down by the employer and seller.

These protocols are bound to favor the protocol-maker, so we’d expect each transaction to be less than glorious from the viewpoint of the buyer or employee, and that jibes with our collective impression. Since there are more employees than employers, and more buyers than sellers, we should expect the majority of participants to be dissatisfied.

But there’s a disconnect here. All the work is produced by the employees, who are the biggest expenditure in the economy, so most of the money is in their hands as they play their role as the buyers. They have great influence, but their influence is not organized to make the rules of engagement so their transactions remain unsatisfying.

The Xpertweb protocol is aimed at the smallest unit in our eOS, the individual transaction. Xpertweb is designed to expose the quality and history of each transaction to scrutiny after the fact. It’s a laboratory, really, though one that’s designed to be viral enough to grow rapidly. Xpertweb transactions are service-oriented, and it is never assumed the transaction is satisfactory until the buyer says so. Therefore, the service is delivered, no strings attached, to the buyer who must grade and comment on it before payment is due. If the grade is low enough, the price may be reduced, or the work rejected.

What’s to prevent a buyer from downrating a transaction in order to get a lower price? It’s a good question that we’ll look into tomorrow.
8:10:31 PM    

A few years ago I got to wondering about the differences among people – why some live in the Big House on the Hill and some sleep next to a dumpster. I know of no more important issue to examine.

Whatever the reasons for people’s different circumstances, it’s obvious that some people have done things that led them to “better” circumstances. and some have done – or failed to do – certain things, so they find themselves in “worse” circumstances.

What is behind those actions or failings? Are these different people better or worse human beings? What are the habits of thought or action that sculpted their different lives? Several years ago a college president tried an experiment. Fascinated with this question, he went out in old clothes with no wealth tokens in his wallet and lived on the economy for a few months.

On the Economy What an interesting term! It describes a resourceful person without resources (interesting distinction) who lives hand-to-mouth and somehow gets through each day. Are the rest of us “off the economy”? I need to understand where this comes from.

We’re describing the Disadvantaged, those whom middle class Americans are likely to describe as unable or unfit to take advantage of everything our country has to offer. We see them all around us, but we don’t, I think, study the specific nature of their disadvantages.

Are they lazy? Perhaps, but the article about the posing college president reported that he had never worked harder in his life. Are they dumb? Arguably so, but researchers who have followed them around report that they juggle a daunting set of variables – weather, affecting them more than most of us, so reckoned with in a serious way; the various offerings of shelters, and how shelters’ availability varies with demand. Danger on the streets is as real for these people as it is imaginary for most Americans, who melt into terminal dysfunction at the thought of spending a night out here. Could most of us actually do what these people do every day? I think not.

So what, exactly, is the nature of their disadvantage? All I could come up with is that these people are procedurally disadvantaged. For whatever reason, they are unwilling or unable to take the actions which would put them into a halfway house or apartment or starter home. They don’t have a checking account, so obviously they have been unable or unwilling to take whatever actions lead to having a checking account.

That’s a superficial tautology, but it feels like it leads somewhere. As I go through my day, I always feel procedurally deficient – disadvantaged, in a real sense. What is the best way to structure a section 179 deduction on a 1040 Schedule C? Should I lower the price on the home we’re trying to sell? Is it better for my client to expose his entire training syllabus to his web site or keep it close to his vest? I’m not prepared to answer any of these questions, and they sound trivial compared to the life-threatening issues that the homeless deal with.

Facing those confusions, I cannot honestly say that I am more competent than someone who is dealing with being homeless. Can you?

The secret to this riddle must be complexity. The issues many of us deal with seem to be more convoluted and abstract than those faced by the homeless. That’s not to say they require more intelligence, just a kind of fractal symbolic manipulation, like comparing the exhausting subtleties of etiquette faced by a diplomat at the U.N. compared to the demanding real-life tasks managed by an F-18 pilot over Afghanistan (or a C-130 pilot in Vietnam, with which I have some experience).

The Aristocracy of Complexity

So are we ready to say that we have a privileged part of our society dealing with numbingly complex issues that don’t matter, but for which we’re rewarded disproportionately? And that there’s a dark underbelly of society comprising flexible, resourceful, emotional people dealing with danger and deprivation and alienation who have to be extraordinarly aware of the real dangers of their marginal existence?

In short, are we describing how we live today compared with how our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived?

If the difference is simply complexity, how authentic is that complexity? Is it in some sense a contrivance to discriminate among our people to determine who gets the goodies?

That’s the conclusion I can no longer avoid. If you are willing and able to manipulate increasingly complex symbols of decreasing real-world significance, then you get promoted to the next rung on the academic/socioeconomic ladder. If you drop out of that silliness at an early age, probably abandoning whatever native symbolic-manipulation skills you might have, then you are destined for a tackier, scrappier, nastier future.

Even though you couldn’t, you shoulda known.
12:08:21 AM    

The ever-insightful Cory Doctorow reinforces the observation that our economy could stand an upgrade. He cites an abstract of Yale philosophy professor Nick Bostrom’s obscure notion that the odds are 1 in 3 that each of us is living in a computer simulation designed by our future, post-human self. Cory is skeptical:

…if I am a simulation of my pre-post-human self, then why wouldn’t I simulate an environment for me that, generally speaking, kicked more ass?

Why not, indeed?, most people ask. If the economy were designed like a computer’s operating environment, it would surely be more even-handed. Sure, it takes some specialized skill to run a computer, but there’s no one locked in or locked out of some or all of a computer’s features, based on their type of business, education or connections – political or corporate.
6:38:51 PM    

Before there was a Bazaar, there was a cave. Socrates, via Plato, said that what we call reality is only flickering shadows on the wall of a cave, cast by the true reality which is forever hidden from our gross senses. The only way to divine the truth is to understand more about how the shadows are cast rather than getting absorbed in the flickers.

We are not what we think we are, nor is anything else as it appears. Dave Winer says things are even worse than they appear.

Plato made a compelling point, lost in the mists of philosophy, and in our day popular media has made a business of literally casting shadows. The fact that most of our knowledge is now based on flickering patterns on screens is an irony beyond comprehension. We may know that the flicker rate is 75 Hz or 30 fps, but we don’t see what the shadows mean. Plato’s teacher, Socrates, was executed for describing his version of the truth to anyone who would listen. Today,David Touretsky finds himself hounded by elders as vengeful as the Greek Olgopoly.

Certainly nothing works the way it seems to – the more we know about anything, the more absurd are the news stories or gossip we hear about it.

So we’re wondering if our real lives have been eclipsed by our ‘productive lives’ – making a business of our lives as the media has made a business of casting shadows. This is an optimistic journal, even when it frets about the wrongs of our current system. Ours is the first system with enough insight to realize how hostile our economic surroundings always have been. Ours is the first economy that has evolved to the point that it’s worth criticizing (tip o’ the hat, Alan Kay).

So we’re all struggling with an economic Operating System (eOS) – one which we are obligated to use, but one which responds better to some than others – as C code does. The good news is that, like computer operating systems, the eOS is getting more user-friendly all the time, opening up possibilities to people who were put off last year by its complexity, but are now able to log on and do something useful, with even more to be empowered next year. Its metaphor is this weblog phenomenon[~]people empowered to build and manage complex websites that were impossible for them a year earlier.

The optimism is based on the inescapable fact that the economy[~]our productive lives[~]is impossible for most people to succeed at this year, but may be trivial to master and manage in a couple of more years. Most people’s economic angst is from feeling trapped by intractable structures requiring permission from harsh masters. Call it the Old Testament economic model. In truth, the economy is just technology mediating the needs of all of us. It’s ours to fix.

Or, we can just sit here gaping at the flickering shadows cast on the glass pane or silver screen in front of us.

The Problem

Now that many of us are accustomed to using a computer, we have a sense of how a computer operating system (the “OS”) can get between us and the application programs which are the real reason we use the machine. The OS is promoted as the bright landscape of promise and possibility, but we know that it’s the OS which often lets us down, encumbered as it is with the baggage of thousands of functions and millions of lines of programming. It’s all conceived and executed by bright kids who love computers, unlike the rest of us who may share neither of those traits.

So it is with our economy. The world seems to be filled with honest, hard-working people who want to be paid fairly by doing work for people just like them who really want the work done. But so much seems to get in the way. The current situation in U.S. medical care is one example of this frustration: most of us respect our doctors and their staffs, yet find ourselves estranged from them by the companies we or our employers have selected to protect us from ailments only the doctors can help with.

Tom Robbins, 1990:

During periods of so-called economic depression, societies suffer for want of all manner of essential goods, yet investigation almost invariably discloses that there are plenty of goods available. Plenty of coal in the ground, corn in the fields, wool on the sheep. What is missing is not materials but an abstract unit of measurement called ‘money.’ It is akin to a starving woman with a sweet tooth lamenting that she can’t bake a cake because she doesn’t have any ounces. She has butter, flour, eggs, milk, and sugar, she just doesn’t have any ounces, any pinches, any pints.(Skinny Legs and All)

What we have here is nothing more than a failure to communicate. Since the fields have corn and children need carbohydrates, why can’t something simple be worked out? In a small village, it often is.

Apparently their eOS is just better than ours.
12:11:54 AM    

The PFR is the inevitable conclusion of digital convergence. Imagine the product evolution of phone cameras.

Each of us will certainly be equipped to capture a video/audio stream of everything we see and hear. The capability can be provided by an eyeglass frame similar to those used for “candid camera” sequences on the Tonight Show. The technology and connectivity is inevitable and, by 2005 or so, trivial.

Whether for convenience or entertainment, we will want to share our lives with others or review our video history. At first, the video record will be stored on our person. With abundant wireless bandwidth, our video stream is likely to be archived to the Internet ‘cloud’.

This means that public life will become truly public. Whether you smooch, shoplift or mug in public, your actions will be recorded. This is the Rodney King incident gone global.

Initially an upscale consumer electronics product, the cost of the PFR’s video stream and storage will quickly become as acceptable as the cell phone and may be served by your cell phone. The more interesting question is how the end of anonymity will affect our behavior and our culture.

Life may be pretty much like the small, tight-knit villages our great-grandparents were born into. Anonymity, an artifact of the great Industrial Age cities, may be a casualty of the Information Age. One post-9/11 notion is that we have a right to privacy, but not anonymity That would be a cultural imperative, while ubiquitous PFRs will be a technical imperative, sure to close the book on anonymity. What transgressions will people commit when they know their actions are visible to the world? Probably not many.

Like seatbelts, PFRs may evolve from prudent to mandatory. As a large minority of us adopt them, pressure increases for the rest of us to be similarly equipped. Who wouldn’t want to maintain their own record, since any PFR-generated video may have been edited by its owner?

Perhaps the most dramatic effect will be on the justice system. After a shake-out process deciding the admissibility of PFR video, evidentiary proceedings will change forever. Just as George Bush I refused to ignore the video evidence of the Rodney King incident, the courts will not be able to keep the PFR genie in the bottle. Authenticity of video will be the issue. Perhaps the record can only be deduced by examining multiple PFR records from several witnesses, like the Space Shuttle’s 3 computers comparing notes. One’s personal PFR archives will surely be subject to subpoena. This trend would reinforce a doctrine that each of us must support the shared video record by streaming our lives into the Internet cloud. For our own protection, we will probably rush to do so. The LA cops who took on Rodney King might have wanted their own records. As Lou Cannon suggests, a more thorough video record might have shown that King was a really dangerous dude and, though the cops’ brutality was beyond contempt, multiple points of view might have showna more complex encounter. It certainly would have made the case more clear and probably have averted the riots.

So, for amusement,  protection and maybe for blogging, we’ll each be streaming our life into the cloud. Perhaps, in a PFR-equipped society, the ultimate act of trust and intimacy will be the moment when a couple or more people get together and turn off their PFRs.
9:22:50 PM    

Just writing every day is enough of a challenge, but starting a blog is also a technical adventure. The fact that it’s possible to set up a blog at one setting is itself a technical miracle. I know – I tried to set up 3 blogs and they each took one evening. The following’s from memory, not notes, so I’ll get some details wrong…

I knew I wanted to host the blog at blaserco.com, but wasn’t sure which tool to use. If you’re thinking about setting up a blog, especially if you intend to serve it from your own web site, it may not be the 15 minute click-and-type that’s advertised.

On a friend’s recommendation, I took a look at MoveableType but it’s a pretty techie tool – setting up CGI settings and privileges and all the rest. I did all that but finally gave up when I found that my ISP, XO, doesn’t have a required Perl function installed, and not likely to put it up just ’cause I asked nicely. One long evening gone.

Then I got started with Blogger, and got it upstreaming to my server. But I was seduced by Blogger Pro’s features and bought the $40 upgrade. Then when I tried to update my post, it wiped out all traces of the work, on my server and, of course, I had no record on my own machine. There I was at 1:30 am staring at an empty text entry area. These are omens I flee from, even though it was surely something I did in my zombie state. Second evening gone.

So I turned to Radio, as I kind of knew I would all along. I looked into Salon Blogging, a Manila-based service, but it felt a little like an AOL kind of pre-packaged deal, and, more importantly, I wanted to distance myself from the liberal aura of the place. Don’t get me wrong, I default to progressive-liberal causes, as long as they’re not served up by big government. If I’m going to show a conservative knee-Jerk the error of his ways, I want to come in under his radar. Blogging from Salon is like telegraphing your punches.

I went to Radio UserLand and got my third user name, worked through the ftp settings for the blaserco.com upstreaming, and it worked pretty much as advertised. The reason I have 3 Radio user numbers is that I’ve downloaded the demo 3 times. I’m sure I paid my $40 once, but can’t find the password from that registration. Apparently that’s not uncommon. A friend tells me he just gets a new demo every month, even though he too paid his fee. To be fair, I haven’t emailed Userland to check it out or posted it on a discussion board, since it’s probably a hassle for them.

Userland – Ma Bell Analogy
“Universal Service” was the motto of the long-departed, monolithic AT&T when it owned and installed every telephone handset in America. In those days there were no phone jacks or pre-wiring. Your single telephone was hard-wired, enshrined almost, in a central location using stout wires so it would never fail. Ma Bell took their motto seriously. They conveyed the impression that the Chairman didn’t go to bed until everyone’s phone was working.

That’s how Userland feels to me. You can sense Dave Winer’s hand in every nuance of the company and the software and, I assume, in the customer support. That’s a good reason to patronize a boutique developer, but it makes me reluctant to be, well, a whiner. Besides, Radio is easily worth $80, so I’ll just get another license.

Glutton for Punishment

As soon as you get one level of tech under your belt, you sign up for another challenge. The Blogger experience taught me I didn’t want to edit in a browser text box, as Dave Winer repeatedly points out. Beyond fear of loss though, is the annoyance of not having an Explorer-based WYSIWYG text environment, because I use Mac OS X – the preferred OS for people willing to be ghetto-ized in exchange for bringing grace, dignity and beauty into their lives. I use DreamWeaver a lot, so I could compose there and just copy the source HTML into my Radio posting box. But I hate to fire up such a huge environment just to make links and heading & blockquote tags more convenient. I looked at Clarisworks and Entourage for editing, but their code was too busy to my taste. BBEdit is world’s best text editor, but it’s just not wizzy enough for me.

Then I remembered the Mozilla Composer tool. It’s an elegant, big-font text entry environment. The links take seconds and posting the source is 3 clicks and a copy-paste. It also gives me a third level of archiving – the Composer docs get saved to my own blogs/year/month folder path, just as Radio saves them in its own directory. Composer feels elegant and forgiving to me, so it’s a mystery that it’s not even mentioned on the What-Is-Mozilla product page. Presumably the author lovingly crafts HTML by hand.

The Missing Theme

Naturally I then wanted to switch from the default theme. Going to Bryan Bell’s amazing themes collection, I found what I wanted: slabblue10.fttb. and saved to my Radio/Themes folder (by Explorer 5.1 (OS X) , I expect to see it as an option the next time I fire up Radio and go to Preferences/Themes. But the theme is absent from the Radio choices and the file’s contents look different than Radio’s included file themes. Mozilla is able to download it, but it still won’t show up in the theme selection page. Maybe tomorrow night.

Just think of the unbelievable tales we’ll tell our grandkids about what it was like in the old days – uphill both ways!
11:21:06 PM    

Doc challenged me to go public with the stuff he and I have been discussing, so now I face the obligation to write daily once started. I mean, you’ve got to be reluctant to blog unless there’s something worth saying and, if there is, there’s probably something there every day. Failing to post something is the blogging equivalent of link rot.

My problem lies in having the persistence to dredge it out every day and, once exposed, face how shallow it is compared to the natural writers I enjoy, like Doc and Dave and David and all the rest. But it seems, well, lazy to sit on the sidelines. Lurking is shirking.

The Discontented

What do you call content companies – big media – when their content escapes their control? The discontented?

On Monday Doc and I were discussing copyright. Since then I’ve been wondering if the current fight is a smoke screen. Maybe it’s a ploy by the Discontented to keep their price fixing in place while calling it a copyright issue. Did you ever wonder why a 25 cent plastic disc costs $15-$25? Must be because the discontented are a cartel, like OPEC. Unlike OPEC, they’re subject to US laws, which never seems to come up.

The current copyright fight is crucial to our cultural viability, but if there’s another agenda, it’s worth recognizing.

No matter, the digital revolution will finally expose the illusion that they’re selling atoms and not bits. They’re going down like every other cartel that couldn’t embrace change.

In 1877 Alexander Graham Bell offered his patent to Western Union for $100,000. They deliberated for a few seconds and concluded there was no future in voice over wires (pdf). Western Union thought they were in the Morse Code business, but they were really in the communications business. At that time, Western Union offices were monuments to the power of wired communications. Notice how impressive they are now.

When airplanes started carrying a few passengers, the dominant railroads could easily have taken over all air travel but passed on the opportunity. I guess they thought they were in the business of filling railcars, not in the rapid delivery business. At that time, railroad stations were monuments to the power of connecting people with each other and the goods they cherish. Notice how impressive they are now.

Now the music labels are reluctant to deliver digital content. They think they’re in the plastic disc business but they’re really in the music delivery business.

(When music was on records, there was a vibrant industry producing and etching the vinyl to make records – companies that produced and delivered little black beads to the record factory; lawyers and managers and workers and jobbers who made sure the product was good and improving; R&D to produce better material for better hi-fi, and better record cutting machines and recycling of all the vinyl scraped out of the grooves, etc., etc. The CD put all those people out of business in a couple of years and the labels never looked back. George Lucas wants to do the same thing to photographic film. Where’s the uproar?)

Maybe it’s time to stop fearing these whiners and start ridiculing them as the luddite dodos they are. Just because our medium-of-choice has evolved from the written word to music and video doesn’t mean we’re actually dependent on what they produce. They’re dependent on our continuing perceived appetite for their stuff. Maybe we’re just growing out of it, and that’s what they’re afraid of – and having to compete with each other.

So much has changed so drastically since 911 that we’re properly concerned everything will be changed, presumably in favor of powerful political contributors. But the natural enemies of the dozen or so discontented media companies are arousing themselves. Verizon has rejoined the fight they thought was settled by the DMCA, and the tech companies echo Andy Grove’s resentment. Collectively, they’re many times larger than the content pushers, which are pretty small potatoes compared to the traditional tech and industrial companies they propose to manipulate.

No surprise: like many grownups, the people running big non-content companies (often sixty-somethings) don’t have time to inundate themselves in the fruits of the Discontented. They think movies and CDs are peripheral to the “real world”, and maybe they’re right. If most of the content stopped overnight, would Andy Grove or Lou Gerstner or Gates or Jobs give a shit? Probably not.

Announcement: The media companies are more afraid of each other than they are of teen pirates.

Is that why they really don’t want to offer comprehensive libraries for download on demand? The smart people in the business must know there’s no future for entertainment intermediaries unless they can use copyright laws to fix prices online the way they have in meatspace. Even that’s a long shot.

Here’s how it’s likely to play out:

1. Eventually the producers will offer legal digital content on line, just as it became available on VHS and cassette, despite their initial effort to kill the technology. Initially, download fees will reflect the price-fixed levels we’re used to paying. if that’s true, then…
2. As the delivery means are refined, each company will eventually expose its entire inventory and then the competition will start in earnest. if that’s true, then…
3. Without the retail channel and physical production as counterweight, content prices will plummet. There’s no cost for a download, and no barrier to specials, discounts or site memberships at decreasing prices. Like an airline seat near departure time, the risk to a content site in a competitive environment is to see a sale not made as midnight approaches. Unlike an airliner, there’s no shortage of seats on a digital site. if that’s true, then…
4. With real competition, the price of a download will approach the marginal cost of delivering it: $0.00. if that’s true, then…
5. As someone pointed out, that’s the end of the money, the parties, the girls, the drugs and the prestige. It all gets exposed as the bubble it really is. No wonder they’re freaked.

The only force that could prevent that price pressure would be OPEC-style price fixing. And that’s where we the illusion of, cost-related non-fixed pricing breaks down.

More bad news for Jack and Hilary: when we decide it’s time to stream legal digital entertainment, we’re not as brand-aware as the labels and studios would like. We don’t have a clue what label or studio produces what. If Paramount or Columbia has a lousy download site or higher pricing, we’ll be just as happy with something over at Sony or Virgin. And God forbid we re-discover classical or jazz! We’d get in the habit of comparing new content to stuff that’s stood the test time.

As we learn how to rate tracks and films, nothing keeps an artist from self-producing and self-serving. For the first time in history, artists could be as self-serving as their producer!
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