Garrison States

I was listening to this diavlog recently and one of the participants (Daniel Deudney) remarked that the Wilsonian "Make the world safe for democracy" mantra of World War I was not so much referring to bringing democracy to monarchic parts of the world so much as making the world non-threatening enough so that America could maintain it's non-militaristic way of life and avoid becoming a "Garrison State".

I haven't thought about it for a while, but several years ago I thought that was the strongest argument for the Iraq war. Not sufficient on it's own, but a good reason. The threat in WWI was European militarism; now it's "The Gap" but the example still holds. The term "Garrison State" is a useful one to describe a militarized police state.

National brain drains and blog posts - the easy way

One of my grand unformed theories is that the 20th century's genocides and ethnic cleansings have acted as a categorical shift in evolution, both social and biological.

A significant part of that theory is that talent leaves one country for another (AKA - a brain drain, as part of the Ricardian Triangle of Land - Labor - Capital) but I've never formed the thoughts that much. I made a comment on Dan Tdaxp's blog on a related post noting that I was surprised he hadn't written anything about it either.

Imagine my surprise when a day later he writes The Consequences of Brain Drains in Developing Countries. Life is much easier when other people do all the work...

Sony VAIO customer service - an exploration

Jane Galt vents most eloquent on her frustration with the Sony Corporation, specifically Sony Vaio tech support. Short version; it's lame.

In the post she states

So instead, I'll try to change the cost-benefit analysis. With your help, I'd like to make this little incident as expensive for Sony as possible.

Let's remind Sony that sometimes, the dumb bitches have blogs. And friends with blogs.

So if you're reading this, and you have a blog, if you wouldn't mind linking to this post, preferably with the words "Sony VAIO customer service" in the link, I'd appreciate it awfully.

Sure, it's revenge. But revenge has positive social uses. If it gets expensive enough to screw over their customers, they'll stop doing it. To all of us.

We'll see what happens. It creates an interesting exercise in feedback, i.e. an advancement in the first of of the OODA loop.

That would be a good company to start - a service that monitors the blogosphere for mentions of a product and somehow differentiates the positive and negative threads so one could track the source and find hidden problems with the business process.

IQ and birth order

An interesting story on IQ and birth order appeared in the New York Times recently. It makes sense, and jibes with my experience. Money grafs:

The average difference in I.Q. was slight — three points higher in the eldest child than in the closest sibling — but significant, the researchers said. And they said the results made it clear that it was due to family dynamics, not to biological factors like prenatal environment.
...

“Like Darwin’s finches, they are eking out alternative ways of deriving the maximum benefit out of the environment, and not directly competing for the same resources as the eldest,” Dr. Sulloway said. “They are developing diverse interests and expertise that the I.Q. tests do not measure.”

This kind of experimentation might explain evidence that younger siblings often live more adventurous lives than their older brother or sister. They are more likely to participate in dangerous sports than eldest children, and more likely to travel to exotic places, studies find. They tend to be less conventional than firstborns, and some of the most provocative and influential figures in science spent their childhoods in the shadow of an older brother or sister (or two or three or four).

Interesting stuff. The older sibling is the best situated to take advantage of the existing structure, so they take advantage of that, and the younger sibling is shielded from the consequences of risk taking, so they consume more of it.

An interview with Charles Koch

A blogger was kind enough to post his transcription of this interview with Charles Koch of Koch Industries (the biggest company you've never heard of). Of particular liking to me

Studying business in school is way overrated. There seems to be absolutely no evidence suggesting that people with a business degree excel more than those without one. As you go to college, you don't want specifics on how to run a business; you will learn this as you go along in real life. You need to have fundamental tools, such as reading, writing, doing math and science, understanding reality, and having good values that enable you to work with people and create real value.

That has always been my gripe with the MBA's I've met. They're certainly more confident (which is important) but of the three main tasks of a business (moving it, making it, and selling it) they're not any more capable than they they would be without the MBA.

Much thanks to C.S. Hayden for posting the interview.

An interesting article from Zakaria

It meanders a bit, but Fareed Zakaria makes a good case for optimism in this Newsweek article. One bit that caught my eye was

To recover its place in the world, America first needs to recover its confidence. For those who look at the future and see challenges, competition and threats, keep in mind that this new world has been forming over the last 20 years, and the United States has forged ahead amid all the turmoil. In 1980, the U.S. share of global GDP was 20 percent. Today it is 29 percent.

It's a staggering thought. 20% is a huge chunk relative to population, and for that to increase is massive. It's an interesting tidbit.

We should be more confident; America has never been strong because of political leadership, but the average person here has room to excel. 15 million illegal immigrants can't be wrong!

Stigmergy and signalling

Stigmergy is defined as a method of communication in emergent systems in which the individual parts of the system communicate with one another by modifying their local environment. My Digital Tool Factory project has been evolving in that direction lately and it occurred to me that the internet is evolving that way too.

In the political blogsphere one can draw conclusions about an author from the use of the phrases "The fall of the Soviet Union" vs. "The fall of Communism". In the corporate realm the use of feathered graphics is a good indicator of the age of the designer and the focus of the company.


Food for thought.

Wellput from Julian Sanchez

In this post about full brains

Efficient brains need to know what they can afford to forget—probably quite a bit, now that it's so easy to outsource our recollections to rapidly-searched digital media. The interesting question for me is: When almost anything you might need to recall can be offloaded in this way, what's worth keeping in wetware memory? My first instinct is that you need to remember exactly enough to (1) make interesting connections, and (2) actually find the full information from the signpost you've remembered.

Quick link round

• Puzzles and Mysteries from ZenPundit
• The Captain America Syndrome at the Washington Monthly. - They don't actually call it that, but that's what they're talking about.
• This seems dirty, but it's mostly medical. Quite funny though.
  
• Yet more Stirling engines
  

Monday link roundup

• A useful post from CodingHorror.com on interface friction
• Al Gore, like Ann Coulter, seems to be a mac person
• A blog for women! And one of the editors might be someone I went to high school with.
• Kuler! The Adobe web color harmony tool - via this site
• Co-Mapping (mind mapping software) looks cool
• Properly bashing ethanol
• HiddenUnities and PurposeSlog have posts on the Wire and 24. I helpfully added the Shield in the comments. All excellent programs, though 24 is basically a commercial for the cell phone industry, not torture.
  

First thoughts on Brave New War

I just finished reading John Robb's Brave New War and I'm struck by how similar his vision of the future was to David Friedman's Machinery of Freedom.

I'll have my review of the book later. On the whole I liked it a lot.

Characterization of Environmentalism

A random thought: A useful way of distinguishing amongst environmentalism is that people see the world as a museum that can never be changed, and mankind must adapt their behavior to suit it, and not the other way around. A good example would be those who would have us reduce our carbon emissions rather than take positive steps to take carbon out of the air (for instance using the proposed carbon vacuums or the algae-iron flakes method).

I realize it's the views are seldom in stark conflict.

Tuesday Rapid Fire

• Networks, in Forbes
• Tin Can Stirling Engine - really cool, this would go nicely with the passive solar heating system that I blogged about last week.
• Global warming awareness reaches diminishing marginal returns, aptly explained by Instapundit. I'm still waiting for the Shotgun News green issue.
• Gauss vs Pareto, if you understand bell curves, you should read this.
• Robots, Robots, Robots, in Iraq and elsewhere
• An insightful article on internal migrations in the US. By Michael Barone
  

A telling point in the Boyd biography

I'm currently reading Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War and I read a telling passage that stated (approximately) that autodidacts crave approval from conventionally educated academics and professionals. For those who don't know fairly obscure word, it's Google defines the word as

Autodidacticism (also autodidactism) is self-education or self-directed learning. An autodidact is a mostly self-taught person (also known as an automath), or someone who has an enthusiasm for self-education, and usually has a high degree of self-motivation.

(tip, if you type in "Define:Word to be dined" into Google it defines the word for you.

This seems to be a good explanation for a lot of the tensions in the blogsphere. It also seems to be a natural healthy thing. As I put it in a previous post, science advances funeral by funeral. It follows that if left to their own devices, any field of thought or industry will spend it's time polishing the corpse of some grand new idea that is mutually agreeable to all (think of the US auto industry before the Japanese came along.

Funny and strange quotes

From this rather odd article about the future of Israel

As Peter O’Toole said as Lawrence of Arabia in the movie of that title, “Nothing is written.” However, it seems clear how to bet. As so often in history, bet on the horrible outcome.

I think the post is flawed as it assumes that the current Israeli situation will not change by several orders of magnitude in qualitative ways as the decades roll by. Of course, there is no reason for the changes to be good, but current trends seldom hold before Bit Rot settles in. Worth reading

Random theories I haven't thought through yet

Of fact-checked for that matter. Nonetheless, here are two bigthink ideas that have occurred to me recently:

• With the notable exception of Imperial Japan, America hasn't gone to war with any country that likes itself in the past 100 years. While I don't usually go for theories involving Constructivism, all of the countries we've had conflict with, Nazi Germany, North Vietnam and North Korea, et al, are all fighting to some degree for national pride. This is why I'm not particularly worried about Iran, because the Iranians seem to like being Iranian.
• The rise of dominant militaries can be summarized as discipline vs identity. By this I mean that the troops can be effective via skillful execution of a central plan, or simply by being themselves. The Romans were a good example of a disciplined group. They were able to carry out the will of their commanders due to training and tight organization. On the other hand, the Mongols required little central direction and usually just had to be their fearsome selves to successfully win wars. Most of the major conflicts through history can be characterized as a clash between these two tactics.
  

Random snapshot of my brain

Whilst waiting for a program to install I came across this article. Blurb:

A North Pole expedition meant to bring attention to global warming was called off after one of the explorers got frostbite.

I then had the thought that there is no evidence that nature, though beautiful, likes us. Then I thought of the metaphor that everyone views the environment like it's their grandparent's house. "Oh, everything is so old and irreplaceable, let us gaze in rapt awe and try to be worthy of it someday". Mind you, what we do with it is another story.

Then I was reminded of an Ayn Rand line which goes something like "Technology is man's victory over nature". Then I Googled that trying to find the exact quote. That led me, somehow, to this page about one of my favorite thinkers, Albert Jay Nock. His excellent auto-biography Memoirs of a Superfluous Man is still one of my favorites. Then I started thinking of my other favorite social critics and came up with Eric Hoffer, H.L. Mencken, as well as Nock. All three of them have a distinctive, elegant style which I associate with urban living prior to the fifties. All three of them wrote from cities (San Francisco, Baltimore and New York) and two of them published all their work between 1900 and 1950. I'm also drawn to movies set in cities in that era.

I wonder why those circumstances have that appeal to me, then I decided to write it all down to clarify it in my head.

And there you go.

A rogue Core

Subadei has some interesting thoughts on the possibility of a new and hostile Core (shortly defined as a group of connected, interdependent nations) involving Iran, Venezuela. However, I think there is not much to be worried about. Assuming they do create/evolve into a second core, they would have enough incentives/core-like attributes not to do so.

I guess that raises the question, can there be two Cores? Wouldn't the opportunity cost of maintaining the divide between the two Cores? Wouldn't the opportunity cost of maintaining the divide between the two Cores become too costly for the divide to be sustainable?

Update:Edited for clarity

Current Iraq thoughts

To update my many readers of my thoughts on Iraq, here they are.

Short and Medium Term Recommendation:

• Accept the fact that a multi-ethnic democracy with strong group loyalties and a medium to high population density that has no overriding equalizer, (i.e. a market economy, strong religion, nation of uprooted immigrants, cult like leader, animosity towards some other country or religion etc) is a very bloody affair.
• Let the country break apart into a very loose confederation, - There will probably be one to 3 Shia distinct regions in the South, 6-12 distinct Sunni regions and one distinct Kurdish region. Withdraw to the friendly areas, i.e. Kurdistan and probably a couple of Sunni areas and let the various sides fight it out. They're doing this anyway and there is no need for American troops to get caught in the crossfire.
• Accept the fact that there will be massive ethnic cleansing with the above option, much is happening already. Do as much as possible within some give time frame, say 10 months to let the ethnic cleansing be as bloodless as possible and not verge into genocide. This is going to happen anyway, many lives could be saved if we do it on our terms.
• Drop the 60s idealism (called nation-building/neoconservatism, or whatever baby boomer term you want to label it) and admit that what is happening in Iraq IS democracy, it's just bloody and ugly. Diversity only works if no one cares about the differences between people. Primary loyalties are primary.
• I think Robert Kaplan thought of this first, but the proper metaphors for the current Middle East is not WWII, but the Barbary Pirates and the Indian Wars. I.E. it's time to think small, and act small. Also, let the military get back to what it's good at, i.e. killing people and breaking things.
  
• Reward our friends and punish our enemies, but above all, be clear in our foreign policy. We would be well served by coming off of our high horse (bringing democracy, enlightenment, etc) and admitting that we're in pursuit of our own interest, just like everyone else. We've long believed our own hype about our own greatness. While largely true domestically (thank you founding fathers and your division of power) it is much less true internationally due to the way our system is set up. Most of the good things we do are diffused in the form of trade and a myriad of private charities. It's time to say less and to behave much more predictably. Cross cultural communication is hard enough without adding nuance and tone into the equation.
  

Long Term Recommendations

• Get out. The Coase theorem applies to the Middle East just like everywhere else. We're buying our oil now and we'll be buying it in the future. And contrary to popular belief, it will be less important in the future. Plus, it's quite likely the Kurds will be very pro-western and peaceful. Their primary loyalty is not divided and it's not against us.
  
• Be honest in our dealing with Israel - we don't have that many common interests, but we are friends - it's less like the US and the USSR in WWII and more like the US and Japan in the present day (excepting North Korea)
  

Consequences of The Above

• Lots of blood will be shed - but it will be shed anyway. The key is minimizing it
• People will be uprooted and new vendettas will be started that will last for centuries.
• The Sunni and the Shia factions of the Middle East will have a battleground to fight their proxy wars, much like the Nazis and the Soviets had a battleground in the Spanish Civil War. Then again, they have that now.
  
• American troops will be used in raids and attacks in the loose confederation of what we'll still call Iraq.
• Turkey will be quite angry - but that is manageable and can be minimized by the use of carrots and sticks.
  

I'll have my post on what I was right and wrong about (regarding Iraq that is) later.

Thoughts?

Put very succinctly

From the Ethical Spectacle

However, I suspect that the real reason we haven't gone after Bin Laden is because we know he is living in the lawless part of Pakistan near the Afghan border, where the resurgent Taliban are also based. This has rapidly become a new rogue state, not really under any kind of Pakistani military or political control. In addition, Al Qaeda and the Taliban are allegedly sheltered and supported by renegade elements of Pakistani intelligence who originally worked with them on the anti-Soviet effort and haven't given them up in the post-9/11 world.

If this part of Pakistan had been a completely independent state, it would have made a lot of sense to invade it instead of Iraq (I believe we don't have a large enough military to do both). I suspect that the reason we can't do this is that the minute US troops land on Pakistani territory (even such independent and lawless territory) there would be a huge popular uprising in Pakistan, overthrowing our nominal ally the weak dictator-president Musharraf. The result of the incursion would be to drive a huge country with nuclear weapons over to the other side, giving Al Qaeda a large powerful playground instead of a small weak one.

MLK day thoughts

Since it's his birthday, I guess I'll post my impression of MLK. I find it surprising that everyone misses his most singular accomplishment, namely that he he was able to manage a coalition of highly and disparately motivated parties and have them all (more or less) follow a strategy of nonviolence, which is the only strategy that would have worked. As a management endeavor that is staggering.

For more on that, see The Gandhi Game, which explains it all in a game theory sort of way. Put simply, it allows the opposing party to do what you want them to do (usually defined as "doing the right thing", though it doesn't have to be that way) and not suffer any violent consequences. If the Palestinians did that, they would be in a much better position than they are now.

Quick round up to clear off some firefox tabs

• An interesting Interface
• Why Hawks Win - an interesting article
• A good deal on health insurance
• Dashboard Mohamed - I'm not that brave myself....
• ASP.net AJAX Cheatsheets
• The lives of the first web builders, in wacky Canadian form.
  

Another article that is well worth reading

From John Robb who predicts a coming privatization of security and the basic functions of the modern state

Security will become a function of where you live and whom you work for, much as health care is allocated already. Wealthy individuals and multinational corporations will be the first to bail out of our collective system, opting instead to hire private military companies, such as Blackwater and Triple Canopy, to protect their homes and facilities and establish a protective perimeter around daily life.

Read the whole thing.

Deepthink of the moment

From the ever interesting Jane Galt about child rearing and careers

I'm not sure. If childrearing is a) necessary and b) as tedious as everyone assures me, then it strikes me that whatever feminine thrill women get out of doing it probably increases the happiness associated with the activity. And, based only on my own previous relationship experience, I'd imagine that socialization which reduces the number of areas that have to be negotiated probably, on net, makes marriages happier.

That would go a long way to explaining why opposites attract, if in fact they do.

RIP Milton Friedman

Instapundit has a good collection of links on his life and legacy. He was the first to think of many, many things in economics that seem blindingly obvious now but were heretical at the time. One of the larger intellectual giants of the past 100 years, on a purely technical level, outside of the politics (which I agree with).

Semantics

I've always rejected the notion of Iraq being in a civil war due to the notion that a civil war requires two clearly defined sides and usually territories, be it Davis and Lincoln or Lenin and Kerensky.

While the two defining concepts in Iraq, Sunni and Shia, are clear, the fighting seems to be split up into 14-20 (from what I've read) different parties. Also, the fighting does not seem to be for control over the country, but rather ethnic cleansing of the classic variety, that is removing one group from a particular chunk of land.

What do you call that? It's not quite anarchy, malignant diversity? Failure of integration? What?

Saturday rapid fire

• Make a timeline of your life - it could be cool, but too revealing
• Time Maps
• Top 10 Signs You're Made to be an Entrepreneur 6.

  You spend more time and energy looking for easier, faster, cheaper, more effective ways of accomplishing something than if you just did the task outright.

• Prosopagnosia - The inability to recognize faces. Or the way of the Steve.
• A good wrap up of the Goldstein - Frisch battle by Wendy McElroy. I still find it odd that Fox News employs a Canadian anarchist as a columnist, but she does seem popular there.
• The Agitator's Fox column about Swat Teams and no-knock warrants. It would seem that the best way to fix the problem is to assign liability to Judges who sign errant warrants, though I don't think anyone has suggested that yet.
• A very good post on why the current world situation is NOT World War III.
  

An interesting alternate take on history

Coming Anarchy has an interesting satire on what might have happened had the American civil war been decided less decisively. RTWT.

What dreams may come

Yesterday I did a tough 80 miles on the Silver Comet. It was a hotter than usual, and for some reason I decided to push myself speed wise. I averaged a mile an hour over my usual speed for that distance, and my heart rate was about 10-15 bpm over the usual rate as well. I mistimed the start of the ride and wound up riding for an hour in a darkness usually found in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Riding safely in this sort of dark mandated an unusually upright and uncomfortable posture for the final hour (I had to keep my vision focused on the area covered by my headlight, which was small).

I'm also on a low-carb kick at the moment.

After I got home I finished Eric Hoffer's autobiography, Truth Imagined. I'm sure I'll have more thoughts on the book later. The book describes his time as a migrant farm worker in California in the 20s and 30s. One interesting thing he writes about is the sheer variety of people he encountered while on the bum. People of learning and accomplishment, forced by the depression into a migrant way of life. It struck me that this is a as a little remarked price of prosperity, as well as the relative meritocracy that is part and parcel of a free society. To wit; in good times one is more likely to meet people just like oneself than in times of physical and economic catastrophe, for good or ill.

That night I had a dream where I attended a cocktail party, wearing a tuxedo. I was talking to an interesting and confident woman my age named Trea. I had told her the observation mentioned above and she opined that I had the cause and effect backward. Economic catastrophe's are caused by the mixing of people (grouped by ability, not race) which interferes with the division and specialization of labor.

What does this labor produce? Society and culture. The conventional view (of mine anyway) is that society and culture are like an investment portfolio; it's outside one's immediate grasp, it changes over time, and grows incrementally. Trea's view was that society is produced and consumed, and does not change incrementally at all. It's like the contents of one's pantry; food goes in, it goes out, but it doesn't last forever, and neither grows nor evolves.

In economic parlance, society/culture are stocks, not flows, which is the way I usually think of them.

I've usually don't have these sort of dreams, nor do I have new (to me) ideas in dreams. I'm not sure what to make of it all.

And if you've read this far, I'm impressed.

Soon you shall all see....

This week I'm going to post short summaries of all my book ideas and hold a vote for which one I should actually start, should anyone care. I have about five fleshed out ideas I've accumulated over the past ten years or so.

Things I don't believe in

A list of things I don't believe in, for no reason other than I find their proponents objectionable, or sensationalistic.

• Intelligent Design theory
• Global Warming
• Public education reform
• Keyboards in rock music
  
• Authenticity as a meaningful part of music
• McCarthyism being a defining moment of American History
• Native American culture being inherently earth friendly
• Anything to do with "carbs"
  
• Apple's vaunted OS stability
• Apple's better "interface"
• Any positive influence of Janis Joplin
• The oft-touted claim by libertarians that 20% of Americans are libertarian also
• "Natural" foods
• Homeopathy
• Divorce being a public/social problem
• Stem cell research being a big deal, for good or ill
• Biomass fuels
• Peak oil
• Addictive personalities
• Chiropractors
  

Abortion and immigration

A long one.

I predict that soon someone will make some correlation between legal abortion and increased illegal immigration, similar to Steven Levitt's abortion-crime idea as told in his book Freakonomics.

For those of you who haven't read the book it spends a lot of time explaining his theory that abortions are disproportionately had by women who would otherwise bear criminal children (to put it bluntly). Those children are never born, which reduces the number of criminals, which reduces crime rates. He has a large amount of documentation and math to support this idea. Bear in mind that the 80-20 rule applies here, something like 20% of the women who get abortions have 80% of all abortions.

A similar idea (unique to me so far) is that were there no abortion, there would be many more children who would grow up to be low-skilled, low wage workers. That creates an artificial void on the bottom of the income ladder, which the Mexicans and other illegals fill.

---

I've been thinking about this quite a bit lately, and it's all part of my emerging theory on open-source eugenics and artificial evolution, which I'll explain more when I flesh it out.

---

On a related note, the pro-choice argument and the usual nativist argument are essentially the same. There is ownership in a country, as there is in one's body. It is up to the owner; the citizens of the country collectively or the individual woman to determine who can be there (to put it crassly). Every child is a wanted child, and every immigrant, is a legal immigrant.

Or that's what I think right now anyway. Thoughts anyone?

Quotes of the moment

The Duke of Wellington

For a great power there are no small wars

Orson Welles

In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed - they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love and five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.

On England between the wars

The fault was not decadence but the desire for holiness, the belief in sacrifice, and a willingness to serve as the butchered victim acceptable to God.

From the guide to Christianity for the secular

Christians are not easy to understand. To begin with, there are roughly 2,000 years of history to grasp, and certainly more denominations and subdivisions than that to take on board. For people who were raised secular, I imagine it's like trying to understand an opera after coming in halfway before the end: the stage is crowded with people, two of them seem to be dead, a woman is wearing a hat with horns, and everyone is making a terrible racket.

Interesting from the Belmont Club

Whilst perusing Wretchard's thoughts on the current state of Iraq

Philip Bobbitt argued in his book, the Shield of Achilles, that Napoleon's strategic revolution consisted in fielding armies so large that any sovereign who opposed him would, in matching the size of his force, be compelled to wager the entire State, and not simply a wedge of territory in confronting him. Napoleon's campaigns were designed to kill enemy armies -- and thereby enemy states. What Napoleon failed to realize in his 1812 campaign against Russia was that the Tsarist state was so primitive that the destruction of its army simply did not mean the corresponding demise of its state. Like the proverbial dinosaur of pulp fiction, Russia had no central nervous system to destroy and lumbered on, like the bullet-riddled monster of horror stories, impervious to the Grand Armee. What Russia had on its side was chaos as epitomized by its savage winters.

Saddamite Iraq, like most terrorist-supporting states threatening the world today, are like the landscape of 1812 in that they were cauldrons of anarchy given a semblance of shape by fragile, yet brutal shroud-like states.

Most of what I've read actually suggests that Napoleon's brilliance was in organization of his armies, not his actual command or tactics. In Russia, he was captured by not seeing a qualitative difference between Russia and the rest of Europe. Unlike the Nazi Germany, (who did see Russia accurately, but bungled the strategy) the problem was that he did not conceive of Russia properly.

Needed - software that helps in conception via clever use of 3D motion graphics.

An interesting article on demographics

The Return of Patriarchy

While I disagree with him about the value of absolute number in military conflict (that has become increasingly less meaningful over time, particularly in the past 100 years) It's a very interesting read, and falls into my own general meme that self-selection is the dominant force in our society.

Random thoughts, quotes and links

Quote:
If you want to get even with someone, make sure it's someone who's done something nice for you.

Thought One:
The more I read about the NSA eavesdropping thing, the more it seems like a colossal data mining operation. Question: Is it actually wiretapping if no one listens (or reads) and communication? Does the fact that someone notes that a call or email takes place constitute an surveillance?

Thought Two:
Am I the only one who thought that the govenrment was doing this already?

Links:

• Clinton claimed roughly the same authority to wiretap.
• Bruce Shneier has a lot of history about eavesdropping.
• Wired's page on domestic data mining projects.
• More PlameGate
• Always Be Cobbling (everyone check this one out, it's the opening scene from Glengary Glen Ross, but with elves.
  

Deep thought

If you had to think of a name for a band or rugby team, you could do a lot worse than the Green Apple Splatters.

Ideas to elaborate on later

Here are ideas and historical (no emotional connection to me) events that have fundamentally affected my outlook.

In no particular order

• Pareto Optimality
• Coase Theorem
• Hayek and Sowell on the limits and costs of knowledge
• Gresham's law
• Napoleon's invasion of Russia
• Dominant Strategies
  
• Schelling Points (as elaborated on by David Friedman)
• The seatbelts kill theory of Steven Landsburg (though the theory might actually originate with George Stigler)
  
• The diaries of Eric Hoffer (and his books, they're fairly similar) as they deal with mass movements
  
• Network effects
• Robert Nozick's notion of morality as a time saving device (morality is used very broadly) as explained in the Examined Life
• The defensive boxing style of Pernell Whitaker
  

I'll have more detail on what they are and how they are all used later.

The Three Types of marriage

All this occurred to me in the car one day.....

Based purely on observation and insight I arrive at this conclusion

• Cult marriage - This does not mean that the people involved are in a cult, or were married in a cult, but rather that they act a private cult of two. Often called "Joined At The Brain" these two differ only in gender and maybe appearance. Holding identical views on things, these people are rarely apart and share without thinking. Over time they also adopt similar body language.
  


• Team marriage - In contrast to the cult marriage, these two contrast well with each other. Their skills do not overlap and they work very well together, though with each playing a different part. Life is measured in tasks completed and there must always be some project in the works.


• Role Based marriage - The most common type, this is the storybook marriage, with each partner self-consciously acting the part of the husband or wife. The term "being a good husband" or "being a good wife" can only be meaningfully applied to this type.

Or something like that.