Fermi: What Paradox?

The Fermi paradox has been getting a lot of attention over the last year, with increasing amounts of doomsday to actually finding life. The Paradox is that if we are statistically average and we're not that old, than we should have found life by now, but we haven't. The supposed answer is that there are great filters that come along and crush potential civilizations, which is why we don't see them, with the other alternative being that we're just special. Finding life means we're not special, so hold on for that filter coming to wipe us out, or maybe we passed it?

So lets start by looking at the assumptions the paradox makes. They are: We've got 13 Billion years of history, and our system is only 4 Billion years old, so everyone else has a head start. There are not only lots of planets, there are lots of habitable planets. We'd see the signs of civilizations that are more advanced than us. 

So let's tackle the head start one. At the start of the universe there was just hydrogen. Heavier elements are made in the center of stars, and get included in planets when those stars explode and their remnants eventually make it into new systems. As a result the chemistry of the universe is constantly changing. Solar Systems formed significantly before ours won't have the same proportion of elements. Yes in the planets we can see, we see complicated elements, but a lot of the time we're just seeing things on the lower part of the periodic table. Being sure that there is a head start for planets like ours is a stretch. So at worst we passed a filter, but I think it's more accurate to say that we don't know when life should have started to start, yet. 

What about all the habitable planets? Well as noted above a lot of them may not have our complicated chemistry, and might be ok to colonize if we can bring the trace elements we need, but may not be complicated enough to give rise to life. Beyond that, let's look at our solar system. Mars is in the habitable range, but if it's home to anything now it's only extremophiles. What went wrong for Mars?

It's magnetic field went belly up. That cost it most of it's atmosphere as well as protection from radiation. It's speculated that our magnetic field is the result of the motion of our planets ferrous liquid core. We think that martian vulcanism is dead. So maybe is the mojo in the core that once generated the field. So some would be habitable planets just haver a limited lifetime, after which only extremophiles can hang on. Then there's Venus. Venus has a very slow rotation and no magnetic field. Why is the rotation so slow did it ever have a magnetic field? Venus also has another problem. A runaway greenhouse effect. What did this, the lack of a magnetic field, the long days leading to less localized thermal regulation to begin with. There's so much wrong with Venus, that we don't know where to begin. But of our 3 planet sample, one has life, one could have had life but not anymore, and one had at best a much shorter period of habitability. Again planets like these might be useful to us in the long run but don't serve as sources for the civilizations that we think that we should see. And that's not counting other benefits we have like our moon to give us tides and wind, or the moon and Jupiter to reduce the number of strikes our planet takes. We don't know what portion of planets out there have all these favorable factors but it's far fewer than 100% It would be weird if the majority of potentially habitable planets in our solar system weren't habitable but nearly all others were. So compared to others in our own system we passed the filters. But finding life on Mars doesn't tell us more than we already know, that Mars isn't habitable. But in the big picture it's just that we need to refine our estimates of habitable worlds. To produce civilization they probably need magnetic fields, and maybe a few other things. 

Finally there is the notion that we'd see signs of civilizations more advanced than us. Our use of radio waves has been a blip. Who knows what our future holds, but if we abandon broad spectrum radio waves within a hundred years than that it's just a blip and the notion that we'd be where we are and be at the perfect distance to catch another civilizations radio blip is highly unlikely. And it's really arrogant to project on what we'll be capable of in the future, and thus what another civilization would be capable of. This is the most baseless of the assumptions. We have reason to believe the universe is much older than us, we have reason to believe that there are lots of planets, but until we spot one we have no reason to believe that a remote civilization would be detectable by us for all but a brief window. Finding the ruins of one of these civilizations wouldn't necessarily be ominous. We keep finding remnants of pockets of our own civilization that have been lost and forgotten. If we never quite terraform Mars or the moon, it would be logical for us to abandon them if we end up with easier access to terraformed worlds. So this isn't a sign of a greater doom for us. 

So where does this leave us? With shrinking the time and the candidates for habitable planets, I think we've taken the advanced civilizations should be out there to advanced civilizations may be out there. And by being honest with notion that we would see them, I think we've taken the sails out of it completely. And without there Paradox where is the doomsday of finding alien life? It's potentially largely gone too. If we find extremophile primitive life, it's a good sign that even on inhabitable worlds we may find important compounds for a colony (also potentially dangerous ones). If we find life on a scale relatable to the progress of life on earth, we can tweak our sense of where we are on the timeframe of life. And if we find a thriving inter-sellar society than hooray no filter. And if we find ruins, until we find that they really are all gone it doesn't necessarily mean anything in particular because it could pretty much mean anything. Plus if we do find that they were done in by a filter, we can learn from that (what humans are good at) and maybe avoid it.

In conclusion I would say the Fermi paradox can be ignored, for being perhaps too baseless. The doomsday of finding life in light of the Fermi paradox, more so. Don't be afraid. The universe is beautiful, and it's mysteries, no matter what they are, are worth exploring. 

Statistical wellness: the current face of eugenics

Eugenics are back! And in some cases being enforced by governments!

Ok, so that bears some explanation. But I’m going to have to start with some basics.

The first thing to understand is that we don’t know how our bodies work. We see what they do and have some really good ideas about what’s going on, but we’re not really sure. This is why drugs still have to go through trials cause it’s all guessing. Where we differ from the age of leeches, is statistics. We started using data across populations to figure out what worked and what didn’t and we started to correlate different metrics for quantifying a person. Doing this made a leaps and bounds improvement to medicine.The problem is that the low hanging fruit of obvious and useful correlations have all been  identified. Now all the correlations are part of more complicated systems so they are much harder to figure out. The other thing to understand is that most of the work has been targeted and dealing with illness. All the metrics we use are targeted for use when the patient has a problem, as part of a process to guess what the problem is. It’s not a process that thinks it’s definitely going to get it right on the first try, so it isn’t optimized for that. It’s optimized for the statistically best outcome.

The second thing to understand is that we’re not all the same. A person whose growth has been stunted might be taller than a different person in perfect health. We vary. There are members of our population that stand out. Sometimes when we identify these people we learn something. Most of the time we just don’t understand. Averageness and healthiness are disconnected.

With our wellness programs we’ve decided to use our diagnostic tools to evaluate people. Which with my setup leads to, What happens when someone that’s not average goes in for one of these checkups?   They get identified as potentially having a problem and start to get treated for it. In all likelihood they’ll either continue to be treated to cure their healthiness for the rest of their lives, though instead of being treated for one non-problem, they may have a doctor that wants to aggressive track down the non-problem, and keeps changing up their mistreatment. What happens when you keep trying to fix something that isn’t broken? It’s going to break! Wellness programs are by design going to harm the atypical. Then why do we do it? Because it’s statistically “better”. Where better is a metric that includes lifetime cost of care. “Better” might also consider some other factors like life expectancy, but a treatment that kills half the people that take it instantly but slightly more than doubles the life expectancy of the rest is also “better”. Not to mention that some atypical people who would benefit from being checked, won’t because they’re unhealthily (for them) average. The is a system that helps the “average” at the cost of the atypical.

Which leaves us with, the question, if we keep coming back to eugenics, is it really wrong? Objectively, Yes! Favoring an ideal leads to a monoculture. Monocultures are susceptible to extinction level pandemics. We’re in the middle of the 2nd one for commercial bananas. Also for sexually reproducing populations you have the genetic bottle neck which leds to all the genetic problems from inbreeding. Beyond that, you have to remember that we don’t really understand how our bodies work. What ever statistical ideal we pursue, could be tragically flawed. We’re more likely to make a bad choice than a good one. Also having atypical people let’s us learn from their advantages.

Unfortunately, in our world, wellness programs are likely here to stay. But there is a light of hope on the horizon. Big data medicine. With access to comprehensive records of your vital stats, doctors will know how you are doing against your own baseline. And with much much larger populations of People for which there is data, docotors will be able to come up with multiple models and find one that actually fits you instead of basing your prognosis on a bogus one size fits all model.

Metric system silliness.

I'm not sure even where to begin with the metric system. It was a great idea in principle, but doesn't actually work out in the real world. And the acrobatics that its advocates so through to keep it alive just make things worse, and are rather silly.

So the idea behind the metric system was to have one system that unified measures of distance, volume, mass, temperature, and more based on the natural constants of water. So that any unit can be derived from others based on water. And further to have ranges based on multiples of 10, with set prefixes so that addressing things at different scales need not see inflation of digits. This definition didn't last but you'll still see memes lauding the metric system's superiority because of these relations. 

The water based definitions for the metric system didn't last because they were too naive. The idea was that one or two measures plus water would let you derive any third measure, but it turns out that in the real world, it's not that simple and you really need pretty much all the other measures to derive a missing measure. Not to mention that water is seldom as pure as we'd like.  So the water definitions were dropped. From official adoption in 1795 this idea didn't make it 4 years before being replaced.

But before the metric system was even out of the gates it already started to be crippled. Maybe it's always struck you as odd that the default mass unit has the kilo prefix. It is odd. The original mass unit was the grav. Unfortunately grav sounds like graff, and graff was a title of minor nobility at the time, when nobility was not in favor. However the milligrav has already taken on a more colloquial name of gram. So they went with that instead, skewing the alignment of the base units and their prefixes. 

The system that replaced the water system was prototypes. That is to say they made specific objects and set them aside somewhere to be the definition. Of course they didn't make just one of these, they made many as identical as possible, though a specific one was named to be the actual factual definition. Obviously switching to this system removes the smug superiority from the metric system. It also means that the system is based on items that can get lost or destroyed, which isn't great. It also, as it turns out, was still too naive. These prototypes were replaced at least once, to improve the material science, but that's still too naive, because our technology just wasn't in place. As the duplicates of the prototype when returned and compared to the prototype, were no longer the same. Which really undercuts any faith in the system.

As a next step for the metric system they want to turn them back into natural constants. This has already happened for the meter. They have chosen to define in terms of the speed of light in a vacuum. The consequence of this that I think is the silliest, is that this means you can't measure the speed of light in a vacuum with the metric system. What ever result you get the answer is by definition, not by measurement. This seems like a silly thing to do with such an important constant. Additionally there are just the basic questions about this constant and our knowledge of it. Have we ever has access to a perfect vacuum? Have we had sufficiently fixed endpoints in any sort of vacuum to get a good measure of this? Don't we measure everything else with light, so how can we calculate margins of errors for calculating the speed of light, when those margins depend on the speed of light? And I'm not enough of a physics guy to get deeply into relativity, which fixes it, and makes it so that it the wavelength of light from moving things that change and not the speed, but also has time and space deform. Which when you go from pure mathematics of theoretical physics to the real world still has perhaps some degree of hand waving going on.

For the Kilogram, one idea at least, is to make a prototype in the shape of a sphere out of an atomic molecule, measure it's diameter, calculate the number of atoms in it, and then base the definition of the kilogram based on that. So here material purity rears it's head, and in this case not even ions are allowed. Next you have that they will calculate the number of atoms in a sphere. based on it's diameter, cause nothing says imprecision like including an irrational number. But then you have a similar problem to light, determining the mass of electrons, protons, and neutrons. The mass unit will be defined in terms of the combination of all three of them. So really you can only measure their proportionality. And once you have their proportionality, you can never measure the mass of anything again. All you can do is count it. The only free variables when considering the mass of something will be what it is and how much of it is there. If you have those answers then the mass is by definition, and the proportionality of those 3 particles. Even the mass of other subatomic particles might be in fixed if quarks have fixed masses. This seems monumentally foolish and roundabout to me. 

There is probably more silliness in the history of the metric system. However the question that's been avoided is why is the imperial (or any other) measurement system better? Simply stated because they don't try so hard to be perfect, and certainly no one one goes on about why the imperial system is better based on it's vast and constant technical superiority. The smug adherents to the imperial system normally put forth it's cultural superiority, which is an argument that defeats itself. 

I think really the thing that irritates many (including myself) is that it speaks to the hubris of people ready to declare themselves in nearly full understanding of the universe. Time and time again such people have been found to have been lacking. And even worse sometimes their well intentioned ideas survive and are used as ammunition against improved understanding, despite having been originally put forth to promote understanding. The math used by theorists is precise and perfect, the real world is not, and only fits approximately within precise models. As we learn those approximations improve. They may never be perfect, but that's good since it pushes us to look deeper. The ethos of the metric system is opposed to that, and I guess that it why it irritates me so much and find humor in the foibles of the supposedly perfect system. 

Why Pluto is still a Planet.

In the early 2000's as we started discovering additional large objects in the outer solar system, astronomical displays started to clump these objects in with Pluto. The rate at which we were discovering them made it seem likely that there would be many. And who wants to memorize 30 different planets? Which if you're lazy and don't want to be embarrassed when little kids know all the planet names but you, who are the actual astronomy professional, don't, means that Pluto has to go. That's it. Don't be fooled everything else is just a smoke screen. Pluto had to go so that a bunch of people who were full of themselves wouldn't have to keep memorizing new lists of planets that might subtly change order. Think about how often these same people, who should know very well that Pluto has a trans neptunian orbit, refer to Pluto as being beyond Neptune.

There is a case for Pluto's demotion. We didn't know how big it was when we discovered it. We thought it was bigger. We didn't know it was in a belt of objects, some of which were big. After it was discovered Ceres was briefly considered a planet, until we realized that it was part of a belt. And while it remains the largest and the only one large enough to pull itself into a sphere, it remained demoted to the rank of asteroid, until this whole kerfuffle, so again there was a reason to be considering these things.

But at the same time as we were finding new things in our solar system we were finding "Planets" in other solar systems, and even looking for ones that weren't captured by a star, that are called rogue planets. This is the back drop of the state of the art science at the time. We were looking for bodies outside of our solar system that didn't orbit stars that we were calling rogue planets. Remember that cause I'm going to come back to it. Also it's very possible that in other start systems we will find bodies in all sorts of exciting and strange orbital configurations.

So with a reason to consider the designation of things in our solar system, and the desire to limit how often school children embarrass them, the IAU set out. The definition that they cam up with is "(1) A planet is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit".

Of the planet definition criteria b is a reasonable criteria. It is a clear dividing line that objects throughout the universe will be on one side of or another, and as such will be useful with all the extra-solar astronomy that is going on as well as with what's going on in the Solar system. This criteria is very broad though and in addition to what had been considered planets before it also captures stars and many (but not all) of the moons in the solar system. 

Criteria a defines planets as being only in orbit around the Sun, and as a consequence there are only planets in our solar system. No extra solar planets, no rogue planets. Planets are just something we have. This is rubbish of course. Further it is complicated by just what that means. In orbital dynamics there is something called the Hill sphere, which is used when looking at two bodies to see if objects nearer the smaller one are orbiting it or the larger one. Right now the moon is orbiting the Earth, and the Earth the Sun. As little as ~1.27 million years ago when the moon was closer, the earth orbited the moon not the sun. Without wanting to do the math I would guess that for Pluto and Charon it is the case that they orbit each other and it's only their system that is in orbit around the sun. So this is the sort of things we should expect to see out there, so if we apply this definition to other systems and other suns it still will eventually break. This criteria wasn't forward thinking towards improving a definition for science. It's stated really naively so you have to guess that they are talking about Hill sphere's for the criteria, otherwise everything in the system orbits the sun. Also this criteria is part of the dwarf planet definition, so if Pluto and Charon are in orbit around each other then they are not even Dwarf Planets, or the framers we being even more naive and less scientific than that. 

After what I did to criteria a, I'm sure that you are expecting that I think criteria c is a pure mess. It is. It's so bad and so naive that people keep coming out with "interpretations" of it, to fix the problems. So let's begin with the big one. Pluto and Neptune. Pluto crosses Neptune's orbit. How can you have cleared your orbit when there is something that big that crosses it? Then you have things like Earth and Cruithne, an asteroid in a 1:1 orbital resonance with the earth that crosses our orbit but isn't technically in orbit around us. And add on to that trojans. The original trojans were in Jupiter's orbit, but it's such a thing that we've generalized the term for all the planets, and they are objects in the same orbit, at the same orbital period, that are in the right spot to roughly never get cleared out of an orbit by a planet. That's right we know, and knew when the definition was made, that no planet could completely clear it's orbit. This definition is a lie. It's a lie that was put in place to kill Pluto and keep the rest of them out. And beyond the problems in our solar system there are lots of possible interesting orbital dynamics that we might find out there, that won't fly with this either. Sure a lot of them won't be super stable, but what's the threshold of stability? Nothing in our solar system is actually stable, so it can't be forever, and then after that you let in a lot of interesting things that we are going to find out there.

So the current definition is unscientific and garbage. As such I refuse to accept it. And revert to the previous state in which Pluto was a planet. If some one tries to argue for the demotion of Pluto, there is a simple question you can use to break them, "What is the difference between a rogue planet and a rogue dwarf planet?". You don't have to give them anything harder to think about than that question which the framers of the new definition, left unanswerable, which counter to the mandate for even considering the definition. In response to searching for and finding lots of new things they revised the definition to not be applicable or otherwise be nonsense to the new? No. Just No. If a future definition gets put forth that's good and demotes Pluto, I'll accept it. But I refuse to accept that trash just like I refuse to accept other garbage that wants to claim to be science.

What is required for a good definition? It has to consider all the types of things we're looking for, so it should consider objects in other sun systems as well as those in between them. It should be based on the intrinsic properties of a body not extrinsic ones. We're not going to have perfect knowledge of everything in a solar system when we first see a body, so it's designation shouldn't rely on other bodies that aren't clearly playing a major role in what's happening with that body. Also the definition should be very specific. It should start as a hard computable thing that is technically precise that can be summarized for humans, rather then something naively high level that might melt down when you actually get into the details. 

I don't know if a body will ever put out a good definition that takes off. But I have some predictions. I predict that we'll define some new term like planetoid to account for objects between solar systems. Of objects that pull them selves into spheres, I think the divisions are more like to keep Pluto with Earth, than Earth with Jupiter. I think that after we define terms like planetoid (potentially with sub groupings) we will then define planet and moon based on orbital relations so that the Earth and the Moon can be the same type of object but will also have terms to describe them in terms of a start system. (I think moon and satellite will be split in this situation). And I think that in systems of mutuality like Pluto and Charon, the two are likely to hold the same status. 

Leap seconds clever but stupid.

For a variety of reasons the Earth isn't always perfect about making it around it's access in the expected amount of time. The implemented answer to this is Leap seconds. Periodically we add a second to our time keeping systems. Since 1970 we've added 26, and we're slated to add the next at the end of the year. I think that this system is stupid for a variety of reasons. (also let's just state off the bat that all numbers in this post will be approximate)

The first thing is the question of why adjust. Why do we need astronomical noon to be perfect noon in part of London? Not all of London mind you, just part of it. At a latitude of 51 degrees 30 minutes, a second's worth of the earth's rotation is only .179 miles. London is over 600 square miles, which is equivalent to circle with diameter 27.6 miles. which at that latitude would take 154 seconds to rotate through. At the current rate of leap seconds it would take over 200 years for the perfect moment of noon to make it all the way from one side of London to another! And it's not even perfect noon since the sun is always slightly to the south. And with s system that takes so long to pay off London might be growing faster than the need for leap seconds to keep noon in London. Will it matter when we've got colonies all over the solar system where in the sky the sun is at noon in London?

Another big problem with this is the effort it takes to actually implement this for all our time keeping systems. Human's don't notice that big a change but computers sure do. So in all our computer systems we keep having to code in and fix weird edge cases like adding a second. Adding this leap second is hard and it's buggy. A stupid amount of human effort goes into pulling this trick off. And probably more effort goes into fixing the things that break when it fails. And this time Google's solution is real time to not implement the extra second but to slowly stretch the seconds on other side.  Hopefully nothing high precision will be using googles clocks that day. Plus there is the question about what they do going forward. Normally things keep track of all the time unit seconds since the beginning of 1970, and have a table to look up when there have been extra seconds, but if google computers don't ever live that extra second then how are they eventually going to take care of it. Are the all the computers just eventually going to register an error of a second and skip ahead? The effort that is involved just doesn't seem worth it.

This also has the gross effect of eliminating all other units of time. If the span between 11:59:30 and 12:00:30 is a minute, then how long is a minute? It depends on which one. If it's one of the ones that has had a second added then it's 61 seconds. And so on for larger units. This already impacted years with leap years, and moths weren't regular anyway, but now everything above a second is not just a calendar indicator instead of an actual unit. And because of weird implementations like google's, a second isn't even really that any more.

One potential solution for this is to do it in time zones. Right now to tell you your local time. your computer has to look up the time zone and modify the time based on that and then look up the leap second chart and modify the time based on that. Why modify the time twice? Why not just make leap seconds or any other minor adjustments for local pride part of the time zone? That way locale's that want noon to be special can finally have it that way, and then they can keep it that way for as long as they desire.

But what we're really going to eventually drive at is global / universal time. The inefficiency of having so much space/stuff dedicated to one person is eventually going to falter and we'll end of with round the clock people trading off space/stuff throughout the day. Not to mention globalization which increasingly creates communities in many time zones that all are on one schedule. All the effort that has gone into local time, and keeps going into maintaining local time is eventually going to be set aside. And then we'll look at the legacy of the leap second look up table and ditch it. Hopefully by then it won't be so late that making that change in and of itself won't be a major headache of an undertaking.

Flying Cars.

Back to the future day was over a year ago, so where are our flying cars?

One of the biggest things holding back flying cars is the human element. We're not that great. And air traffic control for humans would suck. Transition to a future without human drivers. Then that problem goes away and we can have flying cars. We're already doing extensive work in automated drone piloting. Is it really that hard to imagine flying cars as a next step?

Self-driving cars, have a lot of perks in terms of infrastructure. They reduce traffic, so road expansion to mitigate traffic is reduced. They can park on their own, so there doesn't have to be parking everywhere, since your car can drop you off then go find parking. Flying cars increase those perks. At the point where we have flying cars roads are only need for long haul transportation, and so we can spend a lot less money on them. And if you reasonably assume vtol, parking lots can be extra dense. 

And if we want to cast our gaze further forward. Once we have ubiquitous flying cars why would ground level even still be an important thing. we can all have aerial egress. no more going to a central shaft to go up and down. At that point cities might end up looking more and more like the worlds of the Jetsons, or the 5th element. 

Perhaps we'll even moving to ocean based habitats, either floating or in platforms high above the sea, leaving the land to be a nature preserve with only small groups of luddites left. But, of course this magical future has the pitfall that as technology becomes like magic, a crash in society takes us back to square one. In which case our ocean based super-society will be just a legend to the luddite remnants of civilization left on the mainland. But that particular scenario was deliberately picked to sound like the legend of Atlantis.

Getting back to reality: As flying cars kept failing to materialize we kept thinking of them as an increasingly distant prospect. But if fully self driving cars are mainstream by 2020, it's not improbable that we might have flying cars mainstream by 2030. We've gotten so used to predictions of a dull future that an exciting one might just sneak up on us, and that is pretty wonderful to think about.  

Apple's Laptop Event

I've seen a lot of circular and confused comments about Apple's laptop event last week, and I thought I would chime in with some of my own thoughts as well clarifications of some of the things I see confused.

To me the biggest question, is what about desktops. There were reports that the iMac has been delayed, but we've heard nothing about the Mac Pro or Mac mini. So we still need answers and it doesn't seem that likely that we'll be getting them this year. If the desktops were addressed, then with a straight face you could tell all the people claiming to be ultra-pro, but demanding in a laptop that they are being silly. With the MacBook Pros still not stepping up to fill all the desktop roles they really have a hole at the top of their computer lineup.

So from a line-up perspective what happened? Apple got rid of the 11-inch MacBook air, and the old thick 13-inch MacBook pro. They left the entry level 13-inch MacBook pro in place but limited it's customizability. Replaced mid-line 13-inch models with the 13-inch without the touch bar, and the high end 13-inch models with the 13-inch with touch bar. They left the entry 15-inch without discrete GPU in place, and replaced the versions with discrete GPUs with the new 15-inch with touch bar. And it looks like they left the 13-inch MacBook air and MacBook alone. If you weren't familiar with the specs of the old laptop lineup or that they left those old MacBook Pros in the line up. It can look like the prices shot up, instead off it being the case that they just didn't make new entry level machines.

As to whether or not they are falling behind Microsoft, with their announcements. I can imagine that for those that draw all the time the Surface Studio is great. And for a company that has been doing a full court press on the laptop front about touch it's great to see them stay true to that message and finally deliver it on the desktop. I hear that they drawing isn't as good as on an iPad, but they are sticking with their gimmick. I don't know that I've bought into the whole touch thing and I'm not sure everyone has, so I think it's ok that Microsoft is better at their gimmick then Apple. But for Microsoft they are a one platform company, where Apple is not so I think it makes sense for them to find a way to unify their platform when Apple is not.

I haven't played with one of the new macs yet, so I can't speak about the touch bar first hand. In the presentation it seemed way better than the pre-announcement rumors I had heard, which made it sound like it would just have buttons with changeable labels. I think that it's all going to depend on the apps, as to whether or not it takes off. I think it will be a bump in the road for the people that do still use keys in the top row with any frequency, which I do because of my correct editor choice of vi, but I hope it will just be an adjustment, and that what there is to be gained is more than the lose.

For the ports, I think that it's great that they went with Thunderbolt-3 / USB-C. I think that thunderbolt-3 offers more than just straight USB-C, and it's good that it's there, and the ports can all be used for whatever. And I think that the industry has spoken and USB-C and/or Thunderbolt-3 are the way of the future. It's annoying that it's everything all at once, and before we've even finished off the last of the magsafe-1 devices. But I don't think that these ports will become "mac" ports the way firewire or the first two thunderbolt versions were, which is great.

As for the memory limit of 16GB. I am constantly amazed at what can be done by tablets and phones with less than a quarter of that. And one of the reasons to use more memory is to make up for other bottle necks, which have all gotten faster. I do think that there is a place for a mac with more memory, but it probably shouldn't be a laptop anyway.

And doubling back to the complainers. I saw people both complain about the "price change", and that the high end wasn't high enough. Their high end prices didn't really change, so you if you're making both those complaints you probably weren't in the high end before. And if it really is a big limit on you, why are you trying to do all that much on a laptop anyway. It should probably be a minor annoyance unless you're trying to do way too much on a laptop.

I also think it's funny to see so many people talking about how Apple is alienating their core customers. They are the most profitable company ever and their market share in the industry had been growing until they got to the heart of this drought. I imagine that they know exactly who their core customers are, it's probably not who it was 15 years ago. There are also a lot of internal equations that could see someone leaving the mac platform, and I think that those people who have already made that decision will use a new release to re-affirm it to themselves, when nothing could have kept them on the platform anyway.

In general, I think that there is a lot of unnecessary doom and gloom (as long as they do something about the desktops). I think that the size and efficiency improvements will be a big plus to a lot of people. The new task bar provides an interesting opportunity. Finally have a secure enclave in the mac is interesting (and from the point of view of someone that supports them scary). It is disappointing that apple is moving to the model of having the old model as the low-end/entry model at the end of a drought.

Smart Watches

I've had an Apple watch for about a month now, so I thought I'd share my thoughts, on it in particular, and on smart watches in general.

Why did I buy the apple watch? I wasn't buying a new smartphone this year for a change, but saw from Apple's entry into the bluetooth headphone market, that the remote was a thing of the past, and thing to fill that gap would be a watch. So if the new ecosystem was going to be one with a watch, I wanted to buy it in this off year, to make next year cheaper, and to be a position where I could make a better judgment about the proposed ecosystem. I also kind of think that health trackers of some sort are the future, so might as well, jump in.

I probably don't use the apple watch typically. I'm not an alert fiend or a workout hound. I sleep with the watch on and have it on for most of the day. It frequently gets some time off (and charging) right after I get home, and again while I shower in the morning. And with this routine, and with rise to wake off, I don't have problems with the watches battery life.

I think where the watch really shines for me is as a digital watch. It's probably the best I've owned. It's alarms with it's taptic engine are nice and discrete. It's easy to have many of them and to set them up in same-complicated fashions. It's replaced my iPhone for most of my alarms. It's timers are also good. And it's generally more convenient to get to then my phone for the time. I don't think that any watch has lasted on my wrist so long.

It's a fitness tracker, but I don't watch that that much. I'm not trying to use it for that much. My curiosity about such things is fed by it. I think that it's a good supplement to my phone. And it meets my idle curiosity. But a large part of my interest in this function stems from the death of my mother. She died alone and her last hours are a mystery to us. We used some of the tracking in her phone to shape up that period. But a watch that's almost always on me will, I imagine do a better job.

I haven't gotten to use it as a remote yet. I can but it's somewhat silly since I'm not using bluetooth headphones. Even when I do, then model I think is most compelling has an on wire remote. So we'll see if this use pans out. maybe I'll be able to do enough or maybe it'll be slower for all the things the on cable remote can do, but too awkward to do the more complicated stuff.

While my phone is a device I spend a lot of time staring at I think the watch is a device for glancing at. I really like the intimate notifications of it tapping me. and using it for apple pay can go either way depending on the terminal location. For health monitoring and discreet notifications, and maybe as remote for things on less accessible objects. Overall I think that it's a plus. If you're not sure, I'd consider waiting until series 3, comes out and you can potentially get a used series 2, on the cheap.

I think there is a future for wearables. I imagine in the future, I'll wear headphones that work for all of my devices. have a watch for when I'm on the go and need to interact with something, and really only pull out my phone for entertainment/productivity, when I'm stopped somewhere for a while. I once thought that what we should have is a personal area network, that lives in a brick in our bag, and that can manage choosing between cell or wifi, and have lots of endpoints we can interact with. Now that's what we're getting but it's going to be our phone.

Attack of the self driving cars.

I've seen multiple posts so far lamenting the dark side of self driving cars, the lost jobs. And this argument starts to spiral into if car automation actually gets that good, then a lot of the problems that have gotten in the way of a lot of other automation will be solved, what are we to do. And this raises the legitimate question of what happens to the masses when it's cheaper then a living wage to build and have a robot do everything.

Let's start in the short term. Most cars are not driven by professionals, this means that if we can come up with one to many jobs related to these new cars they may be absorbed by the dislocated work force. The first of these jobs is UAC pilots for when cars get into trouble. Secondly these cars will likely have a much lower tolerance of dysfunction then people have with their cars, so the need for mechanics will rise. And really where the magic is with that translation is that this change will be spread equally over the cars that are professionally driven and those that aren't so it won't need to be a 1-1 exchange for jobs.

Now to look at what happens as robots take over everything. 

First thing to do, expand. The needs of how many people or service people a mostly automated society can take care of are bounded by the geographical area that the people are in. So if we decrease density and expand we can grow human jobs that way. Of course this means expanding int new types of areas which will require new types of innovations so the innovation sector will expand.

The second thing to do is change the education system. As economic activities are increasingly reduced to ownership, innovation, and education, we need to move increasingly towards free educations and then towards paying people to become educated ( rewarding higher levels of pursued education with higher compensation). So that as industries die, those that can are motivated to move up the path of education. That way we will always move towards a maximized innovator class and move people to their optimal level of innovation so that people who can learn more don't take away opportunities from people that are maxed out.

The third thing, is to avoid the accumulation of ownership into the hands of individuals. One way to do this is to adjust the rules for inheritance, to favor the distribution of inherited wealth both to as many parties as possible and to those that are not already wealthy. And if anything is left to fall to the state, either hold it in a social trust, or distribute it as possible, depending on your politics.

The fourth thing you do is to manage the population in both directions. If there are too many people you increase the disincentives toward childbirth. If there are too few people, you make it a pro to have kids.

You don't do all of those things overnight so we need to start moving in those directions before we are too messed up. But maybe I'm completely wrong. Those are just my ideas.

So there has been a lot of chatter recently about Chick-fil-A and it was disheartening, because of people that were incapable of rational thought or being open minded. And there were a lot of things in the discussion that I thought were going on. That I want to enumerate without making a narrative about it. Because these are just simple things that people don't or wouldn't get. 

- There are differences between boycotting something personally and discreetly, boycotting something and announcing it, and calling for a boycott on something. The first you do when you just disagree with something. The second when you disagree and think that other may share the opinion and wish to do the same. The third when you think that something is or should be unbearable to all. 

- There is a difference between conducting a business transaction with someone and someone making a profit. In a business transaction you think you both get something. It is not a gift of value it is an exchange of value, ideally both parties leave the transaction with the same value that they entered it with, just in a different form.

- The biblical rules against homosexuality in the bible come from the old testament, but the new covenant, replaces the old and those rules no longer apply. (That's why Christians don't have to keep kosher).

- Many Chick-Fil-A locations are operated by franchisees, who have beliefs and positions distinct from those of the the Chick-Fil-A corporation and are staffed by employees that may have beliefs that differ both the operators and corporation. These people are more directly impacted by boycotts and maybe disproportionately affected by them. 

- Morality is not absolute, and that's never been humanity's position on it. There has always been the allowance for amorality ( like the actions of animals ). Morality has always required knowledge / belief. That is why isolated societies are not condemned ahead of contact and exchange.

- If you believe that causing someone to be tortured is evil, people may be fundamentally influenced by others, there is a God that is strict, and there is hell being condemned to which results in a eternity of torture, then influencing others towards a violation of God's rules is an act that will lead to their condemnation to hell and that is really evil.

- Denying to let a corporation conduct business in a city because of their beliefs or what they say is a violation of their first amendment rights. Banning them because of their supposed behavior with enumerating the behavior or giving legal recourse is a violation of their 5th amendment rights.

- Denying some potential employees a full range of benefits, reduces your ability to recruit those potential employees and is a potential competitive dis-advantage.

- Charging more then a fair value for your services so that you might have extra to syphon away from your business to a cause that you believe in is a potential competitive dis-advantage.

- Closing one day a week, on a day when many people are out and about is a potential competitive dis-advantage.

- A publicly traded company exists in obligation to it's shareholders and can only take positions on the belief that they are financially sound. Since most systems of morality require for deeds to be good that they be done without concern for the deeds financial soundness or in the belief that the act is a sacrifice,  both of which publicly traded companies are not allowed to do, so in many systems of morality they are at best amoral. 

- The Catholic church beliefs that homosexual activity is a sin and that supporting it is the same, and they support gay inequality. If you Participate and contribute to the Catholic Church but you believe and support in gay equality and believe that fighting it is sinful. Then by the standards of the Catholic church you are sinful and by your standards you are sinful, for for contributing to the Church. 

- The world is not fair, and the protections of freedom of speech and freedom of religion ARE used to make the world a place where there is ever less oppression, and people can increasingly co-exist as equals. Despite the fact that many see them as having done their job.  

- If two opposed parties are both close minded then neither will win. One must be open-minded enough to accept the ideas of their opponents, or open-minded enough to understand their opponents in order to effect change in their close-mindedness.

A New kind of Religion.

I want to introduce a new concept. That of the existential religion. Most of the classic religions that we think about Judaism, Catholicism, Islam, etc, have to do with creation. So I'd like to categorize them as creationist Religions. From there what I'd like to introduce is existential religions. That is to say a collections of beliefs that have to do with the current stat of things as they exist right now. As I see the world progressing, I see more and more people acting in accordance with beliefs that don't directly correlate with any clear historical basis.

Some examples of this are, that wind energy is green, that climate change is bad and that extinction is bad. What we know about wind energy is that the law of conservation of energy, says that that energy is coming from somewhere, and we're not sophisticated enough to accurately know what the impact of diverting it is. Why do we think that is good or green. As wind energy as risen on the U.S. west coast, so has the problem of weather systems stalling in the middle of the continental U.S.. Wind energy is not green it's probably our next environmental sin waiting to be identified. (Or not we don't know and we know that we don't know. So why is it great?) What we know about climate change is that for most of the existence of the earth the climate was warmer then it is now. So the climate we have now is just the result of climate change. More over, astro-physicists believe that all of the elements we have on earth other then hydrogen are the result of stars exploding and spreading their material throughout the universe. So if other star systems didn't suffer catastrophic climate change then we could't be hear. But most of the people who claim that climate change is bad don't account for the billions of years of it that led to where we are, they just take the position that change is bad. (There are reasons why climate change can be very bad for us, but any beliefs to that effect should be based on actual reasons, so that an actual intelligent discussion can be had. And from my last example that extinction is bad, well, without extinction there would be no humans. There would not have been environmental niches for our ancestors to fill, and we wouldn't be here. I've heard that something like 99.999% of all the species that have ever been have gone extinct. Extinction isn't the rare exception, it's the norm. There are arguments  for preserving the biological diversity of earth. But far more pragmatic approaches then fighting ALL extinction at all cost, seems to fall short of the pragmatically best approach. By trying to save all the species, even those in direct competition or potentially so for the same ecological niche, we may lose both. So a more pragmatic approach would be to allow for or encourage the trimming of some genetic trees to preserve a much broader collection of trees, rather then endangering whole families of animals to allow a few to survive, and that should be argued on a case by case basis, based on the relative merits of the specific cases.

I mention this new class of religion, because it occurred to me that Eco-catholicism was upon us. That we were already pretty much at the point of declaring people whose views differ from the mainstream to be outcast heretics, and beyond that we are already at the point where carbon indulgences are being sold. Not sure when the eco-martin luther is going to come along and nail a manifesto to some church but it's probably coming too. More over Pepco has found religion around here too, and even volunteered to upgrade whole apartment building including mine.

There are a few things I fundamentally disagree with with the upgrade of my building. The first is the replacement of normal incandescent bulbs with CFLs. When I asked the upgraders about them, they said, don't worry about the CFLs, they contain as much mercury as a can of Tuna fish. Then as they left they handed me a folder which included the half page of instructions (from the EPA) of what to do if a CFL broke. After seeing that I am never eating tuna again. Also I'm going to call in a hazmat team any time I see two can's opened at the same place at the same time. I particularly think that CFL's in a bathroom are dumb. These are light that take a minute or two to warm up, but are used for a minute or two at a time. All that does is encourage me to leave them on all the time, which will use more energy then an incandescent bulb. probably more over the course of my apartment then is saved by the whole cfl upgrade. Additionally they put a reate limiter on my kitchen sink. one of the main uses of my kitchen sink is to fill things. What good is it to make that take longer? It's just more likely that a related fridge open will be left longer or that it takes so long that it will be abandoned and overflowed. So again that is backwards. The last is low flow shower heads. Not only should the Jerry Seinfeld PSA about these should have warned us, I have recently discovered that they are defective by design, that is that be diverting some of the water out the faucet a high pressure flow can be established, at about the normal flow of water, so not only am I not saving anything in my showers, I waste a bunch of time trying to get the just right water flow. Why do hippies want everyone else to be dirty too.

The big problem with these beliefs that people hold religiously is that people who believe will refuse to enter into legitimate discussion that those beliefs. That's the real disappointing thing. These beliefs exist with out labels to use to identify themselves, and exist in a limbo. So that there is no reform possible because there are no well defined dogma to reform. And because when people impose these beliefs upon you, there is no redress in the form of the courts and freedom of religion to save you, because religion is never flamed for these beliefs.

Our relationship with the police

I recently saw video of Police pepper spraying students sitting at UC Davis, because some of them had tents nearby and wouldn't remove them and, because the crowd of people who had come to watch the confrontation completely dwarfed either group. I wasn't shocked or surprised, and that fact had me deeply dismayed. In the sort of world I want to live in, the public should have the utmost respect, and complete trust, in their Police force and that force, to the extent any human group can, should live up to that respect and trust.

Of course the state of things is not particularly either groups fault. It's a feedback loop between the two. It's hard to see now how the relationship started to break down, maybe it was the place where police were left in the increase post-ww2 economic social stratification, maybe it was that the police were too often put by their superiors on the wrong side of the civil rights movement. At this point it doesn't actually matter, it's been long enough that the original slights were by players who are no longer in play.

So what can we do to change it? The first thing is that we can recognize that there is an economic factor here, and be willing to pay more for the police, current and retired. We can't trust our legislators to represent us in that relationship, so maybe we need to start a charity that just works toward health and death benefits for first responders, hopefully with out the obnoxious fundraisers employed by most F.O.P. and with out the ambiguity of also protecting those police accused of violating the public trust. Another thing that can be done, but not by the lay men is separating the duties of the police so that domain related distrust is limited those cops working in that area, so that most cops can just do their jobs, without the collective distrust people have for all policemen. The other big thing we need to do is stop treating so many laws like we are above them. We should all be embarrassed when hearing about the violence in Mexico, that we are contributing to it. And finally as we normalize things in our relationship with the police, we will need the police to be willing to eject those that are too enamored by their own authority, and to accept that they should be the best and the brightest, and those that aren't don't belong, at least at any higher levels.

Not seeing the forest or the trees, for the leaves.

Apparently the International Energy Agency has warned that if we don't change things, in 5 years we will have irreversible climate change. Personally I'm scared, once the climate change is irreversible how will we ever go back to the jurassic climate required to support cloned Dinosaurs?

The biggest Climate myth is Climate Stasis. Everyone who believes in Dinosaurs and ice ages, believes in Climate change. Even when it seems like the climate is static, it's not, because the length of time in that climate pattern is increasing. The climate is the sum of it's inputs and states, all climate change is irreversible. Every instant of every day for the whole history of the earth irreversible climate change has been going on. 

I wish people would suck it up and admit how little we actually know about the climate. Everything is a player in the climate and maybe now that we've got a decent collection of earth watching satellites we can finally get a grasp of all the inputs, but a system that has cycles that last decades, centuries or maybe even millennia, is not all of a sudden going to be cracked by us, especially cause there's not really a lab to experiment with these things.

The biggest sign that we don't know what we're talking about is that, we are concerned about our impact on the climate, and we want to stop impacting it as much so we want to stop getting energy in ways that impact the composition and instead we want to syphon energy right out of the weather systems. Have you heard of the conservation of energy? Wind energy isn't free, wind energy takes energy from the air currents that move atmospheric water around. But it's not like with the rise of wind energy we've seen an increase in weather systems stalling and causing flooding and draughts? Oh wait, we have.

It's unbelievably frustrating to see the public debate be between people who are willfully ignorant and people that are willfully arrogant. It would be really nice for some people to say, hey we don't really have the best grasp on the big picture, but if thing keep going the way they have been, then whatever the cause it's going to cause problems for us, and maybe we can or can not stop it, but instead of betting the farm on our ability to stop the trend, let's look at things that improve our survivability and maybe will buck the trend.

It seems to me that one area that could really benefit the world are micro-grids and ways to recycle small scale waste into them. That is to say that there is a lot of waste energy that we don't bother collecting because storage and transmission make it cost ineffective. One of the challenges with solar houses is rigging the houses grid to take/store the excess so that you have energy when solar is unproductive, but if you look a little wider you'll see that in addition to excess solar energy there are lots of other sources of waste energy that could be tapped and stored, if that doesn't have to go to far. And if we design home scale electrical systems to take these small inputs, then there will be an incentive to design in energy capturing technologies, into the bigger "waste" producers to reduce the cost of operations. 

Another area is refrigeration and cooling. Yes we could probably design much more efficient refrigerators by understanding that if your refrigerator isn't densely packed then every time you open the door and lose all the cold air you're making it do a lot of work. why we haven't made it to a 3 sections design, with the bottom third being a drawer and greater control on the temperature of each section, with ice disposer in the door, is beyond me. But if we got the base cooling that much more efficient all the better, and if we could better move heat around a house or building then we could do without a lot of the production of cooler or hotter air. 


And my last rant on this whole general area, is that many of the people that I have known that have been very pro, let's do the environment right, have also been very supportive of "historical" districts and building preservation. Historical districts don't often make sense because they freeze in place buildings that had been seeing major renovation every 20 years. If the history of a building is to change, then you're not preserving it but not letting that continue. Beyond that however is the fact that may of these buildings are vastly inefficient and keeping them around and making people use them is contrary to the goals of lessening our impact on the world. 


So in summary, we need to stop being so arrogant and ignorant about where we stand with climate science, and should not ignore basic laws of physics when looking for ways to fix things. While we aren't masters of climate science that should be ok, we're finally in a position to start learning, but it will take a while. It's okay to come up with hypotheses as long as you are open to competing ones and established ones having to be altered or thrown out. Climate science is important. But beyond grand declarations there are problems that can be addressed and solved. Those smaller problems should have as much of our focus as the larger ones.

Fair Use a Felony?

There is currently a Senate Bill on the floor of the Senate, Bill S.978, that would make unauthorized streaming of copyrighted material for the purpose of "commercial advantage of personal financial gain" a felony.  This is of course ridiculously dumb. Everything is under copyright these days. Copyright is what "designers" use to keep the cheaper products they sold overseas out of the country, to keep their domestic profits high. So pretty much no one can show up in a stream, cause unless they are naked in front of a green screen, there is probably going to be something under copyright in the shot.

But there are some larger issues. They include demarcating who is a journalist and who is not, protecting parody and satire, the wide scale potential for abuse, and just preserving our history.

I've seen many regular video authors who discuss what's going on in the some or all of the world. They frequently do this with the help of clips or snippets of copyrighted materials. Right now these people have not had to stand up and wrap them selves in the formal trappings of being a journalist, but threaten them with losing their right to vote and they will. In this it could really backfire because ultimately uses now that do not get protected as fair use will end up protected under journalistic freedom. Or the digital word of mouth that these people provide will dry up, which will hurt people. And the loss of discourse if one person with something meaningful to say is silenced, is really more of a cost then just about any cost to the copyright holders.

Parody and Satire, are a huge part of our culture. Shows like the Tonight Show, Saturday Night Live and The daily show are institutions in our culture, and they all stream, and they all use clips of copy written material. And in addition to these voices there are many minor sources of satire and parody out there. And not all the the butts of the jokes appreciate it. Right now it's more trouble then it's worth to harass these people, but when the cost of losing the fight goes up for the satirists,  Intimidation becomes a viable tool to silence these voices.

And ultimately this has huge potential for abuse. When most streamed content contains some things that are under copyright, and most politicians stream content. In one fell swoop an authoritarian regime could round up the opposition. As a tool for intimidation this would have a power for those who can afford to use it. It may not be abused at first, but I think it's too dangerous a weapon for abuse to allow to sit.

Finally what happens when someone captures some historic event like a disaster or accident, but has something under copyright, like a song or clothing or something. Do we want to lose these witnesses to our history?

Ultimately copyright is a trade between creators and society, that is intended to benefit both. When one side of equation isn't benefiting from the social contract anymore then contract has no point.

When are you legally an Adult?

So knowing some of history, it's not clear that the age of adulthood is well established and thee is some sign of this in the law. In the Baby-boomers life time the drinking and voting age were lowered to 18. Only to have the drinking age raised again. But the alcohol legislation in Maryland says that an adult in your immediate family may allow you to drink in their private residence. If you're an adult at 18 then this means you can drink at home, once you're 18. I doubt that was the intent. On the other hand at 18 you can sign legally binding contracts, by default get charged as an adult, and your parents are no longer responsible for you. But along those lines, I can't remember the last time I heard of a 17 year old being charged as a juvenile. So what is it? Is it the standard age at which you are a charged as an adult, 18 when you can sign contracts, serve in the military and vote, or 21 when you finally have no privileges withheld? If it is 18, does that mean that age discrimination is legal? Can you be striped of privilege just because of your age? I think the AARP would have something to say about that, but as long as we leave this up in the air they have no reason to get involved.

What do you think? Is this a quagmire or is it clear?

The fall of Official Identity

I think it's funny, I keep hearing about new measures for ID cards, when the system that supports them is dying. There are three things in motion right now that are undermining or system of official identities and that could cause major upheaval if we don't proactively seek to address them. 

To understand the first big threat, it helps to have ever had to establish yourself independently with a state ID authority (normally the DMV or MVA). In addition to providing documentation establishing who you are, you have to establish where you live. They normally have people do this by bringing official mail, bills, bank statements, etc. The problem with this is that most people have started to interact with the people who generate that mail online, and most of them want to help you "Go Green" (and save them money), by stopping to send you such mail. No longer receiving that official mail. Good luck proving that you live where you do, especially if you're living with a friend or somewhere where you don't have a lease. Oops!

The second threat is tied to the first. That's the impending collapse of the US Postal Service. Not only will it accelerate the first problem, just as the first problem accelerates it, but it prevents new interesting problems for the future. The USPS are generally the one of the main agents for officially recognizing addressing change. If you're still getting bills Fed-Ex'ed to you, what happen when you move to a new community or building that Fed-Ex doesn't understand yet, cause the database of valid addresses isn't being updated anymore? As long as your identity is established with mail, you need the USPS.

The third threat, and this is the big one, is what happens when people become long term nomads? Let me explain because this one is a little more complicated. Why do we maintain private residences? To hold our stuff, For recreations that require infrastructure, for a place to sleep, a place to be a family, and as a place with a Bathroom. So let's take a time to look at these motivations and see what's on the horizon.  

As my posts on media have probably let on, I'm a bit of a major consumer. But over the last few years, less and less of my spending results in the physical accumulation of more stuff. Most of the media I buy is bought digitally and with new cloud initiatives, I'm less likely to have to house infrastructure to make sure that I don't lose it. When my stuff other then furniture is just my clothes and the devices that I carry around all the time anyway there's a lot less of a motivation to invest in a location. And the seeming universal migration that everyone makes to college is going to have the younger generations realizing this sooner.  

The idea of having a hobby room or a media room appeals to a lot of people, but often this is what loses the space wars. In addition to that preferences in media consumption tend to make people want to be where they can consume the media they want. Well as the media goes digital and cable services start letting you view your content anywhere. You can view your media anywhere especially as technology to take what you've got in your pocket and put it on a big screen improve. Just like fitness rooms and laundry rooms, I could easily see dorms and apartment buildings of the future containing reservable media rooms, that are posh enough that they make up for the lack of space, which in addition to the media rooms, let them fit more people in that space. And eventually Hobby retailers will figure it out too. Someone will eventually setup a place as a perpetual con. They will have a store where you can by hobby paraphernalia setting where you can partake in your hobby, better then you could in your cramped  home, and even some storage space that you can rent to store your stuff. Plus while you're their they'll also sell you things for peripheral needs like food and/or for the late sessions a place to crash. And the best part is that these places help you connect with people with similar interests to you. 

As for the biological needs of sleeping and the bathroom. As people's use of their home becomes more and more dorm like, because they don't need space for stuff or hobby supplies, then there's not reason for there not to be a shift. Some people like Google already have fitness rooms and nap rooms at some of their locations, how long before employees that are at a remote site for a night or a month just crash there, even if the employees doesn't think of and provision for it first. So now you have people moving from college Dorms to corporate Dorms. When will these people ever change their permanent address to be anything other then their Parent's home?

Which finally brings us to having a family. So you've people who still list their home as their parents home, who have all the stuff they own that won't fit in a duffel bag and messenger bag at their parents home, and who will probably need help when it comes to day care anyway. Where are they going to go? If it's close enough they will probably just go to their Parents home. Which isn't so far fetched a thing, for a lot of our history there have been familial homes. And if we're spending most of our adult lives as vagabonds, why not? The only problem is that some familial homes will be inconvenient. And the answer to that is new ones being established. Or maybe your aunt, uncle, or childless older friend will invite you in as family. 

And the problem with being a long term nomad who spends decades of their life are marginally tied to any one residence isn't establishing official identity, it's with what happens when your official identity doesn't match your actual one. What happens when you're a "resident" of New York, spending all your professional time in California? Who get's to tax you? Who do you get to vote for?  and how is a jurisdiction supposed to afford the infrastructure it's residents need if none of them officially live there?

So we are heading towards a world where it is getting hard to establish official identity and one in which it easier to maintain one that isn't an actual reflection of reality. We're approaching a world in which it's easier for people to be transient, but in which our funding of infrastructure, governmental representation, and maintaining official identity is based on not being inherently transient. And what happens when a person finds themselves untethered, with a place to sleep and job, but no real home and no way to establish an identity? A lot of the assumptions that have built modern America were reflective of the time but not really the past, or perhaps the future. So do we work to preserve those assumptions or try to fin a better set?

And the most important question, as is the question with all inevitable change is will we act now when we can be thoughtful and have time to innovate, or will we wait until we are at the moment of crisis?

Used Media

So of course after an extended period of having nothing pop into my head to talk about here, I thought of two things in relatively short order. But I'm gonna only talk about one of them now. Cause I'm a punk like that.

This is mostly applicable to the game industry but is kind of there for all media and that is MSRP and Used media. In the game industry, used games sales are a "big problem". A 10 hour game that costs 50 dollars and has no reply value is a big problem. That it's developer can't profitably produce that game, if not everyone who plays it paid $50 for the privilege isn't a problem.

I may not sound at all conflicted about this issue, but I am. Having standard prives for games that very greatly in quality and value to the consumer is unfair. I'm unsympathetic to an industry that has pretty much participated in price fixing when that bites them in the ass. However I understand that there are some amazing games that are only 10 hour games, and in an ideal world the reward to their creators for their work would far exceed what some people get for horrible games, because the used game market is so active. Of course when companies start to take draconian measures to make games not re-sellable, it's again hard to be sympathetic.

To reward artists in the long term I think the middle men are going to have to be taken out of the equation. If your involved in bulk upfront sales to retailers then at some point you are going to sell at a fixed price, and not be able to reap the rewards of any supply/demand mechanisms that are put in place. This I think is coming as evidenced by steam, the apple app stores, and on console purchases.

In the short term I think the games industry would be more successful if they cut down the initial price of games. New Console games normally cost around $50, which is twice the initial cost of then next tier of entertainment products which are Hardback books and new movies. If you reduce the initial price you take a lot of the steam out the used game market. And if you reduce the initial expectation of income from a game and budget accordingly then what used sales there aren't won't be as big an impact. If you are worried you won't be able to cover salaries, then just look at the successful mobile game market and see that people will pay for cheap games, so the way to retain top talent isn't with high salaries that are hard to meet, it's with a percentage of profit.

And this of course is just another case of entrenched business models causing problems. When will they learn that as your industry, consumers and your product change your business model must too.

Disposable Media

Sorry for the long pause. I've been trying to write this post for a long time but it keeps getting away from me before I even get to the meat of what I want to talk about. But hopefully this time I'll pull it off.

In Radio and TV, the main draw for an audience that is counted on is novelty. That's why it's no longer the case that half the year you get a new shows and the other half you get repeats. Instead you get new shows most of the year except for those periods where the audience is expected to be minimal at best. The effect of this is that most media is created as disposable media.

There are a few problems with this. The first is that the plug gets pulled way to easily. We've seen this with shows like Family Guy and Futurama. The second is that when a show gets thrown away without repeats to drive sales, that last season may not see a DVD release. The third is that Gimmick shows abound, because they can string people along for a season, and get good enough ratings. Another is that shows that have managed to stick get kept around way to long, rather then being allowed to go out on a high note, and they get imitated past the point of saturation.

Media should be made to be high quality and original. As a kid I watched so much TV from before I was born, I doubt today's kids will, or will even get the chance. The powers that be will never see the value of some of the media out there, and they will never give it the chance to demonstrate that for itself. Was the return of Futurama and Family Guy a fluke?

I think ultimately it will be the ad agencies themselves, if anyone, who breaks us out from this cycle. They've already learned to go harvest from independents for their Ad music, they'll even give away (sometimes) the music they made as an exercise in building brand loyalty. How long before they do the same with TV type content.

In an ideal world we would have something like the BBC, who take chances see what people really like and go with it. Oh and if they show only produces 6 episodes a year, whatever. I'm not sure if the BBC is profitable, or if they are that that model would ever really fly as a model for the world. The one thing that is certain is that, in the age of new media, the TV and Radio stations are no longer the guardians of what people can find. independent media is out there. go find some, and if you find something you like, PLEASE, spread the word.

The end of the Library

Despite the fact that, I don't have a library card, and haven't been in one for years, I'm a huge fan of Libraries. The notion that a group of people can collectively invest in and have more media available to collectively then any individual would be able to amass. It's great. But the age of the library is coming to an end.

The very purpose of the Library is counter to the media industries'. Libraries reduce the number of copies of a piece of media that need to be bought for a collection of people to al enjoy that media, and the media industries' purpose is to make money through the sales of copies of media. But up until now, there has been struck a delicate balance, the consumption of media is apt to whet the appetite for the consumption of media. Libraries are not as fickle in their purchasing as consumers can be, and large number of libraries provide a healthy base line for consumption, that makes publishing less of a risk. Libraries also frequently buy more durable (and expensive) hard back editions of books. Plus, if something IS really popular the library will never buy enough copies to slake the demand so individuals will buy copies of their own. Plus the physical overhead of moving around physical media limits a libraries ability to fulfill media demand.

But that balance is coming to an end. Netflix started the revolution by demonstrating that with small enough physical media you can get away with a lot fewer libraries (distribution centers), at the cost of some latency, between selection and enjoyment. But when you have a connected world and digital media, why do you need more then one library. And that library would of course be hyper efficient so one "copy" of a movie could be watched several times in the same day, so it would be easier for a library to meet everyone's demand for popular media, and the number of copies of less desired works that the library would have to buy would be minimal.

How do you get around the fact that a single digital library could replace all other media consumption outlets? Right now most libraries pay consumer or near consumer prices for media, and library equivalents like rental stores paid premiums, but usually got some premium like early access in return. If you try to not sell to the library, or charge it so much per copy that it has to charge exorbitant memberships, then individuals will just go about replacing it with consumer copies of media, or you'll create have-nots that will replace your media industries with ones of their own, that will eventually repeat the cycle.

When you look at the realism that it does take money to produce media, and that someone who is wildly successful at their career should be able to make enough at it to live off of for their whole adult lives, then we can't allow the eventual inevitable collapse of the library concept into a single global digital library.

The media industries of course being single minded, push for the two obvious solutions to the problem. Unsharable media, and a blanket tax on everyone to support the production of the media that everyone is consuming. The real problem here is that both of those solutions remove market factors from media. The benefit low quality media should be able to reap should be limited, but a blanket tax, would probably be blind to this, and with unsharable media you don't have used copies of the media coming onto the market quickly and undercutting the initial high price of media that's not worth it.

So how do you balance the values of fair compensation for work, sharing, fair pricing, and ownership? You start by enumerating those values, and realizing that while your interests may not immediately be best served immediately by embracing them all that in the long term you have to consider every one that is part of the media ecosystem and value them too. The other thing that you have to do is look for the technologies that have been disruptive to help solve the problem. Some ideas include distributed patronage where lots of people pay a little upfront to fund something so that it doesn't have to make money on the tail end, which with the internet actually starts to become feasible. Using technology to improve media consumption, helping people fill the portions of their life that are ripe to be filled with media consumption but have been too awkward, help people find new media better [personally i'm tired of having stuff recommended to me because I like one things I'd prefer recommendations based on the whole picture of who I am]. I think you also have to recognize the problem now and scale back some of the media industries' excesses, the more out of whack the compensation of the people at the top is with reality, the faster we move towards the breaking point, and conversely consumers need to do more to value the media they consume so that the media companies feel less defensive.

Of course there are other factors in play in all of this, that deserve posts of their own. If this was a simple topic it wouldn't merit all this discussion.

Technology Giveth, Technology Taketh away.

There would be no mass media without technology. So talking about one of the major technology issues facing the content industries seems like a logical place to start.

Technology is predictable, for just about any technology there is a progression. Technology makes the impossible possible. Perhaps at first not very well or very safe, but possible and almost inevitably very expensive at least to begin with. Then technology steadily improves, doing things better and safer. It also makes them cheaper, sometimes not until a threshold of cheap enough and safe enough have been reached, but eventually.

And that technology progression almost always lead to problems with business. When some technology is new it's expensive and some one has to shell out a lot for the equipment and has to make it back in time to replace it. And because the technology started so expensive and the initial investment was so high, It's not unreasonable that the people who fronted the money for the equipment might make a lot of money off of it. But technology is going to improve and the need for a middle man that owns the necessary equipment is going to go away. But it seems like as often as not the middle men that have been making a lot of money for a long time aren't prepared and fight tooth and nail in order to remain middle men. That's not saying that they should go out of business, but they should be looking for new ways to be a middle man that continue to grow the content.

The example of this that comes best to mind is the record companies. In the past month I've bought Indy band albums that were produced independently, advertised on youtube and I found through some combination of being picked up for ads, and people linking to them from facebook. Increasingly the record companies are being cut out of the loop of my music buying, not because of some stance of mine, but because as technology has made them irrelevant at their traditional roles, they have failed to evolve into new ones.

The lesson is that if you are in a content industry, and your stake in the business is that you own the expensive equipment, then you should have an exit strategy or a transition strategy. Because odds are that at some point the equipment will start getting cheaper.

And before I go to save a largely redundant post, the same trends in technology impact the makers of content consumption devices. Unit costs will go down, so even at steady margins profit per unit will go down, and eventually units will go down. Worse then that, there will be periodic technology plateaus where next improved type of player isn't obvious and if you're not spending R&D to find the next thing to make, when some one else does you'll be left in the dust. Case in point Sony losing it's music player dominance to Apple.