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?