How is the term "Competition" perceived in US markets?

 Everyone brings with them a perceptual framework when they ponder new inputs. For example, I might claim the world is better off with flat, fair, open competition in our markets. I have my own understanding of what I mean by that, but it is not the same as others see it. No matter how much I'd like the term "competition" to keep a simple meaning, that's not how human languages work.

The simplest way I know to show this is to ask questions that probe at the cloud of related terms people have in their heads when they ponder "competition". I've tried this and noticed some people put it perceptually close to "tooth and claw". I don't because humans are social animals. Sure... we have teeth, but we aren't tigers. We don't compete with each other like tigers do, so I find it confusing when people relate "tooth and claw" so closely. Yet... they do. So... why? Why don't I?

How easy is it to avoid "Little Dictators" as bosses?

In a conversation over at Contrary Brin I am having some fun defending an unpleasant notion that can be summarized roughly as follows.

Do we have to suffer rapacious monsters as bosses to gain the benefits of our relatively open society?

My position is roughly this.

Yes we do, but we can use a cocktail medicine approach to mitigate harms.

So... a reasonable debate can be had regarding counter arguments and refuting of any evidence I might offer. These could range from "There is a better way" to "The benefits you imagine aren't there or don't justify the harms."

To shore up my argument, I want to present evidence that we have way fewer rapacious monsters as bosses we can't avoid. That these people exist is a given, but anyone with options regarding employers can turn that into options to avoid nasty bosses. They may not want to quit, but it is an option for them. That's a point I want to leverage in my argument, but my friends will challenge the details, so I can't just toss an assertion into the discussion without them calling me on that.

So... I hit the US Census data and looked for how many "employers" there are in the US, how many people they employ, and how big their payroll is. I didn't need real fine detail, though. For example, in the 2021 data there were roughly six million people employed by tiny groups of four or less with a total payroll near $344B and employed about 6.2 million. Units with 20-24 people had a total payroll near $142B and employed about 2 million. I was a little confused on their distinction between firms and establishments, but I didn't really care since 6.2 million people in groups of 0-4 is a whole lot of groups which means a whole lot of bosses with few to boss around.

I expected a power law curve for the total number of employees compared to employer size and that's roughly true until one gets down to the very tiny groups. Turns out a whole lot of us are employed by very tiny groups and that should not have surprised me. My dentist operates through a "professional" company that likely employs three if you include him. A whole lot of professionals operate at the very small end of the scale and wind up employing an outsized number of us. What was most interesting, however, was that units with fewer than 40 people employ almost as many of us as units with more than 20,000. The big companies/agencies will have lots of line managers, but few CEO's and it's really the CEO count I want.

An historic trend in equity prices

Put the S&P Index closing price on a logarithmic graph and look at the longest time frame you can. See the trend? What could it be driving that... if it is driven at all? Is it beating inflation in the US? Is it growing faster than our public debt? See for yourself.

(Logarithmic scale is important when the quantity being graphed grows as a fraction of its current value. If that growth is perfectly even, you'll get something that looks like a straight line that way.)

 

2020 Will Be Remembered For...

Living in the moment, we think many things are important that later generations see different. They'll scratch their collective heads and wonder at the fuss we made of some events and some other people. They'll wonder how we missed making a fuss about other events and people. Few dispute this has happened before, but we seldom apply the lesson to our own fussing.

Seriously. Many historical events were completely missed in the day. The list is long, but a few are worth noting for context.

• Enrichment

The common person started becoming richer in some parts of Europe by the early 18th century before industrialization. It wasn't just the rich landowners who made profits from colonization of other parts of the world. It was the common person who made much, much more in aggregate than those nobles who owned the land and slaves. It was an historical aberration never before seen written large across Northern Europe. The Peasants were getting richer. Hard to explain if it is even noticed. 

Many today know the world got richer, but mistakenly believe in one or another cause for it. Most of the causes fail to explain the truly vast amounts of wealth that appeared seemingly from nowhere. Many others fail to explain why it didn't happen earlier or with other cultures. Only one of the explanations survives, but few like to believe it because it sounds too easy. 

We liberated ourselves and granted dignity to each other. Somewhat. The more it was done, the richer the common person became. Nothing was perfect mind you. We are still at work on this project and there is plenty more to do.

The common person got immensely wealthy by the standards any peasant would have understood. Why measure this using peasant standards? Because the common person through history WAS a peasant. Are they today? No. Absolutely not. There aren't many peasants left on Earth. There are still people too poor to live comfortably in the culture in which they are embedded, but they are not the peasantry. Those people are members of the petite-bourgeosie. Real peasants still have dirt floors in their shelters and work at fixing that problem.

• Movable Typeface

More commonly known as printing, this technical innovation set fire to Europe, but not right away. Initially, it enabled faster printing for useful documents. Like Indulgences. Like Bibles. Like Sermons. Initially, it was limited by the cost of paper, but Demand begets Supply which overshoots and begets another generation of Demand. Did the initial adopters anticipate the Reformation? No. Not really. Even the Roman Church took a while to see the threat, but it moves slowly. That should surprise no one. 

Did the people living in those early years anticipate what printing would do to the knowledge professions? Well... Gutenberg did to a point. We know that because he used a book fair for his pitch to investors. Did he understand the scope of the revolution to come, though? Doubtful. No one did.

Everything changed, though. Cheap printing enabled a revolution to occur. Anyone with the financial support could print what they knew to be true. Anyone. Obviously it has become cheaper by many orders of magnitude since then due to industrialization and digitization and networking, but these things carry on the initial trend that was missed at the time it started. 

Missed? Really? Well. Some of them had their guesses, but they've proven to be mostly wrong or vast under-estimations of what happened. That shouldn't surprise us, though. We aren't very good at anticipating the effects of causes in highly non-linear systems. That's what we are. Highly non-linear by design. That's precisely what our markets do. Not just the monetized markets. All our markets.

• Epidemiology -> Germ Theory

It's difficult to describe just how badly the trends that emerged from our growing knowledge of biology got missed in the day. Even simple stuff. Well... stuff we think is simple today. Things like 'excrement in drinking water' kills people who drink it. Cholera is just one of the largely avoidable diseases that kills us in our ignorance and surrender to the 'fates'. Small Pox only spread between humans who came near enough to each other or the materials of others who were in a certain state of infection. Social distancing did wonders and we eventually began to understand that. We tried many other things first, though. Prayers. Magic. You name it. Surely it couldn't be so simple as to avoid each other. It was, though.

After learning some of the basic rules, THEN we figured out some of the magic that actually works. People who were exposed to cow pox survived small pox. Iodine killed whatever was in the water causing disease X, but maybe not disease Y. Ever use iodine when you are out camping and can't trust the water? Got something better than that now? Gee. One wonders why we made the effort to learn.

Some of the simple rules are still failing the traction test, though. Do you always wash your hands when leaving a public restroom? How about your private restroom? Do you cough into your elbow or mask up when you know you are contagious? No? These things are easy to do and cheap too. Some do it all. Some do it occasionally. Some refuse. 

At least the doctors clean their hands before helping a young mother give birth to an infant. That former failure came to an end in much of the world and ended two tragically avoidable forms of death. Mothers die giving birth to infants. The infants die too. They have a better chance if they aren't given a dose of death by their own doctors, nurses, or midwives. This change has been SO successful that many now believe a young mother faces NO risk at birth. They are mistaken, but it is an astounding error given how many widowers litter our history books. Husbands locked in unhappy marriages were often freed to re-marry without resorting to murder or divorce. Fathers in happy marriages were similarly freed often losing both wife and child.

These improvements have been gradual, but like a tsunami they changed our social landscape. There would be no abortion debate in the US if maternal mortality was still high. Sure. Many would still oppose the activity, but they wouldn't have much support from non-zealots. Too many of us would have lost mothers, sisters, and wives. The debate would have no traction. We probably wouldn't imprison children either, let alone steal them from their parents for crossing our border illegally. Too many of us would know how the loss feels. It wasn't long ago that one in five children died before reaching their fifth birthday.

• Vaccines -> mRNA vaccines

Which brings me (finally) to the change for which I think 2020 will actually be remembered. Vaccines have been around a while. Early attempts at a small pox vaccine can be found in history textbooks on the American Revolutionary War. Salk's Polio vaccine and his release of it practically earned him a Sainthood. The impact they create is (generally) NOT missed by those in the day. Why draw attention to them here? Well...

The SARS-COV-2 vaccines currently being shipped are fundamentally different. Like moveable typeface, they enable us to do something we could have done another slower, expensive way, but in a faster, cheaper new way. Like germ theory ideas, they enable us to do useful things now instead of later after tripping across an epidemiological solution found because we tried everything including tossing in the kitchen sink. 

These vaccines aren't built on dead virus samples. They aren't even 'discovered' if we are fair to the meaning of 'discovery'. It is more correct to say they are written. Sure. What we write in the mRNA sequences is found through discovery. For now. That's not what is shipping, though. Early mRNA methods produced product that would induce a profound inflammatory response in patients killing them quickly. Not so anymore. Why? Because we know how to write them in a way that avoids triggering our immune systems.

If your jaw isn't on the floor at this point, you either work in the industry OR you haven't read enough science fiction. Seriously. Writing instruction snippets our immune systems accept and act upon is such a huge deal even many science fiction authors thought it out of our reach. Some didn't, though. There are stories about this kind of capability. Some are truly scary. Some are deeply difficult to believe. Some are both because decent human beings with this kind of capability can DO things formerly reserved for The Gods Of Our Myths.

Unless you work in the industry, you probably don't realize what just happened. Humanity just picked up a magic #$%ing sword of its own making. What will we do with it? You probably can't imagine what is coming next. Your children might miss it too. Future generations won't, though. The world just changed.

Do you know what researchers had in mind for this sword before COVID-19 caused human markets to seize? No? Don't blame yourself. Unless you work in the industry, you probably wouldn't. Some of them were eyeing the influenza virus variants. 

Again, if your jaw is not on the floor, you do not understand. SARS-COV-2 is pretty effective at killing old people and others who are compromised. It is astonishing how quickly researchers pivoted... unless you work in the industry. If you do, you know it's more like swapping movable typeface than staffing a Manhattan Project. It's faster with more flexible techniques. Don't think investors will fail to notice.

You know who the influenza virus variants are pretty effective at killing? Our children. We've partially forgotten this because we are pretty good at the epidemiology of influenza. We've even got mildly useful vaccines based on dead virus samples occasionally. If you can keep your kids alive long enough, influenza probably won't kill them. Unless... some new strain makes the leap from birds through hogs to the human population. That's where prior efforts have been most watchful. Farms where hogs and ducks are kept in close proximity. Large hog populations. Bird populations that live among and in close proximity to humans. What would the world look like, though, if we write mRNA snippets that attack entire influenza viral families? Can you imagine that? Probably not, but that future has fewer dead children.

Can we do it? Can we beat influenza in the human population? 

This year... 2020... provides the existence proof of the technique. Yes. We can. 

If those little viral agents had pants to piss in fear, they should be doing it right now.

What else is next? What other viral traumas do we suffer? What about bacterial ones?

The list is long and humanity just fashioned a weapon that will utterly change the war we wage on them.

Like with swords, we will probably cut ourselves a few times as we learn how to use it well. 

Don't think for a moment that will will put it down, though. 

One of the Four Horsemen of The Apocalypse is about to loose his head. No. Not one of the original Horsemen. We unseated Famine during the Green Revolution. You didn't realize that? (See long list of trends missed by those who lived through the time.) No. I'm talking about about Famine's twin replacement. Disease.

Lop.

Energy related CO2 emission in various US States

With a new administration on the horizon here in the US, some thought can be given once again to CO2 mitigation strategies. They all require that we consider facts, of course. That shouldn't need to be said, but in this era, I think it necessary.

Toward this goal, I offer a quick review of energy related CO2 emissions in various US States. Some States are trending up. Some are trending down. Some are flat. How? Why? They probably have individual stories to tell for each of them.

 For California energy-related emissions within the CAISO boundry, we ARE seeing the mid-day impact of renewables. CAISO's plan involves the installation of a great deal more battery storage on the grid over the coming years, so renewable energy generated off-peak can be delivered on-peak. When they get there, those split peaks in the emission curve will spread further apart and be suppressed.

Where is the bubble?

 

Without posting actual account amounts, I need an image here to support an 'asset bubble' argument I'm making elsewhere.

Anyone stopping by without that other material is just looking at an investment history. It happens to be mine and covers the time range between when the Fed was messing with interest rates in late 2018 to the early fall 2020 period during the COVID-19 hide-out. You can see the impact of the early COVID-19 lockdown fear period during Mar 2020.

At the time this image was constructed, there was a lot of discussion about asset bubbles in the equity markets. I'm making the argument (elsewhere) that this is more consistent with the general flow of retirement savings into the equity markets driving prices up. Supply < Demand basically.

Lift gas sloshing

One of the issues with vehicle design for airships that must traverse the lower 30 km of the atmosphere is that the lift gas needed to remain aloft near peak altitude compresses to a small fraction of the ship's volume near sea level. A roughly cigar-shaped vehicle will be pitch unstable if the lift gas isn't stopped from shifting form one end of the vehicle to the other much like the bubble does in a carpenter's spirit level. 

When the bubble's container is given a larger diameter near the center, the bubble stays mostly in the center if the level is.. well.. roughly level. For an airship, movement of the bubble is equivalent to a shift of the bubble of lift gas. When this happens, the center of buoyancy on the vehicle shifts. Pitch stability requires, therefore, some mechanism to push the bubble back to where it belongs. Typically, this is done with two ballonettes (balloon within a balloon) that act like diaphragms on either side of the cell's center. In a spirit level, we can imagine them at either end acting like pistons.

An airship operating in the lower 30 km of the atmosphere, however, requires the ballonettes to expand to occupy most of the volume the lift gas would occupy at altitude. Failure to do this ensures the outer envelope of the airship will experience a pressure difference crushing it. Some of this pressure can be handled by the airframe, but at quite a cost to the mass of the vehicle.

A serious engineering challenge, though, is that a large ballonette can shift much like the lift gas bubble if the ballonette is not secured against the airframe or load envelope. Even then, the air inside the ballonette is not fixed. Pitch instability is still an issue until the interior of an airship is subdivided into many smaller cells by baffles that limit the run of lift gas and the ballonette's air. The more finely the subdivisions are made, the less attitude instability is built into the design. Obviously, this comes at as a trade-off with the vehicle's mass.

So... what to do?

One possibility is to subdivide the ballonette by having more than one in a lift gas cell. To imagine this, look at the spirit level again. Two piston's at either end push the bubble back to the center. Now add another structure around the inner wall near the middle that would allow for the cell's diameter to be restricted like a clogged artery. This would split the lift bubble at low altitude, but not at high altitude when the bubble expands. Splitting the bubble creates a small potential barrier to overcome during small pitch changes.

This is the configuration I've chosen to model. The airship isn't cigar shaped, thus the load envelope itself contributes to preventing pitch instability. Cells near the front and back have a strongly curved ceiling preventing lift gas bubbles from running. Cells in the middle on the wings have no sloping ceiling on that cross-section, so the pistons at each end are much more necessary.

The load envelope is essentially two toroids joined at a chord with ribbing toroids kept at high pressure to provide some shape stability. 

Two keel trusses on top and bottom are contained within two similar toroids tied along the hull chord by a vertical baffle. At altitude, the baffle is expected to be under tension, but not a lot. At sea level, the baffle must be placed under tension by pumping air into the load envelope and/or ballonettes to retain the outer envelope's shape. Hull ribbing toroids will not be sufficient.

Lift gas cells are subdivisions of the hull toroids around the polar angle with vertex at the hull's center. Baffles separate the cells and support a toroidal 'piston' ballonette that presses against two cells when pressurized. These ballonettes CAN push the lift gas around a bit, most mostly they squeeze it into a smaller volume thus reducing its impact on the center of buoyancy. The extra mass of the gas in a ballonette ALSO shifts the vehicle's center of gravity, so both effects contribute to managing vehicle attitude.

With some of the cells, I've sketched in a larger rib around the center that can be pressurized to split lift gas bubbles. I don't have them all drawn in yet, but they will be soon. They are currently sized to contain a maximum volume equivalent to a small ring truss running around the inside of the hull. This truss would provide a protected path between upper and lower ring trusses, but I'm still sketching in what that might be used for. Most cells will not have this truss, though, as it is probably over kill. Its mass does not contribute enough to shape stability to justify it. [Considerably more truss-work would be required to turn this vehicle into a rigid airship.]

SO2 in the air

A while back, when I used to try to predict where balloon lofted packages would land, I had to work with winds-aloft data the old fashioned way. Recent data files and simple atmospheric models got us fairly close. Things are better now as people have written a lot of the software to automate that.

Along the way, a guy (look him up in the 'about us' section on the app) behind nullschool.net did this and a lot of other things to lay data across a map for us. It's not the integrator we needed back then, but it IS a good visualizer showing how things can be done.

For this particular image, I used an unusual projection of the globe so we can see most of it. This one shows the amount of SO2 in the air at the moment and where winds are dragging the stuff. Look carefully and you'll see continental outlines. [I put a split on Siberia because we don't generate a lot of SO2 from there. Same for Antarctica.]

3-D sketching again

Working the internal structure now.
Kinda fun AND kinda pointless.
It fills the covid-19 quarantine time, though.

This has also given me a chance to learn how opensimulator works a bit better too. I'm still curious to tinker with a physics engine using clados for the underlying geometry, so I've pulled a copy of the Bullet physics code to study too.

My system can handle reasonable sized physics models, but for now all the prims are non-physical. They aren't phantom, though.

Intended precision on the airship model is about 1 mm.

... and yah. I've tinkered with the landscape by pulling down a map of Ventura county and the Channel Islands. Scale is way off, of course, but it looks about right until one inserts objects. That little water inlet in the picture is the salt marsh area near NBVC Mugu. The port at NBVC Port Hueneme is just out of camera range on the left.

Be the Alien

It's an old idea from back when I was with an earlier team. I think enough time has passed for them to act on it had they chosen to do so. So... I'm going to have a bit of fun with it now.

physics engines

I think I may finally have an idea of where I want to try my hand at writing a physics engine where I don't have to write the rest of the code to display graphics. Open Simulator appears to be modular enough to allow one to swap things in and out to fit one's needs. Mine aren't about the pretty graphics that dominate places like Second Life. I'm curious about the way Clados would work as a physics platform. That means I should take a peek at how the current physics engines support the simulators. Obviously, I'd have to wrap anything I write so as not to change the interface to simulators, but the simulator's expectations would speak to what the engine has to do.

I also know two basic problems I'd start with to look for engine consistency. The first involves bouyancy in the presence of environmental forces. The second involves gravitation on a solar system scale. Airships first, of course, as I'd have to look into how land is represented for the second.

Argument against naive version of 'Invisible Hand'

Occasionally I climb onto a soap box and get preachy. One of the topics near and dear to me involves 'The invisible hand' mentioned briefly by Adam Smith in one of the editions of 'The Wealth of Nations.' There is a commonly held, but uneducated interpretation of this term that I think must be fought. Occasionally I do and this is one of those rants I've lifted from blog comments to a full post here.

[There are many other topics to get preachy about, but this one gets to me.]

_____________

The invisible hand doesn't solve all problems. People who believe that haven't read Adam Smith (or Hayek's longer-winded version) enough to get the point being made.

The Invisible Hand isn't some beneficent Hand of God or anything like that. It is simply an observation that market forces occasionally steer our selfish impulses in virtuous directions. I use the term 'virtue' because Smith was employed as a philosopher. His subject area centered on 'virtue ethics'. His 'Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS)' book considered why people do what they do from a virtue ethics perspective. TMS examined a few things, but left out much of the discussion associated with Prudence. 'Wealth of Nations' focused strictly on Prudence and that's where the invisible hand gets mentioned. Barely mentioned.

(The book at never got published focused on Justice. Smith really WAS a moral philosopher.)

Hayek's extension observes that knowledge for 'what is' and 'what can be done' is inherently distributed. There is NO WAY it can be centralized sufficiently to enable a 'planner' to optimize fully. What works best is decentralized optimization where knowledge gets applied at the point and time it is available. That requires a market structure. That does NOT mean all problems will get solved. That does NOT mean the best outcomes will occur. It DOES mean that most of the knowledge available to us will get used as best as can be imagined by those using it.

It's that 'as best as can be imagined' thing that should catch our attention most. That's why we liberate our neighbors… even the smelly ones. That's why we dignify their choices… even the failures. That's why we educate everyone… even the leeches.

Popper's extension on this shows you'd need far more than a super computer to centralize knowledge for a planner. You'd need a time machine and the history of the universe. All of it. The universe is inherently open in the sense of indeterminism. No central planner can exist within it. Ever.

_____________

My beef with the naive interpretation of Invisible Hand is that it is a faith/religious position. We imagine God existing and guiding us and then assume too much of His involvement in what we do. When someone says "There is a purpose in everything" I actually cringe. That attitude enables some of the worst evil I can imagine. The kind of evil that occurs when we choose not to oppose evil.

Old Federal Debt Argument... with recent numbers

It's an old argument made new again with all the recent stimulus money being tossed about.

1. Who is better at managing federal debt?
2. Who gets blamed when the debt explodes?

I don't mean argument in the philosophical sense. No one really debates these things. We usually use our political incantations to defend our choices and attack our opponents. Still, all sides need to start from essentially the same dataset or there isn't much point even trying.

For this purpose, I tend to pull data from the St Louis Federal Reserve folks. You can find them at...

http://fred.stlouisfed.org/

They'll do all the chart drawing you need, but you have to figure out which datasets to chart and what you can compare. What you do with the charts depends on your particular interests. Want to blame Congress for debt? Start shading the years when this or that party was in control. For extra points, decide whether the House or Senate is more responsible. Maybe you want to blame the President? Okay. Shade in their terms. To blame whole parties, shade by who has control of the most levers of power and you can cover both executive and legislative possibility. (For example, the Democrats didn't have all of Congress and the White House for very long during Obama's years. They had a filibuster proof majority in the Senate for a span measured in days.)

There are things you CAN do that aren't part of who you want to blame. Try the second-derivative game. When does the debt curve acceleration change? Visually, this can be done by imagining tangent circles that fit sections of the graph. I drew in a few on top of the shaded administration colors. Blue circles for debt accelerating upward. Red for acceleration downward. It's no shock that people with Keynesian attitudes create little blue circles right near the front of a recession. (Small circles imply rapid acceleration/deceleration.) That's what stimulus is supposed to be about, right? What I find more interesting (since they are all Keynesian in some sense) is who behaves better, latter when Keynes told them they should tighten up. Nobody likes sharp decelerations, so those curves tend to have large circles.

I intentionally chart public debt AS A PERCENTAGE of GDP. One can argument about that too, but I won't accept that challenge. The debt people take on even at a family level adjusts with their earning potential, so I reject absolute measures of debt and 'the sky is falling' arguments simply because the absolute number is huge. The US GDP is ALSO huge. While every recession is pain (especially painful to people who face the disruption they cause), we tend to bounce back and then continue. 

It IS true that our debt as a fraction of GDP has ballooned, but I find it interesting to note WHEN it balloons. We stimulate near recessions, but not every time. We tighten up a bit afterward, but the political parties are not equals in their willingness to do this hard task. Why? Well... would you vote for them if they did? Turns out some of us do and some of us don't.

From my personal perspective, no amount of tax cutting is ever going to reduce public debt. That is a steaming pile of dung of an idea. What might is cutting services, but good luck convincing people to do that. It's hard enough during good times when some of the politicians realize they can do it and not lose their jobs. 

If you really want out, better beef up the GDP and reduce the costs paid by the general public on certain categories of services. Health care, home ownership, and education are big chunks of what people spend for themselves and their children. If they could spend that money some other way, it might do better for GDP than what they can currently manage. The inflation levels in those sectors are ridiculous, but not many people are aware of that. You can be, though. Just go get those numbers from one of the federal sources (BEA, etc) and chart them yourself.

Question for any UBI advocates

Someone once said…

• With a UBI, would i do more of what i like, or more of what I love? Duh. I'd drop to half-time at work and open more work for someone else, and consider more seriously the entrepreneurial possibilities of my hobbies.

This response came about from an earlier conversation involving others where one of them made the argument FOR UBI that it is good for capitalistic innovation. I hadn't heard that argument before, so I gave it some thought. It sounds at least partially true to my ear.

And raises a fear.

I've sorta done this. I didn't drop to half time, but I did accept underemployment for about 12 years while I pursued three distinct start-ups.

Here is the problem I fear. I'm looking for UBI advocates to allay it.

When we drop down like this, tax revenues of all sorts are decreased in the sense of an opportunity cost. I accepted my income loss in exchange for a possibly different, richer future, but in that choice, I reduced MY revenue by not earning at my potential. That means less income tax for federal and state coffers, property tax for local schools, and less sales tax from purchasing goods and services. Less purchasing period. Less, less, less. [Okay, my landlord probably off-loaded his property tax on me, but that doesn't change the fact that I was not a home owner until this period in my life was almost over. He could have been off-loading it on someone else while I bought a new house and contributed more.]

How many of us can safely do this (fraction of the working population) and still deliver sufficient tax revenue to be distributed as UBI so we don't break our promise to give people time to find the path they love?

[For any libertarians… I'm not suggesting this justifies taxation. I'm looking at the next step in their argument after the money has already been taken from us. This isn't an 'ends justify the means' argument.]

Thoughts on Value Assigned by Labor Contribution

One thing early economists pondered that a many current economists agreed to set aside is the old notion of labor theory of value. Basically, an objective measure of the value of something produced because everyone can agree how much time it took to make/deliver it. It makes a kind of sense in the early days of industrialization, but becomes strained once people amass a lot of intellectual property. The notion still holds in popular imagination, but many economists have walked away from it.

For example, consider writing a book. After much effort, an author produces a manuscript. How to value it is the next question. Using the old method makes it easy. Multiply time spent by the author's hourly rate. Well. We don't really know the hourly rate, so let's just measure value in time units for know and understand that the hourly rate is really a unit conversion factor. Time into money.

• What a book generates in revenue when published is a different thing. Quite different. That measures what others see as the value and is recognized to be subjective. Some may adore it. Some may burn it. Preference. Subjective.

Before publication we make 9 copies of the manuscript and hand them around for feedback. Now there are 10 copies of the book.  No one would argue the value of the set rose 10x. Instead they fashion a sum of values for each labor contribution. Since we don't know the conversion rates for the people doing the copies, we must stick to time here too. Is it really a numeric sum, though? Are the people making copies contributing equally? In the modern era it doesn't matter much because copies can be made rapidly. That wasn't the case not long ago. Let's be idealistic, though, and stick with numeric sums.

• The idealistic method is easy, but we can introduce those conversion factors if needed. Instead of summing different types of time, we'd sum the same kind of 'dollars' and let the hourly rates absorb any belief we had that introduced inequality.

Now, through some unfortunate event, the original manuscript is destroyed. Eaten by a time-traveling T-Rex. Doesn't matter because we aren't going to track the labor associated with destruction. The T-Rex isn't being paid by anyone. The next question concerns how the sum is altered to represent the loss in value. Which term in the sum do we remove? The one for the original book because that was the thing destroyed? The book still exists in the form of 9 copies, so perhaps not. Maybe we should we spread the initial value of the book across those new 9 copies as an average? Probably not. That obscures the fact that the people making the copies didn't do the author's work. Should we pretend one of the copies is the new manuscript and remove the value created for one copy? Maybe, but then the sum reads as if the thing destroyed is one of the copies instead of the original manuscript. Try convincing a collector of books some day that the copy is just as good as the original when they think about buying it. They won't accept the argument.

• There are multiple ways to handle this, but the point made here is that we are fudging a formula to match what we believe to be the remaining value. Our original meanings for the terms get lost in the construction.

If we tried for a description that made use of a multi-world idea like one described by Karl Popper, we would argue that creation of the original manuscript created both World 1 and World 3 objects. The physical manuscript is present in World 1 and the 'ideal' version of it is in World 3. [Though it is highly unlikely Popper would have used Plato's terminology, we can use it loosely here.] Value would be present in the sum for each object with the bulk of it assigned to the World 3 representation. Upon destruction of the original manuscript, we lose that term in the sum, but not the term for the World 3 object because there are still 9 copies of it in World 1.

• This still has issues with meanings in the sum. How do we divide the authors contribution between the two objects? Anyone watching the author would see they are both created in the same timeframe, so a split is subjective and the very thing we are trying to avoid.

Some economists have retreated to a safer position arguing the question 'What is the value of X?' is about as meaningful as 'What is the difference between a duck?'. 

• Quantum physics theories are similar where they make no statements about meaningless questions. Many more questions have no answers unless until 'the system' is probed which means we don't know if it was that way before or became that way because of the probe. That difference turns out to be meaningless as well. 

Instead we ask 'At what value did X trade for Y last?' Whether it is $USD/gold ounces or kgs of copper kgs for kgs of gold doesn't matter. Two items minimum and a timestamp are necessary for a value question to be well formed. For our manuscript example, the book has no value until it trades. It does not have a ZERO value, though. It has a NULL value. No answer. What is the difference between a duck? What is the value of the manuscript? Same kind of question.

What does that do to the sum, though? It is eliminated unless all trades use the same measure and occur at essentially the same time. This can be done if we know hourly rates since we are converting to $USD here in the US, but all the trades better occur relatively simultaneously. Don't let much time go by or $1USD yesterday won't be the same as $1USD tomorrow. Not so bad, right? Well. With the hourly rates back, we are quite done with any objectivity. Trades are negotiations about preferences. Very subjective. Can we just stick with the original units of time? No. We'd be adding apples and oranges. The author's time is spread over the act of writing. One day is not like another. Consider opportunity costs to see this. If we can't even sum the author's duration, we are trapped. What is the difference between a duck?

To get back to the old notion of using labor as the means to assign value, we have to avoid Popper's World 3 objects. The manuscript is just paper with ink on it. Just a World 1 thing until read where it becomes World 2 subjective experiences. Try convincing an author that their new book is just ink on paper. They'll tell you they have a copy of it in their head too, so the World 1 and World 2 objects interact. Hmm… We never tried to assign value to the World 2 things. Those were supposed to be why people bought the book and would show up later as revenue. An author will tell you, though, that particular description is incomplete. So why not World 3 as well. World 4 too if there becomes a pop culture subjective representation of the book. Tolkein's Middle Earth books got that far.

3D world building

Learned how to get OpenSimulator running again for Julian. Load a few regions with freebie's and give him control of the place and he floods it. Ocean level to 100 meters. Blub.

In the mean time, I mess around a bit with an old project made much larger. Keeps me thinking about other things besides raiding the fridge, running around outside during the pandemic, and all that.

I was thinking about ground infrastructure needed to support something big like this. I'll give it a jelly fish look, though. It has stability problems without the old fins.

I'll probably have to learn the meshing tools too. 

Finally.

Sit and read with her

I admit I've always wanted to swap out the book she's reading for a physics text book. I'm sure she's old enough for that level of material now.

The King of Personal Perspective

Some of my friends are arguing that COVID deaths are currently undercounted because they are being labeled on death certificates as something else. Cardiac arrest, pneumonia, and other possibilities get listed, possibly because it is easier to believe we aren't living in a zombie apocalypse world [yet] so all that fake reporting on cable news can't be truth.

Some of my friends are arguing that some COVID deaths could be due to other causes. Their quick study of how doctors choose to describe 'cause' on death certificates leads them to suspect all sorts of motives for inflating the truth. Financial motives are the ones receiving scrutiny, possibly because it is easier to believe greed or a desire to avoid bankruptcy will move people to commit fraud than it is to believe that 'cause of death' has always involved medical judgement calls made by fallible, but mostly honest doctors.

I pointed out to a friend in the first group how a friend in the second group thinks. There response was to paraphrase me (correctly!), and then try to refute their position instead of accidentally thinking it was my position. Refreshing!

So their argument is that, instead of lowballing the COVID-19 death counts (because patients die without ever being tested), doctors are intentionally inflating those numbers by counting people who simply died of "routine" heart attacks as if they were COVID deaths? 

And how do those geniuses explain why so many more people in general happen to be dying now than usually do in the same period of time? Just a coincidence that those nefarious doctors are capitalizing on for..what nefarious purpose, exactly?

In writing it out, I got to see how difficult it is for each of my friends to understand how the other is thinking. It is obvious they see the world in different ways. They don't accept each other's evidence. Literally.

How? The King of Personal Perspective takes the throne.

Confirmation Bias ensures we spot supporting evidence and reject as irrelevant (at best) or fraudulent (at worst) evidence to the contrary. In the textbooks they call it 'perceptual framework', but it is really just the structure you've build over a lifetime that helps you make sense of the world. Evidence that doesn't fit is usually rejected without higher thought. There was once a time when we thought all swans were white. No exceptions. No one had ever seen one that wasn't... until they did... and they still chose a name for the bird that implied it wasn't a swan. 


This King is very difficult to depose. If you think you have, you probably haven't and he's chuckling at your naivety. You need serious help from others to stand a chance. You need people who don't see the world your way, but won't burn you at the stake for your beliefs. You need people who do see the world your way, but won't shun you if you pay attention to those who do not. Most importantly, though, you have to admit to yourself that you could be wrong, and prepare yourself to listen to Truth Spoken By Another. Such truths can be heard, but you have to appreciate an old demi-goddess. Her name is Temperance. Shut your mouth and still the perceptual framework's feedback. Even then it is really hard to hear. That framework is armored with defenders at the top ready to cast boiling oil down upon the attackers.

Reflecting my what I say and what I do

By itself, this list won't mean much to any reader. 

If, instead, you got here from David Brin's "Contrary Brin" blog, it will.

In one comment I made there, I mentioned reflecting in where my head has been and how much of it got expressed in actual words there. Turns out there IS a difference.

Anyway... this material is the review of my own comments that I mentioned. I post it here to avoid clutter over there. 

Wanna know more? Check out Contrary Brin. It is an interesting community.

Jan 22-25

Thinking in terms of influenza. Hadn't quite realized it was a corona virus

Jan 25-29

Pedantic thinking about trading transmission rate with lethality rate, but barely interacting

Jan 29 - Feb 15

personal anecdote while thinking about measles, then a gap to deal with death in the family

Feb 15-19

Thinking politics mostly. CA primary.

Feb 19-21

Thinking politics, beginning to mention equity market issues, but mostly silent on details.

Feb 21-25

Still thinking politics… specifically about predictions.

Feb 25 - Mar 11

Feb 25 first mention of dark thoughts involving equity markets and the economy, but still thinking politics. 

Then back to money in politics.

Mar 11-14

Mild optimism about virus. Gloomy about impact on economy. Angry about incompetent leadership. 

First prediction | political impact (due to economic one) will be worse than medical impact. 

[People were already working at mitigation efforts in a crowdsourced way and I could see them.]

{Started working from home. Stressing about sister.}

Mar 14-18

Looking at markets for forward looking evidence of administration intent independent of what they say in press briefings.

Personal anecdote involving co-morbidities. Another about how great civilization is at keeping most of us alive.

Wasted time refuting locumranch.

{Whole family now working from home.}

Mar 18-21

Nothing useful to offer about pothole idea. 

Kibitzed about relative rankings for States while others argued about which one sucked more than the others.

Mar 21-25

Thinking a bit about unemployment, but mostly from a political angle.

Staying out of medical projections game.

{Didn't stay out of it on Twitter.}

Mar 25-28

Wasted more time refuting locumranch's lazy thinking about lethality rates. 

Realized Matthew is right about locumranch.

[Larry was right too.]

Mar 28 - Apr 01

Minor economics quibbles about the role CA plays in the world. 

Avoiding defining 'essential'. Why? Can't seen to avoid wasting time refuting locumranch.

Apr 01-04

Viral defense through behavior change, then back to politics.

Then back to offering alternatives to biological conspiracy theories.

Apr 04-08

Began seriously to look at Libertarian positions being taken regarding quarantines and getting perturbed about them.

Quarantine distractions.

Stepped into 'essential workers' argument finally.

Apr 08-11

Comments on Libertarian positions and perspectives.

Apr 11-15

Nothing useful to offer. 

{Spending my time talking to local libertarians. Arguing sorta.}

Apr 15-present

Nothing useful to offer. 

{Spending my time with local libertarians. Arguing a bit more by taking unpopular position.}