Reasons Unbeknownst

My brain needed some time off. Here is what I’m about to write about when I find some free time and viscous coffee.

–New book I’m reading – The Singularity is Near
–Effect of Accelerating change on the Economy
–Deflation – productivity – Yield Spread – Real Estate — including fancy Excel graphs

It’s funny because I’ve been convinced that we’re about to see a jump in deflation but I’ve been stuck on the consequences of it. It looks like this has all been figured out but the question remain are in the ways wealth is distributed. High-End Home Prices Likely to Dip I’m going to look more into wealth and all its flavors. Trust fund babies investing in real estate are possibly more likely hasten the death of old money.

Wealthy parents = connections = cronyism = job as middleman = high pay AND old money = real estate + internet = death of middleman = decline of high end real estate = bigger middle class?

Speaking of Real Estate. You’ve got to check out Trulia.com.

As far as tech goes, looks like SPARQL could be an actual, hype free, good idea.

Most of the right wing bloggers are calling the indictment of DeLay a partisan witchhunt. Although I’m more right leaning than left it’s ridiculous to jump to conclusions about the intent of the prosecutor, Ronnie Earle, especially when the evidence shows otherwise.

From the Texan Burnt Orange Report:

From a March 6 article in the El Paso Times: “Earle says local prosecution is fundamental and points out that 11 of the 15 politicians he has prosecuted over the years were Democrats.”

Still didn’t point out my favorite answer to the “Ronnie Earle is a partisan hack” meme- In the mid 80s Earle (who has been Travis County DA since 1976) filed misdemeanor charges AGAINST HIMSELF. He missed a deadline for filing financial disclosure forms so he filed charges against himself and paid a few hundred bucks in fines.

Check out the video of Alien vs. Predator at Crooks and Liars.

UPDATE: Still adding links. I’m going to update some outdated pieces of my blog this week as well… According to the prevailing wisdom, the following industries will die in the next five to ten years. I’m going to continue to add links to articles about the various industries so you won’t have to take my word for it.

Newspapers:
Web sites update faster than paper. Anybody can start a blog for free, no expensive printing press required.
Corante – Rebuilding Media
My thoughts on the future of Newspapers, Buzzmachine approved.
Craigslist: Stopping the Presses?
Television
Video production costs are dropping to freakish levels enabling competition. BitTorrent allows free, decentralized internet video distribution. People, including myself, use DVRs and fast forward through ads which will eventually cause layoffs and consolidation.
The End of the TV Industrial Complex
Exploding TV
Jeff Jarvis on the future of TV – Video
BitTorrent gets $8.75M from venture-capital firm

Government
Talk of E-Government has been around for years but XML+Open Source(AKA Business Process Automation) are going to lead to actual progress(and by progress I mean less government).
Document Management and Automation For the Government Enterprise

Software
Open Source and open standards will kill Microsoft according to most as applications move from the desktop to the web and become operating system agnostic. Office will be replaced by software supporting the OpenDocument Format.
Microsoft’s Nightmare Inches Closer to Reality
Oracle Feels the Software Squeeze

IT
Computers are so cheap now that it’s cheaper to replace a computer than to have it fixed. Open standards make arcane knowledge of inefficient systems worthless. Software is handling tasks that used to require people.

Computer hardware:
Even if you make a 40% profit on every comptuer it’s hard to make money when they’re selling for $200 and sales are flat. There is no killer app. Computers are so fast now that people have less incentive to upgrade. Imagine someone happily running Windows XP in 2015. After the phone/pda/mp3/blackberry combo device is released we’ll have less incentive to upgrade.
Dell’s Biggest Enemy: Commoditization
The $100 Laptop Moves Closer to Reality

Real Estate:
Read this. Information asymetries are vanishing. People are saving thousands selling their own home.
US Takes Estate Agents to Court of Internet Policy(MLS)

Movie Theaters:
Home theaters are good enough, videos will soon be released at the same time as the theater version.

Movie Rentals:
Blockbuster is nearly dead. Netflix and the Internet should finish them off soon. Netflix will be killed by video on demand over the internet.
Forbes – Netflix Boosted By Rapid Shift Away From In-Store Rentals
Blockbuster ‘Remains Inferior’ To Netflix

Phone service:
PDAs with Skype and broadband wireless will make phone calls free.
VoIP wants to cut the computer cord
The Future of Voice Communication

Manufacturing:
Robots, outsourcing

Office Assistants:
The paperless office might actually happen now that we have XML and open tech standards.
The Web Based Office Will Have its Day

Marketing:
Brands are dying as distribution monopolies(TV) are eroded by the internet. The focus is on products instead of advertisments.
The Multi-billion Dollar Suicide Pact Between Clients and Television

Automotive:
Cars are so reliable that used cars are becoming more attractive. Auto mechanics are going to have a rough time if cars switch to electric as newer and better batteries hit the market.

I read a lot. Some might say obsessively. Mainly about economics, culture, politics – which are all really just subsets of human nature. Even my on again off again love of technology revolves around the ways in which techno-progress is going to change the rules of the game in the very near future. I’ve surrendered my brain to Hayek and a handful of bloggers that understand business and technology because I think we’re at a point in history where many apparently disparate problems have been solved but nobody is really looking at how their solutions are related. That’s what I like thinking about.

All of the reading about technolgy and economics is pointing me to one idea. Deflation. More reading to do before I can say anything intelligent…

UPDATE: This is a moving graph which doesn’t show the hit from the election. The German people couldn’t let go of their Socialist tendencies in the Sunday election. Check out what happened to the German DAX stock market. Hopefully the German papers don’t bury the news about the markets in a footnote somewhere.

Random thoughts from p79…
Progressive taxation is wrong according to Hayek because it “violates equity before law”. I’d always had this idea that once we get government parsed down to the level where it’s no bigger than it has to be, the only debate will be about how progressive we should make taxes. I imagine that if government funding for welfare was ended, charities would step in so nobody would starve…

Which got me thinking about wealth distribution. If the government is much smaller national borders are less meaningful and foreign aid and what we know as welfare become the same thing.

The media business and just about any other businesses that profit from inefficiency are dying. If you change perspective and look at our supposedly high levels of productivity and efficiency from the top down it’s apparent that we have a long way to go. So here is the idea for the day:
The inefficiencies of modern business act as a system of wealth re-distribution. Millions of people are employed simply because the Internet and decent software haven’t previously existed. In other words, the Internet is going to make the wealth divide a heck of a lot bigger.
If the Internet makes national borders less relevant then it has the same effect as libertarian principles but there is no need to secure votes possibly leading to a left wing backlash.

One political question that plagues me is the problem of intelligence. Why is it that the left is composed largely of intellectuals when its reasoning is fundamentally flawed? Hayek’s insightful answer is that intelligent people over-value intelligence. Since we humans are the smartest mammals on the planet it’s hard to imagine that anything could be smarter. And when you don’t know your limitations it’s easy to overextend yourself, which is what he argues the left does. Specifically, the left likes to think it can help the poor by interfering with free market prinicples without a full understanding of the system they’re trying to manipulate.

Basically he’s saying that a free market is smarter than we are even though individual decisions are the main ingredient in a market. Imagine ten brain cells deciding they want to take control of the body because, after all, they are the ten biggest brain cells. Obvously, if that happend, we’d collapse in a warm noodly heap. The point is that the individual cells aren’t aware that they’re part of a diverse mix that works due to its decentralization. Consciousness won’t happen with ten big braincells just like economic growth won’t work with ten “smart” politicians (see France, Germany).

I also read somewhere that the left values intention over outcomes. The analogy is of a guy with a lit cigarette offering to help clean up a gasoline spill. The left would let it happen because he means well, the right would tackle him before he could do any damage after which the left criticize the right for preventing someone from trying to make the world a better place.

I watched the docu-drama Touching the Void the other day. In a land forgotten by time, with mountains nearly as tall as man’s imagination, two climbers, against all odds, miraculously survive, etc., etc. In one scene a severely dehydrated climber finds a trickle of water coming off the mountain and starts sucking mud off of rocks. It reminded me of my own futile attempt to give up coffee. In another scene, the mud drinker is trapped in a crevasse with a broken leg and starts talking about how he was raised a Catholic. I was anticipating the typical “Then I prayed to God and in what can only be described as a theocratically sponsored miracle, I managed to escape.” But no, he says “the thought never occured to me” which makes his situation even more dire because not only is he potentially going to die from hypothermia in an ice cave but he’ll then spend eternity in the fires of hell, left to ponder the irony of his defrosted fate.

I’m building up my about me page. The Occam in the post title is due to my belief that my beliefs trickle down from a handful of high level conclusions about the world I’ve come to believe. “In its simplest form, Occam’s Razor states that one should make no more assumptions than needed. ” I guess summaries are supposed to be reductionist anyway so it seems like a good fit. I write a little bit at a time trying to figure out what I believe, but never really condensing my beliefs into something I can read to remind myself why I think the way I do. Plus, I’ll be able to spend less time explaining why I think the way I do and more time writing about the things I like: coffee, monkeys, movies, etc., etc.

Race to the bottom: In what may be the funniest marketing disaster ever predicted, Gillette has created the FIVE blade razor. Boing Boing has the info. From The Onion:

F*** Everything, We’re Doing Five Blades
By James M. Kilts
CEO and President,
The Gillette Company
February 18, 2004 | Issue 40*07
James M. Kilts
Would someone tell me how this happened? We were the f***ing vanguard of shaving in this country. The Gillette Mach3 was the razor to own. Then the other guy came out with a three-blade razor. Were we scared? Hell, no. Because we hit back with a little thing called the Mach3Turbo. That’s three blades and an aloe strip. For moisture. But you know what happened next? Shut up, I’m telling you what happened–the bastards went to four blades…

I know what you’re thinking now: What’ll people say? Mew mew mew. Oh, no, what will people say?! Grow the f*** up. When you’re on top, people talk. That’s the price you pay for being on top. Which Gillette is, always has been, and forever shall be, Amen, five blades, sweet Jesus in heaven.

Stop. I just had a stroke of genius. Are you ready? Open your mouth, baby birds, cause Mama’s about to drop you one sweet, fat nightcrawler. Here she comes: Put another aloe strip on that f***er, too. That’s right. Five blades, two strips, and make the second one lather. You heard me?the second strip lathers. It’s a whole new way to think about shaving. Don’t question it. Don’t say a word. Just key the music, and call the chorus girls, because we’re on the edge?the razor’s edge?and I feel like dancing.

This is going to go down as the most egregious, disgusting thing ever done by a politician. Words are failing me so I’ll just use some excerpts from the ABC News article:

Rep. William Jefferson, D-La., who represents New Orleans and is a senior member of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, was allowed through the military blockades set up around the city to reach the Superdome, where thousands of evacuees had been taken…

Military sources tells ABC News that Jefferson, an eight-term Democratic congressman, asked the National Guard that night to take him on a tour of the flooded portions of his congressional district. A 5-ton military truck and a half dozen military police were dispatched.

Lt. Col. Pete Schneider of the Louisiana National Guard tells ABC News that during the tour, Jefferson asked that the truck take him to his home on Marengo Street, in the affluent uptown neighborhood in his congressional district. According to Schneider, this was not part of Jefferson’s initial request.

The water reached to the third step of Jefferson’s house, a military source familiar with the incident told ABC News, and the vehicle pulled up onto Jefferson’s front lawn so he wouldn’t have to walk in the water. Jefferson went into the house alone, the source says, while the soldiers waited on the porch for about an hour.

Finally, according to the source, Jefferson emerged with a laptop computer, three suitcases, and a box about the size of a small refrigerator, which the enlisted men loaded up into the truck. The Louisiana National Guard tells ABC News the truck became stuck as it waited for Jefferson to retrieve his belongings.

The soldiers signaled to helicopters in the air for aid. Military sources say a Coast Guard helicopter pilot saw the signal and flew to Jefferson’s home. The chopper was already carrying four rescued New Orleans residents at the time.

A rescue diver descended from the helicopter, but the congressman decided against going up in the helicopter, sources say. The pilot sent the diver down again, but Jefferson again declined to go up the helicopter.

After spending approximately 45 minutes with Jefferson, the helicopter went on to rescue three additional New Orleans residents before it ran low on fuel and was forced to end its mission.

The Louisiana National Guard then sent a second 5-ton truck to rescue the first truck, and Jefferson and his personal items were returned to the Superdome.

In an unrelated matter, authorities have recently searched Jefferson’s property as part of a federal investigation into the finances of a high-tech firm. Last month FBI officials raided Jefferson’s house as well as his home in Washington, D.C., his car and his accountant’s house.

Last week, Jefferson set up a special trust fund for contributions to his legal defense in light of the FBI investigation. A senior federal law enforcement source tells ABC News that investigators are interested in learning if Jefferson moved any materials relevant to the investigation.

“Gangs of Lesbian Chimps Attack Malevolent Man Monkeys” might be the grocery store tabloid headline for this enlightening article.

In other primate news, a Union has hired temp workers to picket in front of a Las Vegas Wal-Mart, in 104 F heat, for $6 an hour, then refuses them union membership.

From the article:

“I asked him (union organizer Hornbrook), I said, ‘How come we’re working here for $6 an hour? I need you to help us find a better job. I want information on the union,’” Rivera said.

He was told, he says, to secure his own job with a grocery store, and then the union would help him to be sure the store paid him appropriate wages.

“This is an informational picket line only,” Hornbrook said. “We’re paying these people. They were out of work before (joining their picket lines). This is an in-between-jobs stop. Picketing isn’t a career.

Of course this has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that they don’t make enough money to cover union dues, right?

Had an idea for something patently patentable assuming it hasn’t already been and assuming software patents are ethical. BuzzMachine linked to my last business idea about the media business which effectively made it public domain but assuming I wasn’t going to actually start the business and that someone else will then it has a nice utilitarian effect.

So the idea is to use Ajax(think Google maps) to cache data on the fly while navigating through database driven websites. Here’s how it would work:

If you’re clicking the next record button to scroll through say client information the server would notice that you’re moving from A to Z (probably through awareness of the query) and while you’re reading about the Samsonite accout, Smith’s data would be quietly downloading in the background.

It’d have to be smarter than simple awareness of the query though. It’d have to recognize deeper patterns than just sequential queries. The problem being solved isn’t a lack of web server speed, it’s the latency of the internet. As applications move from the Win32 API and LANs to the web as a platform new bottlenecks emerge. Latency is that bottleneck for future applications.

There would need to be some kind of standard way to measure client latency and adjust the bandwidth to match. The tradeoff here is bandwidth. One extreme has the client downloading the whole database to kill latency which is of course ridiculously inefficient not to mention expensive. So that problem would need to be solved and has been in the world of the CPU through L1 and L2 caching algorithms.

The second problem is the issue of outdated cache data. If millions of people are using and updating the same data then cached data is going to get outdated. This is similar to problem one but could be fixed by a simple server side check when the user clicks next (which re-introduces the latency problem) but could be fixed by presenting relatively static data (based on field statistics) first followed by more recent data.

Last paragraph isn’t an elegant solution, this is better: The server could constantly ping the client with verification of cache reliability using UDP instead of TCP (the limits of HTTP are starting to become apparent here) to cut latency. You could also have a variable which lets you decide if you’d like to display data without 100% accuracy, data that would simply change as you looked at the page if more recent data was found in the database.