23 January 2007
Slow Democracy
Then I wondered about why modern democracy is the best way to do things. As a joke, some one said that we need government to keep the politicians busy while we get on with life. Many a truth has been spoken in jest.
Lets face it, democratic government is largely about some kind of representative body endlessly debating what is the Best Thing to do. The more democratic and representative (which is a good thing, right?) the longer the debate. In most industries the concept of "design by committee" is seen as bad for business. Why is this seen as something of merit when it comes to government?
I suspect this is exactly because it takes so long. Changing things like government quickly is seen as a Bad Thing, since it usually goes hand in hand with lots of angry people and some times shooting. Taking a long time to change things or making it hard for one person (or a very small group) to change things quickly prevents this.
If a tyrant of some sort (king, emperor, chieftain) is in charge, this person can make decisions on the spur of the moment and radically change things overnight. People might still get angry, but since the tyrant is either there by force, or seen to be rightfully in the position of power, it might take them longer to get angry enough to actually do something about it. Its interesting to note that the systems of government that has lasted the longest has mostly been some variant on the tyrant theme. Oh dynasties may rise and fall, but the system of pharonic rule lasted a very very long time.
The tyrant, being one person (or a very small group) and being human, is subject to human limitations, emotions and lack of wisdom. The tyrant can not be right all the time despite any divinity that may be attributed to this person. In times where radical change is needed, one person making decisions can in fact be a good thing because it makes reaction time very quick.
If there is a drought that threatens the entire city, the king can decree that every one must participate in building an aqueduct and it will happen the next day. In theory this will increase the survival rate of nations that have wise rulers. It will also increase the power of nations with ruthless rulers. Foolish rulers lead to nations disappearing. What type of ruler you get is a bit random, especially if it is determined by heredity.
So maybe one reason for the success of democracy is because it becomes hard to change things quickly and the system as a whole is more stable. You don't easily get bad rulers that make bad decisions. It also means that it is less likely that you get a good ruler that makes very good decisions. But avoiding badness seems to be more important than to find success.
In a modern world where information flows freely and the immediate threats to existence are far fewer, it would seem that the slowing down effect of democracy is its biggest virtue. It makes things more stable.
Unless you have executive power to declare war on thin pretexts...
21 November 2006
Stephen Ritky Strikes Again
Interestingly enough, Stephen Ritky contacted me in a huff about me putting up his contact details on my blog. Go figure. So now if you want to contact him, you will have to ask me for his details I guess.
It turns out that he also wants back the two CDs that he gave me at our last meeting. At the time there didn't seem to be any strings attached and I assumed that it was some more marketing "induction" material. At least he offered to collect the precious CDs. I suspect that the value of the CDs are inversely proportional to the likelihood of me participating in a sucker deal on offer.
It appears that some things in life are harder to get rid of than others.
15 November 2006
Depth First Network Marketing
So I was called by a guy called Corne (+27 82 524 1888). He said we met at some or other conference/event thing. Now I am notoriously bad with names and things, and rather free with business cards, so I took his word. He said he had some business ideas he wanted to bounce off me so I agreed to meet him.
I soon realized that I was to meet him and another guy at the coffee shop. It turns out the other guy (Stephen Ritky) was there to get met to participate in this cool "asset based income" thing.
So I listened, asked questions and tried hard to understand. I also agreed to some mass meeting at a later date to do the signup thing etc. Afterwards I went home and thought it through in detail. Here are my conclusions.
Network marketing in the Amway sense is like a breadth first search in a tree data structure. In order for me to make money, I have to get as many people directly under me to sell products to. If they have their own networks, this benefits me too because the "value" trickles up.
The scheme that was pitched to me is more like a depth first search in a tree structure. Instead of getting as many people directly under me as possible, the structure is linear downwards. That is, every new participant is added at the bottom of a long line. Any one already in the line that adds another person benefits every also already in the line, because the "value" gets trickled up to every one. Of course the total depth below you determines the total benefit you get, but since every above and below you in the line benefits of additions, in theory you have to do less social engineering.
So it sounds great: less work for some benefits. BUT (there is always a but). With the depth first scheme you get a discount based on the total volume of money spent on products by the people below you. So if you have lots of people that spend lots of money, you may get up to a maximum of 21% kickback on the money YOU spent. So if I don't buy products myself, I get no benefit. The way to MAKE money out of this, is to start your own "second leg".
The second leg is basically a branch. The difference is that on this branch, you get actual money instead of just a discount. With a mature second line (according to the marketing spiel) you can make some good money. Sounds ok to me... BUT (there is that but again)
My initial involvement is likely to mean that I want to add people below me in the line, so that I can max out my discount. Some of the money these people spend will end up with the guy that started the line I am in. So in a sense I am working for that guy. I am growing his network for him while I get a stupid little discount. Sounds like a sucker deal to me.
When I finally get wise and start my own second line, I have to tap into my social connections AGAIN, and probably do a LOT of hard shmoozing before any one in that line starts seeing any benefit. So the "easy money" suddenly becomes very amway-like. I am going to have to irritate the crap out of every one and their dog and offer them a sucker deal to get their money.
The depth first approach is very clever though. The sucker deal is much better hidden than in the breadth first approach. It would seam initially that I get lots of benefit for little effort. The way it is pitched also casts it as "asset based" income. The only way that the term asset can be applied here is in the sense that the CIA uses it: you are an asset to be used of a specific purpose.
I must say that the whole thing seems very well organized and planned. It is marketed very smoothly. During our little meeting over coffee I was repeatedly encouraged to give them numbers or contact details of people I know. Apparently they also give training in how to shmooze people into the deal, at a "reasonable price" of course.
In the end, I guess they are welcome to take money from suckers in a semi-legal way. Just keep that crap away from me, please.
30 October 2006
Split Up
So I decided to split my coding ideas and discussions form my apparently more politically minded ramblings. For code stuff go to Code In The DeepFreez. Here I will stick to politics.
25 October 2006
Source Code Landscape
So I was working with some source code for a 3D application. Using the usual game control scheme (wasd and mouse look) during the testing of the application and jumping right back into Visual Studio gave me an idea.
For one moment after the game to code transition I found my self wanting to zoom out of the code to get my bearings on the "code landscape". In fact I was a bit surprised and disappointed when my mouse wheel only scrolled the text up and down. Wow, code as a landscape!
Code has structure. It has a lot more structure than say, an article. The code generally has some local cohesiveness, meaning that the 5 lines above and below the current line will probably be related, either by being part of the same function or passably a related function.
Imagine being able to zoom out of our source code and seeing some kind of cohesiveness measure. The same function will be shades of brown. Functions that it calls will be tinted red, green and blue depending on the order they appear in the code. At a sufficient zoom level you will not be able to see the text, but that will be replaced by color and texture of the code. We humans are good at picking out those things and also to remember things spatially given those queues.
Maybe its worth exploring this idea.
22 October 2006
Ecoterrorism?
In an earlier post I made some very radical suggestions. Radical as in political fringe, not radical as in way cool. In fact, suggesting genocide as an option is decidedly not cool. I have been talking to several people about these ideas and I feel the need to reevaluate my arguments.
Lets tackle the cornerstones of my argument. When is it justified to take a human life? Does the CO2 emissions present an immediate threat to my life? What are the options open to us?
So when is it ok to kill some one? Answer: never. Phew, that was simple. But hang on, what about self defense and protection and the law and war etc? Well, its never ok to kill some one, but some times its necessary. To simplify, if there is some one that is attacking me, and he is clearly going to kill me if I don't do something, and there is no possibility to flee and the only way for me to stop him from killing me is to stop him first, and the only means I have at my disposal is to kill him first, then it becomes necessary for me to do so in order to survive. That's a lot of ifs and buts there. It might be easier to do it the other way around. If it is not an accident and my intension is to kill you, I am committing murder. What about war? When I am in at war, I clearly have the intention of killing you. Some would say I have the duty of killing you. It would be easy to say that the aggressor in a war is committing murder and the defender has no choice, but that's not the way war works. War is messy. Some times the defender needs to strike first or strike to destroy the aggressor in order to regain safety. I would like to classify wars (simplistically) into two categories. Wars where there is a clear aggressor, like the second world war, and wars where things just deteriorates to a point of thuggery. In the first instance, the aggressor is clearly wrong and the defender could make a case for destroying him. In the second instance, both sides are equally wrong for letting the situation deteriorate and the killing is not justified on either side.
Not since the bronze age have wars been fought where the aggressor attacks due to a need to survive. My tribe will die if we don't have access to the watering hole. Your tribe is simply not open to negotiation, so it has become a matter of survival to reach the water. What happens after we reach the water reveals our true character. Do we share with you, the defeated, or do we deny you the means to survive like you did to us? Simple competition for resources needed to continue living. We have refined the "need to survive" quite a bit since then. The need for "lebensraum" seemed to justify the second world war for some. The need for "liberty" seems to justify it for others. The need for "prosperity" seems to be be the true measure of some recent wars as opposed to "safety" as it is being sold. Strip away all the politics and you do not end up with "survival" which means it is not justified.
On to the question of CO2 emissions killing me. Well, to be honest, the jury seems to still be out on that one. But that might not be the case for much longer. It is becoming increasingly clear that something is changing. Wether it is a natural process or the result of man made activities should become clearer in the years ahead. Unless of course it is in the interest of those that control our news sources to have us think other wise (in either direction). The problem here is the scale of the thing that is being done to me. It is larger than just me and will probably take longer than my life time to completely reveal itself. My children will be affected more than me. They will also have a harder time to stop it if necessary, if they still can. So the question of threat becomes more complicated. It is possible that technology will advance sufficiently in the next 20 years to eliminate the threat. This is what the USA is banking on at present. Or at least that is the alternative they give to not signing the Kyoto Protocol. So now the nature of the threat changes. It becomes "Will the USA develop and implement clean technology in time?" Since it is in the interest of those who supposedly control our news sources to tell every one that these clean technologies are on the way we could expect this message to be blasted to us full throttle. Which it isn't. We have to conclude that either our news sources are not being controlled, so the clean technology message is not being pushed, or that our news sources are being controlled but that the controllers do not want us to hear the clean technology message. Either way, it would make it rather unlikely that the USA will clean itself up in the next 20 years while oil lasts.
So does it present a clear threat? Well, no. Not a clear threat. A likely threat. Unfortunately it also seems that is might be an all or nothing threat. If it does materialize as a clear threat it might very likely be too late.
So now we come to options. My simplistic analysis earlier left out several options. Reducing a population does in fact not clean up the industries. One might argue that a smaller population might support a smaller industry, but the reduction in industry will most likely not be in proportion to the reduction in population. A reduction in industry is more likely to give the wanted results. Cleaning up industry will also have the wanted results.
As China accelerates its industrialization, it is likely that cleaner industry will become much more important in the equation. Do it right from the start and avoid the mess the USA is making.
So what can we conclude from all this? Firstly, there is not sufficient moral motivation for killing 100 million people in the USA. The threat they pose is too vague at present. It is also unlikely to solve the problem. A better solution is to inform and change opinion towards cleaner industry and cleaner living. It does appear that there is some organizational opposition to this message. So how does one get a message across to millions of people that do not want to hear and do not want to change? Not by flying an airplane into a building... or maybe they are on to something there.
16 October 2006
I believe
I recently read an article "Modeling Opinion Flow in Humans Using Boids Algorithm & Social Network Analysis" Gamasutra with some very interesting ideas in it. It revealed to me the interesting subject of social network analysis. Now I don't claim to know anything about the subject, but one idea jumped out at me: The relationships we have with our information sources. Considering that I made an argument for genocide in the previous post, I thought I had better reexamine some of my fundamental assumptions.
The idea from the article that got me thinking, is that a lot of our opinions are formed due to the relationships we have with our news sources. If a source that I regard highly informs me of X I will tend to move my opinion in that direction. If a source that I hold in contempt informs me of X I will tend to move my opinion away from that point of view.
There are a couple of things in this idea that are interesting. My relationship to a specific source has very little to do with the accuracy or veracity of the source. If I had only the Pravda to read in 1980 and I found it to be useful, I would hold an opinion that had little to do with truth. Further more, I could actively turn my back on the truth based on who is giving it to me. If Al Jazeera reports that Iraq actually does not have biological weapons, I would tend to believe that they actually do, because I believe that Al Jazeera lies to further an agenda.
To take this one level of abstraction deeper. In order for me to control opinion, I need to control a source of information that many people use to align their opinion. I would also need to reinforce the belief that this source is a good one. Finally, just to make sure, I need to push opinion about other sources into the negative regions, especially if they present an opposing view.
Of course your opinion is not only formed by news sources, but also by the people around you. Some one who you respect greatly will of course influence your opinion accordingly. Within one group, people tend to have the same news sources, so the person you respect is likely to be informed from the same places as you.
To be practical, what is my relationships with my news sources? Here is a quick rundown on a scale from 1 to 10 where 10 is I believe everything and 1 is that I will tend to believe the opposite:
- CNN 6
- BBC 8
- Sky news 7
- Reuters 8
- Wikipedia 8
- News24 8
- SABC 7
One thing that immediately struck me is that I am very biased towards the US/Western media. I also don't seem to have much of an Eastern or African view.
I would wager that its a "good idea"(tm) to be exposed to as many ideas as possible. But also, while seeking out ideas, one should evaluate the source itself critically. Failing to do so will have a few consequences. Having only sources that repeat the same ideas will starve you to the point where new ideas might even start to seem threatening. Failing to evaluate your sources will expose you to the possibility of manipulation by a small number of people who control the source. In short, it will turn you into an American....
