Friday, October 29, 2010

Want




From the website:
"The Maverick is the true flying car: drivable on public roads with a civilian driver's license, and pilotable when airborne under S-LSA/E-LSA certification with a Sport Pilot license and Powered Parachute rating. Preparation for flight is quick and simple, thanks to our innovative wing deployment system, which also provides the Maverick maneuvering capabilities unique among powered parachutes."

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Job search update

I'm looking for a business software start-up that needs to build their first services team.  I'm the person they need to build that team.

Business software means that I'm looking for a company that sells software to companies.

Services includes both technical support and professional services.  Most business software start-ups will decide they need technical support first, because the salespeople will get tired of doing technical support.  But some will decide that they need professional services first, because they can get paid for professional services (like training and implementation consulting.)

Here is my 'marketing plan', which describes the position/company that I'm looking for in more detail.

This is my resume.

This is my profile on LinkedIn.

This is my new blog.  I'm writing articles there that demonstrate my expertise in this field.

My resume and LinkedIn no longer connect to this blog.  Maybe some potential employer will find this one, but I doubt it.  Most people don't click the links that you put right in front of them, let alone go to Google to dig.

I'm going to empty my brain into that new blog for the next few weeks.  I'm not going to work on anything else until I run out of ideas for what to post there.  When that is done then I'll go back to one of my other side projects.  Posting on this blog will probably be light for the next few weeks, because I'll be writing on the new blog.

Please let me know what you think about the new direction, resume, etc.

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Kids say the darndest things

Lincoln decided that he wanted to write a letter the other day.  He got out paper and then made Christy take dictation.  After they finished the first letter he made her write another.  Then he colored in some pictures to fill in the "blind" parts--the parts where there was nothing to see.

Laura and Rachel are two of our cousins that we see regularly.  Lincoln is 4.  I don't think he meant 'like' in the Junior High sense of the word.



What is prayer?

My wife asked me if I knew any good books about prayer.  As a matter of fact, I do.  But I asked what sort of book on prayer she wanted--what question was she trying to answer.  She had an impressive list of questions.

How come God sometimes changes His mind, like in the story of the good king Hezekiah?  How come sometimes He answers the prayer of one person, and sometimes He only answers after many people pray?  We are instructed to go to the elders for prayer when we are sick, but why do the elders' prayers count more than my own?  Is there a formula for how and when we are supposed to share our prayers?

Well, I'm in the process of building a shared prayer journal website, called Pray with Friends.  It turns out that I have some ideas on answers to these questions.  I think best while writing (and editing the dumb things I write in my first draft.)  So I'm writing my thoughts out here.  I'll also include a few books I liked at the end, for further study.

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

We are

Yesterday I had an idea for a new novel.  Last night I couldn't go to sleep because I couldn't get that novel out of my head.  The novel is about human colony ships flying out to earth-like planets that have no life and releasing various bacteria to start the terraforming process.

Today I found this fascinating article about bacteria will change your view of the world.  Apparently life is dramatically more complicated than we were taught in school.  How's this strike you:
"Strictly by the numbers, the vast majority — estimated by many scientists at 90 percent — of the cells in what you think of as your body are actually bacteria, not human cells."
It gets better.  The article is long, but well worth your time.

Apparently bacteria research will be a high-growth field for the next few years.

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Climategate is not dead

I have discussed climategate several times before.  The issue seems to have fallen out of favor with the media, and I have ignored it because I didn't have any links or new information.

Now one of the most respected physicists of the last 50 years has resigned from the prestigious American Physical Society in protest of the cover-up going on over climategate.  His accounts sure look like something other than science going on at the formerly prestigious APS.

More rumblings on the street

If you care about the economy then you must read The Big Picture every day.  After the election TBP will surpass Drudge as the single most important source of news as the lawsuits against the banks hit the street and the financial services sector's stock take a beating.

I won't copy and paste their excellent work today in rounding up the current state of the mess.  It's unclear whether the big scary lawsuits will hit before or after the election.  This is the only major issue on the American radar where the Democrats are more in synch with the public than the Republicans.  So I would not be surprised to see them turn up the heat on this issue as a way to get some favorable press running up to the election.  Go read the round-up on TBP.

This is the only time when the will of the people matters more than the will of the donors.  About three weeks out of every two years.  Let this be a warning to other industries.  Don't get yourselves in trouble during the last month of the election cycle.

Pattern matching

The video is interesting.  The X-Files background music detracts from the serious nature of the report--a poor editing decision by the El Paso TV station.  I was ready to dismiss this out of hand until they reached the side-by-side comparison of the lights over New York and the lights over El Paso.




I approach life with the assumption that I don't know everything.  I form a framework of what I think is true, and then I try very hard to allow new information to change my framework when it doesn't fit.

I can think of only four possible explanations:
1. Visitors have arrived from another planet.
2. A government is testing some new top secret weapon.
3. A new natural phenomenon has just begun to occur.
4. Somebody is playing a hoax.

I am inclined to dismiss the first three explanations as being too incredibly unlikely.  Long-distance space travel is just plain hard.  Governments have not demonstrated the competence to build technology leaps this large.  And any government that was competent enough to do that wouldn't show it off in the sky above New York City.  And any natural phenomenon would not occur for the first and second times in the same week, like this.

The more times this happens the more likely we are to get an explanation.  My guess is that it has to happen at least ten times or we will not get an explanation.

If I were the marketing director for a new movie about aliens landing on earth, this is exactly the sort of viral marketing campaign I would do.  I wouldn't actually put the lights in the sky.  I would just film realistic crowd scenes of people looking at the sky and then use photoshop to fake the sky images.

That said, the video is still spooky and unnerving.

Monday, October 18, 2010

Evolution is chaos!

New Scientist's recent cover article is a fascinating discussion of some new meta-analysis of several trains of study in evolution.  It's not too thick with technical terms.  The results are interesting and fascinating.  Scientists seem to be disproving one of Darwin's big assumptions.

The really really short version is that evidence appears to indicate that climate change (and similar external events) do not cause evolution.

Plants, animals, and insects all migrate when the climate changes.  And evolutionary changes do not correlate with those migrations.  Evolutionary changes occur completely randomly, probably driven exclusively by internal DNA defects.

This leaves a big hole in evolutionary theory.  DNA defects have shown no ability to perform the big changes, like the development of the eye or the lung.

It also makes it impossible to predict evolutionary change going forward.

Interview with an Economic Hitman

I just ran across a wide-ranging interview with John Perkins.  John is the author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman.  Confessions is one of the best books I've ever read about how the world really works.  I rank it right up there with Michavelli.  Think of it as a tell-all book from one of Michavelli's modern henchmen.

If you want to talk about what's wrong with the world today, or about the battle between the wealthy and the poor, then you have to read Confessions.  And you will get a good taste of John Perkins by reading that interview.

This is how you fix Congress

One of my aunts just sent me this chain email.  I have a policy against forwarding them, because I know that many of them are spawned by spam marketing companies who use them to harvest email addresses.  But this one made me laugh, so I decided to post it.  This is unedited.

"
Congressional Reform Act of 2010
1. Term Limits.

  12 years only, one of the possible options below..

  A. Two Six-year Senate terms
  B. Six Two-year House terms
  C. One Six-year Senate term and three Two-Year House terms

2.  No Tenure / No Pension.

A Congressman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they are out of office.
  

3.  Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security.

All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately.  All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the American people.
 

4. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.

5. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise.  Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.


6. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.

7. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.

8. All contracts with past and present Congressmen are void effective 1/1/11.

The American people did not make this contract with Congressmen.  Congressmen made all these contracts for themselves
.

""

It's a good start.  Most of these are too vague to be enforced.  Number eight would probably qualify as an ex poste facto law, and would not hold up in court.

Thursday, October 14, 2010

The other shoe is about to drop

The financial crisis was bad.  Round two will be worse.

This crisis was caused by bankers who made risky mortgage loans and then re-sold them as safe investments (CDOs.)  In round one the banks got bailed out and the people on Main Street were thrown a bone (HAMP, which I can personally attest is a huge sink-hole of bureaucracy and incompetence.)  In round two the investors who bought the CDOs will get thrown a bone while the banks get bailed out again.  Or the market as we know it will not survive.

The banks engaged in a risky game of fraud.  They gave mortgages to people who could not afford them, and then repackaged and sold those risky mortgages with AAA credit ratings.  Investors bought those CDOs thinking that they had little risk.

The banks were in a hurry to make as many of these mortgages as they could.  And the loans didn't really meet lending standards anyway.  So the banks didn't actually do their paperwork properly on those mortgages.

Borrowers have been aware of this for years.  Many people have successfully fought foreclosure by arguing that their bank could not show that they have the right to foreclose because they didn't have the paperwork showing that they owned the property.

In an effort to counter that argument, banks have been arguing to streamline the foreclosure process.  They have taken to having a "qualified" employee evaluate the paperwork and sign a legal affidavit saying that the paperwork is all in order.  They succeeded in getting some courts in some jurisdictions to accept their signed summary and foreclose on property without demonstrating the actual paperwork in court.  This practice is now being called "robosigning" because there is strong evidence that these employees are not looking at any paperwork whatsoever and are bald-faced lying to these foreclosure courts.

We know this because there have been numerous cases where the summary documents were quite wrong, and banks have foreclosed on the wrong homes.  Foreclosure agents have literally picked locks and entered homes, with genuine legal paperwork in hands from the foreclosure courts, where the home in question was owned outright by the person living there.  They didn't have a mortgage, and they certainly didn't have a mortgage with the bank that had foreclosed on their home.

Lawsuits followed, of course.  The depositions from those lawsuits revealed the robosigning practice.  And that led directly to the current moratorium on foreclosures for many banks.

The moratorium has caused the investors to get quite nervous.  They have started reviewing the paperwork that the banks gave them.  What are they finding?  The second shoe.

Surprisingly enough, the banks who did shoddy paperwork on the mortgages also did shoddy paperwork on the CDOs that they sold.  So instead of buying tranches of secure mortgages, the investors bought tranches of incomplete paperwork that fail to meet the standards of being "mortgages" in a court of law.

At this very moment investors are consulting their lawyers to determine what to do.  If all investors could somehow agree to not sue the banks for fraud then everyone and everything would be fine.  As long as their is no lawsuits from the investors' side then the banks will find a way to conduct business as usual and will pay those investments in a reasonable manner.  But that is a classic prisoners' dilemma game--a scenario where the first one to defect wins.  Someone will understand that and sue--any minute now.

These lawsuits will cause a huge problem for the banks.  There isn't any way to look at the physical evidence and not see systemic, intentional, wide-spread, large-scale fraud.  Trillions of dollars worth of fraud.  Their only defense is pleading gross negligence and incompetence.  And no one will buy that defense.

The only hope that the banks have is that the federal government still has their claws dug in.  In some of these cases the federal government will be listed as a co-defendant because the federal government owns a large stake in the bank.  And the federal government has a long history of writing ex post facto laws to legalize past bad behavior, especially for the banks.

The moral dilemma here is that convicting those banks of fraud and punishing them appropriately will crash the economy.  The 1930s will look fun by comparison.  Thirty percent unemployment.  Trillions of dollars will be lost.  No one will benefit except the lawyers.  We would genuinely be better off if we could avoid that fate.  But the only way to do it would be to let the crooks get away with fraud.

If you can think of a solution that brings the crooks to justice, keeps the investors from losing everything (even pennies on the dollar would work), and doesn't crash the market, then please speak up.

Do you care about the internet?

Cory Doctrow has a brilliant op-ed in The Guardian concerning freedom, copying, paying artists, and the many bone-headed attempts to police the internet.  If you care about the internet then you need to read this article.

I particularly like this quote:
"copying isn't going to get harder, ever."
That sentence fragment is fairly important.  If you are hoping to never live in an Orwellian nightmare then you need to digest and understand that point.

Do you get the internet?

Take this little test.

If you lol then you understand the internet.

If you don't get it then don't fear.  It's not that important.  It's just the internet.

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

What's in a name?

I'm a facts and figures guy.  I'm no good at art.  I can recognize attractive, but I can't create it.  And I feel like I'm no good at naming things, either.  Picking a name is just too much of an artistic and marketing exercise.  So....

I'm working on a project that needs a name.  I've researched and come up with a list of possible choices.  I need your feedback on which name you like best.  You are also welcome to suggest other names.  But, frankly, all of the good names are taken.

What It Is
(Feel free to skip this part if you think you don't want to get too caught up in the details.)

Representative democracy is a form of government where the people elect representatives, and the representatives write the laws and manage the government.

Direct democracy is a form of government where the people debate each and every decision themselves--everyone is involved in every decision.

There are dozens of other variant forms of democracy.  Anticipatory, Athenian, Christian, Consensus, Constitutional, etc.  Each of these different forms contains a different set of rules concerning:
* Who makes the decisions (laws, treaties, government spending, etc.).
* How the decisions get made.
* The goal of the decisions.

I'm designing a new form of democracy.  (Yes, this is an extension of Democracy 2.0.)  The big idea is to get rid of the corrupting influence of money, and to put the people back in charge of the government.

This is NOT about liberal or conservative policies.  This is only about the way in which the decisions get made.  I think that debating policy is a waste of time as long as wealthy individuals, companies, and special interest groups can buy whatever policies or loopholes they want.

In my mind representative democracy has several weaknesses, which I hope to address:
* Money corrupts the system, and all of the representatives.
* The representatives are left in charge of their own rules of conduct and ethics.
* There is no check or balance against the government assuming additional powers.
* The system is very rigid and hard to change.
* The system does not respond well to the peoples' changing priorities.
* The results of the decisions are not measured against any goals or reviewed in any organized way.
* There are too many laws, and the laws are too complicated to be understood by average people.

Here are a few goals and ideas that I have for the project:
* Obviously the good parts of our government will be kept: equal protection under the law, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, etc.
* People vote their goals and priorities, which drives the decision-making process.
* Very strong separation of powers and checks and balances.
* Every decision has measurable goals.
* Every decision is regularly reviewed and changed if the goals are not being met.
* The decision-making process itself is monitored and modified as new ideas and technologies become available.
* Strong protections in place to ensure that every law is understandable to average people and that everyone has ample time to review and comment before the law is passed.

Additionally, I'm not going to design the new system all by myself.  I'm going to launch a web-based project where anyone can give their ideas and add their input.  I'll seed the discussion with some of my own ideas.  And I'll moderate the process, to keep everyone on task.  But, ultimately, the crowd will make the final decisions on the design.

Naming Parameters
This is a project to design a new form of democracy.  So we are naming the project and the new form of government at the same time.  If the new form of democracy is called Bobble then the project will be called the Bobble Democracy Design Project.  Or something like that.

I have to be able to get a domain name for the project (and ideally for the new form of democracy.)  So, if we go with Bobble, then I will want to grab these domains:
bobbledemocracy.org
bobbledemocracyproject.org
thebobbledemocracyproject.org
bobbledemocracydesignproject.org
thebobbledemocracydesignproject.org
bddp.org (or .net)

(Yes, there are many 4-character domain names available in the .net and .org extensions.  bddp.org and bddp.net are both available, for instance.  I would only put up a site and email on the short domain name, and I would put simple redirect pages up on all of the others.)

This means that I can't use a name that is already in use, even if it isn't exactly a "form" of democracy.  For instance, reformdemocracy.org is taken.  Lots of good names are taken.  Many of them are just held by squatters who want you to pay $10,000 for the neat domain name.  I can't do that.

Some of the good names are taken by similar projects.  These projects have established branding and history, so I would have to fight them for the name or carry their baggage if I wanted to use that name.  opendemocracy.org is an example.  They are doing some good things to highlight civil rights abuses and stuff like that.  I'd like to see them participate in my project.  But I can't fight them for their name.

My Ideas
I've vetted all of these to make sure that there isn't already someone else using the name.  These are listed in no particular order.

Fair Democracy


Results-Driven Democracy


Adaptive Democracy


Incorruptible Democracy


Adaptable Democracy


Quest Democracy


Principled Democracy


Pragmatic Democracy


Humanitarian Democracy


Systematic Democracy


Planned Democracy


Honest Democracy


Evolving Democracy


Honorable Democracy


Equitable Democracy


Experimental Democracy


Modular Democracy


Scientific Democracy


Vote
Either comment below or send me an email.  If you have another idea I would love to hear it.

Monday, October 11, 2010

Linkin Park grew up?

I've never been a big fan of Linkin Park.  I watched this new video because I heard that the effects were cool and interesting.  That is true, but I must say that the sound and the lyrics are much more mature than I expected from these guys.  I wonder what happened.

The video is worth upscaling to full 1080p HD and watching full screen.







Lyrics (courtesy of directlyrics.com):
This is not the end
This is not the beginning
Just a voice like a riot
Rocking every revision
But you listen to the tone
And the violent rhythm
Though the words sound steady
Something emptys within em

We say yeah

With fists flying up in the air
Like we’re holding onto something that’s invisible there
Cuz we’re living at the mercy of the pain and the fear
Until we dead it forget it
Let it all disappear

Waiting for the end to come
Wishing I had strenght to stand
This is not what I had planned
It’s out of my control

Flying at the speed of light
Thoughts were spinning in my head
So many things were left unsaid
It’s hard to let you go

I know what it takes to move on
I know how it feels to lie
All I wanna do is trade this life for something new
Holding on to what I haven’t got

Sitting in an empty room
Trying to forget the past
This was never meant to last
I wish it wasn’t so

What was left when that fire was gone
I thought it felt right but that right was wrong
All caught up in the eye of the storm
And trying to figure out what it’s like moving on

And I don’t even know what kind of things I said
My mouth kept moving and my mind went dead
Picking up those pieces now where to begin
The hardest part of ending is starting again

All I wanna do is trade this life for something new
Holding on to what I haven’t got

This is not the end
This is not the beginning
Just a voice like a riot
Rocking every revision
But you listen to the tone
And the violent rhythm
Though the words sound steady
Something emptys within em

We say yeah

With fists flying up in the air
Like we’re holding onto something that’s invisible there
Cuz we’re living at the mercy of the pain and the fear
Until we dead it forget it
Let it all disappear

Rock Me Baby

And your little dog, too!

When I rail against official corruption I'm not just talking about the elected officials.  Here's an interesting piece from the Wall Street Journal about congressional staffers who placed stock market bets on companies that were about to benefit from laws that they were working on with their bosses.

Corruption is a complicated beast.  We will only end corruption with a detailed security analysis and a complete overhaul of the rules for how our laws get made.

Saturday, October 9, 2010

"It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow-beings."
--Gandhi
I have been thinking about this topic for quite some time.  I have had trouble finding just the right words.  I ran across this quote in Gandhi's autobiography, and I was amazed.  He was a peculiar man, based upon the evidence of his own autobiography.  And yet sometimes his words pierce so deeply to the heart of the matter.

Anytime one person speaks of another their listeners learn about both parties--the speaker and the person they are speaking of.

When a speaker humiliates someone we learn that the person being spoken of may be guilty of some shortcoming. We also learn that the speaker is definitely guilty of being prideful, arrogant, petty, jealous, and many other vices.

When a speaker honors someone we learn that the person being spoken of may blessed with some praise-worthy quality.  We also learn that the speaker is definitely blessed with wisdom, grace, compassion, and many other virtues.

Jesus said:
“You know that the rulers in this world lord it over their people, and officials flaunt their authority over those under them. But among you it will be different. Whoever wants to be a leader among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first among you must be the slave of everyone else. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve others and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
--Jesus (Mark 10:42-45)
Leaders in our era know nothing of humility.  This is an embarrassment.

* I found this quote at the end of chapter XX of his autobiography.  I looked at some prominent lists of Gandhi quotations and didn't find it anywhere.

Professional journalism

I love Wikipedia.  I link to it often for simple stories and scientific notes.  But Wikipedia has a huge problem.  It lacks professional journalistic ethics and backbone.

This article in the Village Voice is the best example I have found of Wikipedia's failure.  Warning: this article is primarily about a wealthy man committing incest with his daughter.  It's professionally written, but the subject matter is disturbing, even handled professionally.  But the end of the article outs Wikipedia for its lack of backbone.

I did search Wikipedia in order to confirm the accusations in the Village Voice article.

Professional journalism is dying.  That is a shame.  We should endeavor to find a way to maintain the investigative research and ethics of truth-telling that exists in some parts of the journalism animal.  We will all be worse off if that spirit dies.

Thursday, October 7, 2010

Depression treatments research

I just ran across this interesting research on the effectiveness and popularity of depression treatments.  Now that they have published the data the popularity of the treatments should change significantly.

I don't particularly care about the popularity side of the study.  That's a little interesting.  It's mostly sad that so many people have been focusing on ineffective treatments.

According to this research, these are the most effective treatments for depression:
  • Exercise (far and away the most effective treatment)
  • Talk therapy
  • SSRIs (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor)
  • Meditation
  • Spending time with pets
  • Adequate sleep
  • Cognitive Behavioral therapy
  • Psychotherapy
  • Light therapy

And the most ineffective treatment list:
  • Caffeine
  • Effexor
  • Trazodone
  • Paxil
  • St. John's Wort
  • Fish oil
  • Depakote
  • Magnesium
  • Flax seed oil
  • Effexor XR
  • Cannabis
  • Cold Shower
  • Lexapro
  • Prozac
  • Chiropractic care
  • Tryptophan
  • Vitamin B
There are two dozen other treatments that fall between those two lists.  Hit the article and mouse-over the blue dots to see the whole list and find your favorite treatment.

That wikipedia article I linked on SSRIs is quite interesting.  It includes an enlightening quote from a major research study:
"The magnitude of benefit of antidepressant medication compared with placebo ... may be minimal or nonexistent, on average, in patients with mild or moderate symptoms. For patients with very severe depression, the benefit of medications over placebo is substantial."
Several of the drugs listed as ineffective are SSRIs.  How can they be both effective and ineffective?  Read the quote again.  Ineffective against mild or moderate symptoms, but effective against very severe depression.

So, my summary of the treatment scores is that successfully treating mild to moderate depression depends upon what you do, much much more than on what you swallow.  But very severe depression may respond to certain drug treatments.

More Congressional incompetence

Once again, Congress shows that it does not understand the consequences of it's actions.  They passed this big healthcare overhaul without really thinking through how businesses and people would react to it.

If you raise the taxes on milk then people buy less milk.  But if you raise the taxes on alcohol then people buy less milk.

People rarely respond to rules, like taxes or healthcare mandates, the way they are intended to.  If you pass a tax on alcohol then you are probably expecting people to buy less alcohol.  When Congress passed their healthcare mandates they expected companies to just suck it up and pay for the additional coverage.  But the Department of Health and Human Services has realized that many employers will simply drop their healthcare coverage entirely and leave their employees worse off.  So the DHHS is now handing out exemptions to the healthcare mandate.

Soon every company in America will apply for a waiver.  Those that don't get it will drop their employee healthcare coverage.  Those employees will be forced to buy their coverage from the government.

So the mandate will end up having no effect except to leave many workers worse off, and to improve the profits of companies that don't get the waivers.  This is stupid.  Even if you think that Congress's goal was to socialize healthcare then you must agree that the whole DHHS waiver maneuver seriously undermines it.

You have to design laws with people's responses in mind.  When we do this, how will people react?  What could people do to subvert this rule?  What will the long-term effects be?

If you really want every employee in America to be insured then a mandate is the wrong way to do it.  That's a stick.  You need a carrot, or at least a carrot and stick approach.  How about a graduated scale of payroll taxes?  Uninsured employees cost X% more in payroll taxes than insured employees.  I'm sure there are many similar approaches that would make companies choose to provide appropriate minimum levels of insurance.

I don't really know who Urban Institute is, but they wrote a great article describing what they call 'Evidence-Based Policy'.  This is the sort of planning and thinking that I believe needs to happen before a law is written.

But those implementation issues are not the real problem.  Adding health insurance increases the cost of each employee.  If push comes to shove, many companies will choose to lay off workers rather than absorb the extra cost of providing additional insurance.  There isn't a carrot that you can attach to that.  It's simple math.  So your healthcare mandate (or whatever other rule you implement to replace it) will decrease overall employment.  And it will do it at the bottom end of the employment scale--low earning part-time jobs go first.

This is why the Democrats are going to lose big in this coming election.  They chose to decrease overall employment during a recession.

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

funny video break



Funny the way it is

Last week while I was waiting to hear about whether or not I was about to get a job, I was feeling depressed.  Not rock-bottom.  But I felt down.

As the days dragged on I assumed I didn't get it.  Employers are getting worse and worse about not notifying candidates they choose not to hire; even candidates that they did ten interviews with.  So I could feel the bad news coming.

Today I got the confirmation that I did not get the job.  I'm distracted.  I'm thinking about what I should do next. But I'm not depressed.  Annoyed.  Frustrated.  But not depressed.

Monday, October 4, 2010

Business as usual

I'm toying with another side project--something related to Democracy 2.0.  That's a long story.  Anyway, as I was brainstorming for that project I wrote this sentence:
Donating money has replaced voting in the American government.
I stopped there and almost cried.

Then tonight I came across this story.  What really strikes me here is that Alabama state legislators were arrested by the FBI today.  They must have been remarkably sloppy.  This is business as usual.  Sure it is unethical and probably illegal if you don't use the right words and signals--remember that the people who are accepting the bribes are the people who wrote the laws against bribery.  But no one gets in trouble for buying or selling votes any more.

This won't stick.  And it won't stop anyone else from doing it.

A moment of artistic zen

The Predictioneer's Game

I just finished reading 'The Predictioneer's Game' by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita.  If you are interested in the future this is a must read.

Bruce is one part economist, one part social scientist, and one part mathematician.  He has developed a formula that describes the negotiation process.  He studies each party to a negotiation and assigns numerical values (0 to 100) to their positions, goals, and power.  Then he solves the formula and predicts the results of the negotiation.

His work is based upon game theory.  So he calls each negotiation a 'game'.  He gives examples of wars, negotiations leading up to wars, bidding wars, lawsuits, elections (and sham elections), multi-party political struggles, and car buying.  His explanation of how to get the best price for a new car is the most buyer-empowering process I have ever seen.  (Unfortunately it only applies to new cars.)

I find this approach very appealing.  He doesn't give away any of the formula itself.  He only explains the variables that he assigns as inputs.  Frankly, that's enough for me.  I don't want to do the math.  That's why we have computers.

He cites several examples of correct predictions.  The future predictions that he gives appear to be reasonable, and not obvious to anyone who does not approach the subject through this type of disciplined methodology.

He has posted an online version of his game.  So you can prepare a tab-delimited text file with a series of values representing each party of the negotiation, and then upload the file and see the results of the game.  He doesn't show you the formula.

Of course this is only a methodology, and not a guarantee.  He gives several examples when his predictions failed.  And it appears that he has a pretty good grasp of the failure conditions.  The biggest two failure conditions are outside interruptions (natural disasters, sex scandals, and other exceptional events that interfere with the negotiation process) and people who do not seek their own advantage (idiots and idealists.)  But these two issues are problems for game theory in general, and not unique to his methods.

There are a few modifications that I would like to see implemented in Bruce's formula and process .  The following won't make much sense if you haven't read the book.

Three Goals
His process only accounts for a single goal for each party.  I don't think that humans usually work that way.  I think that we usually have three different goals in mind:
* Ideal - The perfect state that we hope to achieve.
* Expected - The result that we expect to be able to achieve.
* Minimum - The poorest result that we are willing to accept.

The intervals between these goals affect the way that we play the game.  It's probably a fallacy to identify a 'normal' game.  But the most obvious case for these three goals would be that a person's Ideal goal is higher than their Expected goal, and both of those are higher than their Minimum goal.  In this situation a person is likely to negotiate and act in good faith.

If a person's Expected goal is very close to either their Ideal or Minimum goal, above their Ideal goal, or below their Minimum, then it will greatly alter their approach to the negotiation.

When a person's Expected goal is very close to their Ideal goal then they will shift into either a more flexible or a more rigid negotiating strategy.  Pragmatists will become more flexible in order to get the process over with quickly.  True believers, idealists, and other extremists will become more rigid as they get caught up in the fervor of reaching their Ideal goal.  (This might be the true test of an idealist.)

When a person's Expected goal is very close to their Minimum goal they will use a very rigid negotiating strategy and expend a great deal of time and energy on the negotiations.

When a person's Expected goal is lower than their Minimum goal they are going to either undermine the process, cheat, and otherwise act in poor faith, or they will expend a tremendous amount of time and energy in an incredibly flexible negotiating strategy.  For example, a dictator will not join a negotiation where they expect to be hanged as a result.  But a murderer who has been arrested will negotiate nearly anything to get out of the death penalty.

When a person's Expected goal is higher than their Ideal goal they are going to treat this negotiation as a means to an end to improve their negotiating position in some other game.  This is the ugly political process of giving votes on one issue to gain votes on a separate issue.

Context
Every negotiation takes place within a context.  Each participant has other concerns that they are concurrently negotiating (or expect to begin negotiating soon.)  The participants have an existing relationship, and expectations for a future relationship.  And there are other parties who are not directly involved in a particular negotiation, but who have an interest in either a resolution to negotiations or to one or more of the participants.

Each participant has many ongoing negotiations.  If this negotiation is not one of their top priorities then it will not get their full attention.  They will probably delay it where possible.  When delay becomes impossible they will adopt a very flexible negotiating strategy in order to get done quickly.

The more negotiations that a person has going on, or expects to have going on soon, the more likely they are to be willing and able to be very flexible in their negotiation strategy.  This is especially true when some of the other participants to this negotiation are also participants in other negotiations.  This is the type of situation where politicians trade votes.

When two or more parties negotiate multiple separate games, over time, they establish a relationship.  Each participant will form an opinion of the other participants, especially concerning their trustworthiness.  Participants who have a long history of negotiating successful games will be able to negotiate more flexibly with each other because of the trusting relationship.  And conversely, when trust has been betrayed in the past  then current and future negotiations will be less flexible.

When one or more participant wants to negotiate more games after the current one, then that person will adopt a more flexible negotiating strategy.  For instance, a businessperson who is attempting to establish a reputation and earn repeat business will negotiate more deeply than an established company.

Sometimes there are external parties who may choose to interfere with a particular negotiation game.  There is a near-unlimited number of possibilities here.  Friends, enemies, and parties to other negotiations (current or future) are the prime suspects here.  A mistress, for instance, may be content to remain hidden until the money and notoriety from exposure gets too great.  Or someone may see an opportunity to hurt an old enemy by interfering with a negotiation.

I'm not certain that all of these scenarios are worth codifying within the prediction formula.  But I believe that for important negotiations each of these possibilities should be examined as a possible tactic for improving one's position.  That type of strategic and tactical research is what Bruce's consulting company does.

Stupidity
Humans aren't always rational.  Sometimes people just fail to see an opportunity.  Sometimes people have hidden constraints that limit them from exercising an obvious negotiation tactic.  Sometimes people bluff.  And sometimes your estimations of their goals and values are simply incorrect.

This is something that the predictive formula should be able to test and adapt for.  Almost all negotiations take place over a series of rounds.  As each round concludes you can compare the predicted and actual positions.

It is not as simple as updating the formula with the actual values and recomputing.  Each variation needs to be examined and explained.  Those explanations need to be fed into the strategic and tactical plans for future rounds of negotiation.

If you decide that someone is bluffing then you need to decide if you want to extract more concessions from them, at the risk of moving their Expected goal above their Minimum goal and causing them to begin subverting the negotiations.

If you decide that someone has a hidden constraint and cannot ask for a concession that they need, then you can use that information to your advantage.  Maybe you can threaten to expose their weakness to coerce greater concessions.  Or maybe you can offer the concession as an olive branch, in order to gain the upper hand.

If you decide that someone is simply stupid then you can play them in order to gain greater concessions.  You can arrange the situation to make the stupid person look heroic while they make much larger concessions than they should.  Call this the Neville Chamberlain tactic.

The Predictioneer's Game

I just finished reading 'The Predictioneer's Game' by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita.  If you are interested in the future this is a must read.

Bruce is one part economist, one part social scientist, and one part mathematician.  He has developed a formula that describes the negotiation process.  He studies each party to a negotiation and assigns numerical values (0 to 100) to their positions, goals, and power.  Then he solves the formula and predicts the results of the negotiation.

His work is based upon game theory.  So he calls each negotiation a 'game'.  He gives examples of wars, negotiations leading up to wars, bidding wars, lawsuits, elections (and sham elections), multi-party political struggles, and car buying.  His explanation of how to get the best price for a new car is the most buyer-empowering process I have ever seen.  (Unfortunately it only applies to new cars.)

I find this approach very appealing.  He doesn't give away any of the formula itself.  He only explains the variables that he assigns as inputs.  Frankly, that's enough for me.  I don't want to do the math.  That's why we have computers.

He cites several examples of correct predictions.  The future predictions that he gives appear to be reasonable, and not obvious to anyone who does not approach the subject through this type of disciplined methodology.

He has posted an online version of his game.  So you can prepare a tab-delimited text file with a series of values representing each party of the negotiation, and then upload the file and see the results of the game.  He doesn't show you the formula.

Of course this is only a methodology, and not a guarantee.  He gives several examples when his predictions failed.  And it appears that he has a pretty good grasp of the failure conditions.  The biggest two failure conditions are outside interruptions (natural disasters, sex scandals, and other exceptional events that interfere with the negotiation process) and people who do not seek their own advantage (idiots and idealists.)  But these two issues are problems for game theory in general, and not unique to his methods.

There are a few modifications that I would like to see implemented in Bruce's formula and process .  The following won't make much sense if you haven't read the book.

Three Goals
His process only accounts for a single goal for each party.  I don't think that humans usually work that way.  I think that we usually have three different goals in mind:
* Ideal - The perfect state that we hope to achieve.
* Expected - The result that we expect to be able to achieve.
* Minimum - The poorest result that we are willing to accept.

The intervals between these goals affect the way that we play the game.  It's probably a fallacy to identify a 'normal' game.  But the most obvious case for these three goals would be that a person's Ideal goal is higher than their Expected goal, and both of those are higher than their Minimum goal.  In this situation a person is likely to negotiate and act in good faith.

If a person's Expected goal is very close to either their Ideal or Minimum goal, above their Ideal goal, or below their Minimum, then it will greatly alter their approach to the negotiation.

When a person's Expected goal is very close to their Ideal goal then they will shift into either a more flexible or a more rigid negotiating strategy.  Pragmatists will become more flexible in order to get the process over with quickly.  True believers, idealists, and other extremists will become more rigid as they get caught up in the fervor of reaching their Ideal goal.  (This might be the true test of an idealist.)

When a person's Expected goal is very close to their Minimum goal they will use a very rigid negotiating strategy and expend a great deal of time and energy on the negotiations.

When a person's Expected goal is lower than their Minimum goal they are going to either undermine the process, cheat, and otherwise act in poor faith, or they will expend a tremendous amount of time and energy in an incredibly flexible negotiating strategy.  For example, a dictator will not join a negotiation where they expect to be hanged as a result.  But a murderer who has been arrested will negotiate nearly anything to get out of the death penalty.

When a person's Expected goal is higher than their Ideal goal they are going to treat this negotiation as a means to an end to improve their negotiating position in some other game.  This is the ugly political process of giving votes on one issue to gain votes on a separate issue.

Context
Every negotiation takes place within a context.  Each participant has other concerns that they are concurrently negotiating (or expect to begin negotiating soon.)  The participants have an existing relationship, and expectations for a future relationship.  And there are other parties who are not directly involved in a particular negotiation, but who have an interest in either a resolution to negotiations or to one or more of the participants.

Each participant has many ongoing negotiations.  If this negotiation is not one of their top priorities then it will not get their full attention.  They will probably delay it where possible.  When delay becomes impossible they will adopt a very flexible negotiating strategy in order to get done quickly.

The more negotiations that a person has going on, or expects to have going on soon, the more likely they are to be willing and able to be very flexible in their negotiation strategy.  This is especially true when some of the other participants to this negotiation are also participants in other negotiations.  This is the type of situation where politicians trade votes.

When two or more parties negotiate multiple separate games, over time, they establish a relationship.  Each participant will form an opinion of the other participants, especially concerning their trustworthiness.  Participants who have a long history of negotiating successful games will be able to negotiate more flexibly with each other because of the trusting relationship.  And conversely, when trust has been betrayed in the past  then current and future negotiations will be less flexible.

When one or more participant wants to negotiate more games after the current one, then that person will adopt a more flexible negotiating strategy.  For instance, a businessperson who is attempting to establish a reputation and earn repeat business will negotiate more deeply than an established company.

Sometimes there are external parties who may choose to interfere with a particular negotiation game.  There is a near-unlimited number of possibilities here.  Friends, enemies, and parties to other negotiations (current or future) are the prime suspects here.  A mistress, for instance, may be content to remain hidden until the money and notoriety from exposure gets too great.  Or someone may see an opportunity to hurt an old enemy by interfering with a negotiation.

I'm not certain that all of these scenarios are worth codifying within the prediction formula.  But I believe that for important negotiations each of these possibilities should be examined as a possible tactic for improving one's position.  That type of strategic and tactical research is what Bruce's consulting company does.

Stupidity
Humans aren't always rational.  Sometimes people just fail to see an opportunity.  Sometimes people have hidden constraints that limit them from exercising an obvious negotiation tactic.  Sometimes people bluff.  And sometimes your estimations of their goals and values are simply incorrect.

This is something that the predictive formula should be able to test and adapt for.  Almost all negotiations take place over a series of rounds.  As each round concludes you can compare the predicted and actual positions.

It is not as simple as updating the formula with the actual values and recomputing.  Each variation needs to be examined and explained.  Those explanations need to be fed into the strategic and tactical plans for future rounds of negotiation.

If you decide that someone is bluffing then you need to decide if you want to extract more concessions from them, at the risk of moving their Expected goal above their Minimum goal and causing them to begin subverting the negotiations.

If you decide that someone has a hidden constraint and cannot ask for a concession that they need, then you can use that information to your advantage.  Maybe you can threaten to expose their weakness to coerce greater concessions.  Or maybe you can offer the concession as an olive branch, in order to gain the upper hand.

If you decide that someone is simply stupid then you can play them in order to gain greater concessions.  You can arrange the situation to make the stupid person look heroic while they make much larger concessions than they should.  Call this the Neville Chamberlain tactic.

Friday, October 1, 2010