Hope Amidst Stagnation

I've been following the evolution of the ideas described by Tyler Cowen's idea of 'The Great Stagnation'. I've also been playing MineCraft recently and I started thinking about how players can setup servers to host a MineCraft 'map', especially so multiple users can play together, but that this 'virtual reality' compares so incredibly poorly to the virtual reality depicted in most (all?) of the scifi books I've read. We have grossly underestimated how much work reality actually involves! And it struck me that it's wonderful that we don't have anything approaching the true, full 'realism' of the real world!

The world,
we've learned,
is far more rich
in details –
and history! –
than we ever before
could compute.

We have yet
many more eons
before us
to plumb its depths,
and all the rest
of our time
to enjoy them.

Can We Arrange a Marriage between The Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street?

I'm with the Dirty Effin' Hippies, but I'm not sure that we can ever agree on how to address the unholy alliance of big business and the state.

I think the difficulty in reconciling the 'right' { Tea Party / libertarians / conservatives } and the 'left' { Occupy Wall Street / progressives / liberals } is reconciling our differing solutions on how to destroy or contain the unholy alliance. The right wants to restrict the power of the state and its ability to protect or benefit business while the left wants to restrict the power of business to influence politicians and bureaucrats. But the right fear restrictions on business are too broad and unfairly hurt legitimate lobbying. And the left fears restrictions on the power of the state are too broad and unfairly prevent the state from providing public goods. And of course the right too more often fears an overly powerful state, while the left more fears overly powerful business interests.

The right believes that businesses will cease or reduce the purchase of political influence if there is nothing to buy, i.e. if state actors are unable or less able to benefit businesses. But the left believes that politicians and bureaucrats will cease to benefit business if we prevent them from buying influence. Both are impossible ideals.

How can we prevent the state from ever benefiting specific businesses? If legislators were to simplify the tax code of their jurisdiction, accountants and other tax professionals would suffer and all other tax-paying organizations and individuals would benefit (at least in terms of tax compliance). We would expect accountants and tax professionals to lobby against such policy, and because the asymmetrically concentrated benefits or losses among one group, we can expect that group to lobby more effectively. Conversely, how could we prevent businesses from ever benefiting or harming state actors? Every politician, bureaucrat, or employee of the state is a person living in some community and is therefore connected to other people, other businesses, and therefore is almost inevitably connected to any business to at least some degree.

The only policy I can think of that might be embraced by both the left and the right is to prohibit future bailouts of financial businesses or even to 'claw-back' the most recent bailouts of financial firms.

Renting a car vs renting a bike

I'm traveling soon – to a city near you?! – and I the price of renting a car is roughly the same (slightly cheaper) than renting a "premium" bike! Were I to rent a simple "bicycle", I would still pay ~75% of the price of renting a car!

I imagine that bicycle rentals are an extremely small-volume business in my destination city. Too bad. It's actually faster for me to get around where I'll be on a bike than the bus (and there is no train). Maybe I can borrow a bike and forego both of the exorbitant prices! Wait, there *is* a weekly rate ... Bike wins (60% of the car) for 4+ days. Still. I'm comparing renting a car with renting a bicycle.

WordPress and the plugin Revision Control

I started a blog with some friends and I decided to use WordPress. I got everything setup – my web hosting provider (InnoHosting) provides a nice cPanel tool Installatron that did all of the significant work.

I started editing posts and noticed that I couldn't find any post revision history, even though that is a standard feature.

I installed the plugin Revision Control but the edit post page for any post shows the error message:

Error: WP_POST_REVISIONS is defined in your wp-config.php. Revision Control cannot operate.

I checked my wp-config.php file, but that constant was NOT defined in that file. Hmm. Maybe it's defined in some other file loaded by that file? I'm not fluent in PHP, so I don't know that that's even a reasonable hypothesis.

I downloaded the entire WordPress file tree from my site and tried to search those files looking for that constant. No results. I'm pretty sure the settings for the Google Desktop indexing plugin Larry's Any Text File Indexer don't include PHP files (because you can only specify the file extensions you want to be indexed once, when you first install the plugin). Hmm ...

Maybe SciTE can help me? Indeed! From the Search menu, pick Find in Files..., add the extension *.php, and pick the local folder where the WordPress files are located and presto! The culprit turned out to be the WordPress plugin Postie, which I installed to extend the standard functionality of the post-via-email feature. Fortunately, my writers don't really use that feature so I was able to deactivate Postie and then voila! Revision Control now works.

Hopefully this may help someone else also struggling to determine why the error message quoted above is lying to you!

Status Quo is *Not* God

Even though it may seem that way sometimes.

Is the set of possible angles in physical space continuous?

I found a note I'd written about a statement in the book Information: The New Language of Science by Hans Christian von Baeyer.

The statement:

[a beam splitter] can be designed to reflect any portion of the total between 0 and 100 percent.

My notes:

Is this true?

If x is the probability that a qubit [quantum bit] is a '0', what is the mathematical domain of x? What is the graininess of x? The set of possible values of x? Is the set finite? Infinite? If infinite, is it continuous?

Is there an experiment that could be performed to determine the angular granularity of space? A quick google search ... led me down a rabbit-hole of tangential reading.

I finally got an iPhone, but ...

My experience has been almost entirely wonderful, but of course it's a single annoyance that motivated me to write this post. My single annoyance? I can't enter a phone number and have my phone automatically tell me the matching contacts. I can't even figure out how to search contacts by phone number.

It sucks to lose a feature you didn't even know you loved.

If economists were so smart ...

This is from The Non-economist's Economist, a review of The Affluent Society & Other Writings, 1952-1967, a collection of writings by John Kenneth Galbraith:

At the 1955 stock-market hearings, Galbraith was followed at the witness table by the aging speculator and "adviser to presidents" Bernard M. Baruch. The committee wanted to know what the Wall Street legend thought of the learned economist. "I know nothing about him to his detriment," Baruch replied. "I think economists as a rule—and it is not personal to him—take for granted they know a lot of things. If they really knew so much, they would have all of the money, and we would have none."

What if the only way to be happy was to lie to everyone you ever loved?

Would it be worth it?
Where would the balance fall for me? As I am regular of melancholy, I'd guess I'd side with truth.

At some point, everything can't be blamed on "the media"

Especially if the complaitant is a blogger! At what point will Brad DeLong and Kevin Drum be members of "the media"? I certainly read their writings more than any 'journalist' members of "the media". And when oh when will they shut the fuck up about "the media"? The incessant meta-level discussions are annoying (and pointless). You're both part of "the media" now! Raise the bar (and stop calling me stupid, assholes)!

The real nemesis of the Autobots ...

... is the doppleganger of Optimus Prime: Pessimus Subprime!

You're already bearing the burden of the truth

People can stand what is true,
for they are already enduring it.
-- Eugene Gendlin

From a larger quote in Avoiding Your Belief's Real Weak Points.

Weird Pandora coincidence

I added a band (Crystal Castles) to Pandora and it started with the song that was currently playing in my tab for the MySpace page of the same band.

I just realized that it's just a coincidence. Or rather, I felt how much mundane of a coincidence it really is. It's so mundane I'm ... still going to post it, but I'll always almost regret doing so.

Humility is not boasting of modesty

Great slogan derived from the article on Less Wrong: The Proper Use of Humility:

Humility is not boasting of modesty.

Less Wrong: Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable

I was reading Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable when it hit how much religion is simply the form that (almost) all cultural transmission (i.e. spread of ideas, songs, pottery, etc.) took throughout much of human history.

There simply wasn't anything like law, or history, or biology for a long time.

Religion was it. It was everything.

Criminal building person, falling

Or is she or he diving?

Poem – Threads

All threads begin somewhere
And each one somewhere ends.
Voices unheeded crying out
against the life we, heedless, spend.
Counting, dying, watching, waiting,
for life we hunger never sating.

Guacamole – Delicious

I modified this recipe as follows:

• 4 avocados instead of 3 (and I left the pits in; a friend says that slows the color change of the guac)
• 1 lime, juiced [I did so by hand]
• I used an unknown (but significant) amount of nice garlic salt instead of salt (or minced garlic; see below)
• I used a red onion (still half of it)
• I used almost certainly 2-3 times more cilantro and I pureed it with a food processor
• 2 roma (plum) tomatoes, diced [I think I actually matched this]
• I didn't use any minced garlic aside from the garlic salt mentioned above
• I used a jalapeño (including the seeds) but no cayenne
• I also added dice cucumber, using about a third of a decent sized cucumber

Just combine everything and mash the avocados – I used a spoon and that worked just fine.

It's a little spicy, particularly when you get a jalapeno seed (or several) in a bite. The cucumber provides an extra coolness lost often otherwise lost in the creamy textrure of the avocados, but the original recipe was pretty solid to begin with.

It was (and still is) delicious. And four avocados makes a surprisingly large amount of guacamole apparently.

"Forty years was long enough to convince everyone that the new structure of the industry was permanent."

Great point about our temporal parochialism regarding the economy.

Institution deaths are 'real'

One apparently puzzling aspect of recessions or depressions if you listen to or read economists is that 'aggregate demand' falls so much more sharply than one would otherwise expect.
But what if the death of instiutions themselves, both large and small, are the real reason recessions and depressions are so asymmetric with respect to their corresponding booms?