Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, one of the things I see repeatedly is people hating on corporations. This is understandable insofar as corporations have a number of flaws – the biggest one being that they often optimize for profit over other, more valuable goals. There’s been a lot of discussion about the legal decision to treat corporations as people, with all the same rights (but apparently none of the responsibilities). There are a few things that distinctly separate corporations from people – and I may in fact be rehashing old material here, but I was having a discussion with my dad about it and I thought it was interesting so I thought I’d post about it.

1) People are a tightly coupled neural network. While you’re not consciously aware of being directly connected to everything you know, you are a neural network with data stored in all the associations between neurons. Corporations are much more loosely coupled, with much information not being shared at all between individual ‘neurons’ (corporate members)

2) People optimize for a number of different things (see the hierarchy of needs pyramid). Corporations generally optimize for very few things, and unfortunately in the way they are set up in the USA, they optimize first for profit. (The ideal corporation, in my opinion, would optimize for serving the employees first, serving the customers second, and then for profit third – in fact, not making a profit, but simply breaking even while providing value to humanity would be considered a win. In the current system, *destroying* value for humanity is a win if you make a profit while you’re doing it)

3) People can experience consequences for suboptimal behavior in ways corporations can’t. A corporation can’t be placed in jail, can’t feel physical pain, and won’t necessarily learn from things like fines – in fact, if a activity will generate a fine but is profitable beyond the fine, a corporation would normally decide to perform the activity anyway.

Corporations are often used as liability shields – or legality shields – for questionable behavior. I’m not sure what the ideal fix would be (see, already displaying the hypocrisy I talked about in the previous article) – although I do think one thing we could do that would help a lot is adopt the german ownership and directorship model for corporations in place of our own.

One big problem with corporations is that they (probably inadvertently) can exacerbate the problems caused by the Milgram effect. Individuals can be acting against the interests of the species as a whole, against other individuals, and even against their own common sense and feel that they are obliged to do so because the corporate rules and standards require it.

So, a friend of mine who will remain anonymous to protect the guilty has been heavily and actively promoting a end to oil pipelines, and speaking about the energy extraction industry in ways that make it pretty clear they consider the energy extractors to be evil and motivated only by greed.

This is extra-ironical to me because this friend of mine spends a LOT of time on jet airplanes, so them complaining about oil extraction is a lot like the addict complaining about the existence of their dealer. I am not sure they are aware of how many megawatt-hours of energy it takes to hurl them across oceans, but I would assume they at least have the sense of the order of magnitude involved.

The truth is, the people who work in the extraction of energy are not mustache-twirling villains – they are good, honorable people, often doing a very physical and dirty difficult job. And, even though I would run the grid very differently if it were up to me – nuclear for baseline load – next generation nuclear that can burn what we currently think of as waste and is meltdown proof – and wind and solar for peak load – even with the grid operating the way it is now our energy network saves far more lives than it costs. I also certainly wouldn’t do fracking, because clean water is far more valuable than oil or natural gas, and it probably takes more energy than they’re recovering to return the water they’re using to clean. But, while I would run it differently, they are running it. They are keeping the lights on, and I think we should recognize that. If we asked them to run it cleaner, and offered to pay the larger bills that would result in the first few years from installing clean capacity, I am sure they would.

And we are transitioning to a better grid. Just look up a graph of wind generation in the US over the last 20 years. We are not doing it particularly quickly or efficiently, but we are doing it.

This definitely falls under the category of a topic where I am fairly sure despite all the moaning, groaning, and disasterizing, we will get where we need to be. In the meantime – it is important to have the new infrastructure up and working before you disassemble the old infrastructure. My friend who’s so critical of the power mix doesn’t do any local generation despite having quite a large stream wandering through their backyard and plenty of sun falling on their land, nor have they even called their utility to try and make arrangements to buy their power from a cleaner mix. Both of which would be a far better way to effect change than posting about how we should stop building pipelines on facebook.

Long term, do I want a better grid? Absolutely. But I think it’s in general a bad idea to identify the people who are keeping the power on as villains. I have similar feelings about Monsanto. I’d do things very differently if it were up to me, but they are a part of feeding hundreds of millions of people, and I don’t see all the people lambasting them proposing alternate solutions.

In general I guess I feel the world would be a better place if people would wait to complain about things until they had a viable alternate solution to propose. I acknowledge my position here is hypocritical insofar as I probably complain about things all the time without having a alternate solution to propose – but I do have it as a long term goal to get to a place where I don’t complain about things until I have a better idea in mind.

Another long term goal of mine is to do less “us” vs “them”-ing. I think that’s part of what my friend is participating in here when they talk about the evils of the extraction energy.. thinking “they” are somehow less than “us”.

For anyone who wants to see large numbers of pictures, some out of focus, of my recent UK trip, they are available at http://www.sheer.us/pics/UK2016pics/.

(The title is a allusion to a video by Sarah Silverman) – So, yesterday I was looking at the York Minster – which is undoubtedly a beautiful piece of work, but it did make me wonder, how many people could this building house? I mean, it’s huge – it’s a unbelievable number of square feet under roof. And then I started wondering.. if in general we converted churches to housing, would we *have* homeless people?

That’d be one to back-of-the-envelope one of these days when I’m feeling bored.

And yes, I understand there are problems with this. I used to regularly let homeless people crash in my garage, until the level of stupidity exhibited by one of them went too far. (Dude was smoking next to large cache of very flammable objects despite being asked not to). And I will admit that I worry sometimes as I consider offering housing to down-on-their-luck individuals, will they be violent towards me? Will they steal everything I own and sell it for meth? Trusting people enough to live with them is a challenge for me.

I do wonder to what extent the homelessness problem is that we all have a hard time trusting each other – thanks, Gun Nuts… (well, to be fair, knives are also a problem here, and so are fists.. perhaps if I believed I would say thanks, all-powerful-God-who-loves-or-at-least-doesn’t-stop-violence..)

Here’s a business idea for you enterprising types. Someone needs to create a business that does donation anonymization. In particular, I want to be able to donate to various causes without them having any idea what my mailing address, phone number, etc are. I don’t ever want them to spend my money asking me for more money. You could just take 1% off the top in exchange for providing this valuable service to the public, and then arrange with the various charities to never mail you, because after all your purpose in life is to provide anonymization. Long term it might not be that viable because as charities realize that people don’t want to be begged for more money, especially in paper mail while knowing what it cost to send those paper mailings.

I would suggest limiting the size of financial transactions through such a system to $2500 or so, to avoid a whole host of problems, including the one Centauri mentions in his comment below.

I added a new feature to my website where it looks at the last 1000 access log lines and shows any mp3s that are in the list. I’m hoping this will help various web spiders be more aware of the fact that we’ve got lots of music here for the downloading. Anyone know how effective this is likely to be and what else I should be considering doing to have google and other web spiders notice me more?

So, I’ve been thinking about the challenges of getting my upcoming solo album to turn a profit. In terms of Sheer Time, if we estimate each track at 20 hours, I’ve got to sell a total of 20,000 units, or have people stream 2 million times in order to break even with my hourly rate at my day job.

This is harder than it looks. Even if we assume that I’m skill-wise the equivilent of Pink Floyd (probably a questionable assumption, but let’s run with this) we still have to figure out some way to get the public to notice I exist. With a band, there’s at least some hope that friends of all four or five guys are going to notice and tell their friends. With me, my word-of-mouth seed starts from one person.

Also, I’m definitely tuning this album for my personal tastes, rather than what’s currently ‘the popular sound’. As a result, it’s going to be that much more difficult to get people to notice it. I think this makes sense insofar as I’m not likely to move enough units for it to make a profit, so I might as well enjoy myself, but it’s still worth noting that I’m not exactly taking the shortest course here.

My gut feeling is that it will be my next album, not the one I’m releasing in December, that breaks even. I’m guessing by my next album I will be past that magic 10,000 hours that everyone says you need to have to make it.

It’s a little frustrating that if I were a pointless political facebook meme, I’d have no trouble getting 2 million views.

This is one of my posts that I make so I can link to it from facebook instead of repeatedly typing the same things in comments.

You’d think you guys had never watched pro wrestling.

Trump is playing a Heel. By choice, and I imagine to his great entertainment. It’s pretty clear, since he and Hillary are friends, that they decided to get together and rig a election. Nothing in the rules says they can’t do it, and I have to say, it’s starting to be a lot of fun to watch. He’s clearly having a lot of fun with his mustache-twirling villain role – now he may actually believe the things he’s saying, or he may not, but I would take anything he has to say with a grain of salt.

For me, this is a pretty winning situation. A heel is not going to win the election, and we don’t end up with a right-wing whacko running the country. But if you’re actually feeling outrage about Trump, well, I guess he’s playing his role well. What I really wonder is whether he will break kayfabe at the end or not. If he’s genuinely a force for good, he will, just to help his supporters understand how broken they are. Assuming they’re not just part of the gag as well, which – to be honest – they might be.

So, in a comment to http://www.sheer.us/weblogs/?p=3006, Alderin said “I agree that the software needs adjustment. The difficulty is that we don’t have the source code, we have to decompile and reverse-engineer it before was can being to find the bugs we need to fix.”

I think this is part of the hope of what we might gain through making a ANN the size and shape of a human.

1) It would let us find out what happens when you run our memetic software with a different instinct table
2) It would let us find out how our memetic software ends up rendered ‘on the iron’, which might be very instructive.

One of the questions that’s still very much open for debate is whether, even if we did know what to do differently for software, we’d be able to change the existing running software on the thundering herd of humans out there, or if all we could do is improve future generations. It is worth noting as a side note that, much as I loathe aspects of Christianity, I also recognize it was probably a significant upgrade from what was being memetically distributed prior to it being authored. Ideally a *really* good software upgrade would tend to be viral because the people running it would be better adapted – this I think was the plan in the fictional work Stranger In A Strange Land.

So, lately the DAW plugin market has been a bit saturated with a bunch of vendors all producing plugins that more or less do the same thing. This is great insofar as it’s driving down the price of plugins, but not so great insofar as it suggests no one can think of anything new to do.

My first and most obvious suggestion on this front is to abandon the beaten path of what’s been done before. In particular, might I suggest that there’s a huge GPU on most modern computers that could be used to play with building artificial neural networks to perform audio processing. I’m not exactly sure what the results of this would be, and maybe a GPU isn’t big enough yet to do meaningful amounts of ANN processing, but I still think it’s a neat idea.

I have memories when I was a tween of having a vision of manipulating a giant artificial neural network via a set of controls very similar to a mixing board, which controlled trigger levels and amplitudes of signals passing between subnets. I didn’t fully understand what I was imagining at the time, but looking back…