Never been one to let the carrier drop

TL;DR=Conservatives appear to me to think that what defines what we can afford is the number of dollars available, not the amount of food, concrete, steel, and other real resources available, and that is a problem

For more about this, see http://www.sheer.us/weblogs/?p=2316

So, I’ve been thinking lately about how what money is worth – and what liberals and conservatives believe is possible – represents our faith in ourselves. When conservatives talk about how there’s not enough money to solve problem X – where problem X might be homelessness, hunger, health care – or whatever – essentially what they are saying is that they don’t have faith in humanity’s ability to come up with enough resources to solve these issues. In a previous post, I discussed the dichotomy between value and money, and explained how we often destroy the former in our chase for the latter because we have a corrupted and confused idea about what money is and what it represents. I’ve also talked about how in order to accurately abstract the value available to humanity, the government should be printing and handing out large amounts of money every year, because the amount of value available to us increases every year, often by leaps and bounds as we discover new things. In a future article, I will discuss how certain types of patent hoarding destroy value and make us all poorer so that a few corperations can garner more money, and why that’s a undesirable thing. But in this article, I am going to talk about the whole idea that we can’t do things like universal health care because “we can’t afford it”.

The conservative approach to anything that involves giving resources to people is “we can’t afford it”, with the automatic assumption that the conservative will somehow be less wealthy if those lazy welfare moms get a free ice cream sundae. Now, in fact, we probably can afford it – with all we know about automation and science, and all we’re learning, we could probably feed everyone, clothe everyone, give them all free houses, etc. If our goal were to give everyone everything tangible they wanted, we probably could give them that experience. (more on that later) Whether it would be good for them is another, more complicated question, because many people have a need to draw self-esteem from their jobs, from the feeling that they’re doing something useful.

I suspect if you told a lot of people that it was possible for us to feed all the hungry, house all the homeless, etc, without taking any wealth from their pocket at all, their response would still be that we shouldn’t do it – “Because I had to work for this, if they get it free, it makes my work less meaningful and it’s not fair” is one possible explanation of this, while another one is “But if we didn’t give them free food, we could give me more.”. Conservatives, please contact me and tell me I’m wrong if I am, so I can update this and learn more about how you see the world.

I would argue that the simple knowledge that there are people starving and cold and homeless makes us all less wealthy, and that some people have not taken some factors into account.

Now, I’m going to digress from that for a minute to state something. I think everyone deserves everything they want, except insofar as the things they want are hurting other people. I even think people deserve to have the *experience* of hurting other people if they want it – just that no other people should actually be hurt. I think this is technologically achievable and I think it’s desirable.

Now on the other paw, there are those who say that we only appriciate the things we earn. I think it’s possible that this is somewhat true on earth but I think it is the result of our culture – I do not think our culture does a good job of programming us to be healthy and happy – in fact I think it often does a good job of programming us *not* to be healthy and happy. I think it would be possible to build a set of beliefs under which we could be given things and appriciate them even though we didn’t have to work for them – and I think this is a desirable thing to do, because I think – yes, really – we should be trying to give everyone everything they want.

Anyway, back to the question of “we can’t afford it.” Many times, our need to not take care of our fellow man so we can feel good about how they aren’t getting “something for nothing” ultimately costs us far more in real value than just giving them what they need would. I’ve heard of cases where people have looked at the cost of having homeless vs. the cost of sheltering them, and the cost in dollars was actually higher to keep them homeless (see http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2012/09/24/canada-homelessness_n_1908876.html). Now, I suppose we could just actually say “well, if you’re homeless, you don’t deserve to live” and just execute them and/or provide no services at all. However, I’d *really* rather not live on the planet that would make that decision.

Often, in the case of theft, it would be far cheaper just to give the criminals what they wanted to steal than to keep them in jail, for example. But we’re horrified by the idea that someone could get something for nothing – even though, as automation and the number of people wanting jobs goes up, we have far more hands to build things than we have things that need built.

For some of this, I blame the particular set of morals that our modern world espouses. I think the idea that we deserve to suffer is wound all throughout several of our religions, and I think it’s deeply flawed. We *don’t* deserve to suffer. We *choose* to suffer, as a race and as individuals, and to some extent we have not yet figured out how *not* to suffer, and we do deserve the freedom to *choose* to suffer, but we also deserve the freedom to choose not to.

Anyway, back to the whole money thing. Part of why I am a left-winger is I have optimism, and hope. I believe that we *can* afford to treat everyone well, that human ingenuity and creativity is more than up to the task of making us all wealthy, healthy, loved, and well cared for. I believe that the reason it looks like, on paper, that we can’t is that we have a system of accounting that is fatally flawed, and I think we should all be holding the people who are upholding that system accountable for that, as well as educating them as to why their system fails to abstract value and is keeping us all far more poor in real value than we should be.

Of course part of the problem is that the issue at hand can get attached to theology – the honest and deeply held belief that people don’t deserve anything unless they work for it, that people should have to work harder than they are, that the poor are somehow not good enough to be anything more than poor, that they’re all gaming the system and they deserve to suffer for that.

I did have a good conversation with a member of my extended family which opened my eyes to the one glaring problem with the welfare state – that generally people need something to make them feel useful (as I’ve said, I think we could fix this culturally so people realized they were a positive force just by being them, and having friends, and living) and so people on welfare have self-esteem issues that result from them not feeling like they are useful. And I won’d deny that I would probably go nuts if I didn’t have some sort of work to do to occupy my time (although as has been mentioned many times before I really wish that that work was more music and less IT)

Note that this article has been edited from the original, which I feel was bringing in issues that are irrelevant to the discussion.

Now that we’ve talked about that, perhaps it is time to look at Resource Allocation As A Group

The song most often commented on at Fraud In France shows is Starshine, which is about Voyager I. We finally have a halfway decent take of it, captured at practice #46 and mixed by Bunne Rabb – for the curious, here’s a link: http://pb.sheer.us/bunne/Dec%202013/Star%20shine/SS-46-non-asplodey_mix.mp3

Since I posted a perl one. Note there’s probably some neat way to do this using system libraries that I just don’t know about, but this is what I use

As part of the class (you can have this as a class i.e. Config.cs, or as part of the program:

  static readonly Dictionary argsDict = new Dictionary();

Parser:

 static public void ArgHandler(string[] args)

        {

            foreach (string arg in args)

            {

                Regex quoteRE = new Regex(“\”(.*)\””);

                string[] quoteResults = quoteRE.Split(arg);

                string workarg;

                if (quoteResults.Length > 1)

                {

                    workarg = quoteResults[1];

                }

                else

                {

                    workarg = arg;

                }

                Regex argRE = new Regex(“–(.*)=(.*)”);

                string[] regResults = argRE.Split(workarg);

                if (regResults.Length > 1)

                {

                    Console.WriteLine(string.Format(” — {0} -> {1}”, regResults[1], regResults[2]));

                    argsDict.Add(regResults[1], regResults[2]);

                }

            }

        }

Get a argument:

     static public string GetArg(string arg)

        {

            string result = null;

            argsDict.TryGetValue(arg, out result);

            //if (debug)

            //    Console.WriteLine(“arg ” + arg + ” -> ” + result);

            return result;

        }

At the top of main(), call:

ArgHandler(args);

TL;DR=We should use prisons as a experimental ground to find out what media help broken people heal

I emailed this, and then – while I think it needs rework and expanding on, which I will probably do later – I thought I should paste it into my blog now just to get it out there. It’s a idea that I’ve discussed with various people over the years, that’s slowly grown..

From email:

This actually reminds me of a experiment I want to do. I will never,ever,ever be allowed to do it, but I think it would be truly awesome.

I want to retrofit a bunch of the country’s jails. I want to equip every cell with a very hardened computer console [as in virtually indestructable and also virtually impossible to break into from a hacking point of view]. Then, I want to try a number of different permutations of libraries of videos and books in each jail, and try different amounts of freedom to roam the net / free phone calls / things of that nature. I’d even want to try in some of the jails letting the employees work doing data entry or other remote-control things and potentailly also try having their income partially go to pay back their victims. I’d try anything in the initial seed set – porn, religious texts, movies from the 20s, childrens movies..

The purpose is to see what set of media, what set of communications options, and what set of employment options

a) Reduce recividism the most
b) Result in the happiest population

If we really think about it, what we really want our jails to do is help the people inside become better citizens. Since we don’t execute very many criminals and we don’t keep very many inside forever, we really want to figure out what to do for them that will turn them into people who don’t commit crimes. Ultimately it’s in the best interest of everyone who has to live here for our jails, rather than “punishing” people – often for crimes they committed because of mental illnesses they have – to heal them. And if a particular set of books or movies or whatever encourages that process, let’s give it to ’em free of charge, maybe even find ways beyond that to encourage them to watch & read! I know from my parking meter days that I could make a terminal that would survive anything a inmate could do to it. It wouldn’t be pretty, and it wouldn’t be possible to touch type on it that easily, but it probably wouldn’t cost *that* much either – and utlimately, if one is measuring using value rather than money, it would potentially pay for itself many, many times over. Plus, the value of knowing which, out of the milions of books and movies we have really heal people is almost beyond putting a dollar amount on.

I also talk about commercial prisons and the profit motive encouraging recidivism here and suggest a fix

I also make another suggestion here – that if we must have commercial prisons we only pay them for the prisoners that do not re-offend.

View Larger Map

So, I’m rather unhappy with Sprint at the moment.

A few weeks ago, during a trip to CA, I somehow cracked the display on my 897 LTE. I didn’t do anything unusually abusive to it, I just set it down on a dresser and it spiderwebbed.

I called sprint, who said they could replace the display/digitizer for $150. Since I know the part is about $100, this sounded reasonable, so I took the device to them for repair.

They attempted a repair, and somehow managed to destroy the motherboard. The phone would just reboot cycle endlessly. They also managed to destroy – beyond any repair, not just filesystem damaged but chip totally useless, a 16G SD card with a bunch of useful data on it.

They gave me a refurbished phone in replacement, and I went about my business.

The first thing I discovered about the refurb phone is the camera wouldn’t focus. This suggested to me that it had been exposed to a transient shock of truly large proportions. The second thing I noticed is that every few days, it would hang in a very unusual way. The heartbeat light would continue to pulse green, but the phone would not respond to the power button.. nor, indeed, any other interrupts (i.e. USB, phone calls, etc). Sadly, the phone has no reset button and has a internal battery, so every time it did this, I had to take it to sprint to be power cycled. The first time, I explained to them that A: It was a refurb and likely had experienced a large G-shock at some point and B: they were not equipped to do component-level repairs on phones, as I saw no hot air guns, no magnefiers, no lights, no DSOs, none of the tools one would need to do such things – hence, they could not possibly fix it, so please give me a replacement. They refused, saying they would only replace it if the failure occured in their shop.

Well, after coming in three times to have it power cycled, they finally admitted, yep, we can’t fix it, yep, it’s broken. However, it would take them 1-2 !weeks! to get a replacement.

I asked about buying a identical device. None in stock. They had two floor models, but it’s against sprint policy to sell those. So I bought a vastly less powerful LG to use while they fix my phone. At retail price because I’m not eligable for a discounted device for another two months.

Now, I’ve been a sprint customer for 12.5 years. However, when my contract expires, I will be finding another wireless service provider. I *know* they all suck. But there has to be one that sucks less than this. Their ‘Total equipment protection’ is useless, because they give you refurb phones that have faults with them! I doubt if Sprint has *anywhere* that’s equipped to do repairs on the tiny surface-mount-and-metal-cans assembly of a modern cell-phone, so what they should do whenever a phone shows up with a reported intermittent fault is recycle it, because there’s no way they can fix it. But instead they send it back out the door to some unsuspecting customer who will then have to figure out A: what’s wrong with it and B: whether they can live with that.

P.S. Motorola, shame on you for not putting a reset button on a device powered by a internal battery. Computers crash. It’s a fact. I will admit that prior to sprint destroying my first 897 LTE it had never crashed in a way that I couldn’t get back from, but that’s still no excuse for doing something so boneheaded.
\

In my previous post, I explained a few things about my views surrounding money.. now I’m going to do a stream-of-consciousness on people with a high (>$10 million) net worth.

Please note this is based on my current understanding of the reality model I’m experiencing, which may be flawed.

We have a fixed amount of capitol in the system. We add too it sometimes, but not very much nor very fast, because whenever we add a lot, a bunch of people not in possession of all the facts think it means the capitol is worth less, instead of realizing that it’s because we’re actually generating wealth out of thin air all the time – new ideas, new intellectual property, new ways of getting things done – and new children who will grow up to create and build more wealth. Because we’re becoming more wealthy in real-world things, we need to print more money to match, or things are gonna break.

Because we have a fixed amount of capitol, it’s important to *keep it moving*. If it stops in one computer register (i.e. some billionare’s bank account or a stock in the market), it’s no longer a available resource in the system for facilitating getting things done. People can’t pay wages with money they don’t have. In addition, the value of money sitting in a bank account beyond a person’s conceivable personal needs is *negative*, because the reduced amount of money floating around ‘live’, migrating, making transactions happen will result in less of those transactions occuring and those transactions often generate value. (Think of the inventor who doesn’t have enough money for a lab vs. the one who does). Holding onto money beyond your personal needs *reduces it’s value* by a real-world, food-and-drink-and-housing-and-entertainment definition of value.

TL:DR=People are making decisions based on dollars when they should be considering the real value – concrete and steel and the like – involved.

I’m not really sure how to write this, so I’m just going to do a stream of conciousness writing and hopefully it will capture some of the ideas I have.

First of all, I have concluded that some of what the department of defense does is in essence a entitlement for people who like to hurt people. So, if you are one of those madly anti-entitlement people, you really should be upset about the DoD. There’s no way that we need the level of military technology we have. It’s a gift for the DoD contractors, pure and simple. Nor do we pay the actual people who put their lives on the line very well – so it’s not even a entitlement for the group of people who one could argue deserve it for putting themselves in harm’s way in the interest of implementing the decisions of our government. It’s pork for the people who want to make a bigger bomb, a better rifle, a larger aircraft carrier, even though we already have a vastly larger army than anyone who would conceivably want to pick a fight with us.

Now I must mention in all fairness that the DoD is not all bad. My father worked there for a while, and every project he ever chose to share with me that he had chosen to support was one that generated value for the human race, that made us all richer. But people who make bombs, and guns, are making tools for destroying value.

Beyond that, however, I think that our culture has a very sick idea about money. We think it’s worth something – that it’s more important than people. Money is our tool, but instead of us using it it has come to use us.

Money is not value. Value is what money buys – and what we want. No sane person really wants money – they want value. You can’t eat dollars, and they’d make a lousy house – but dollars buy food and shelter, which you can eat and live in. However, money can’t *accurately* abstract value, for a whole host of reasons:

1) Some types of value are forever and infinite. Once a great book is penned, or a song or movie is laid down on tape, that content is now ours, now and forever. With our current level of technology, distributing and copying it cost fractions of a penny. Using money to try and pay for that content is having a finite resource (dollars) try to chase a infinite one (content). In terms of real value – things like great movies and works of art and automation that works and whatnot – the human race is far, far, far wealthier than it ever has been. In terms of minds and hands to create amazing things, the human race is wealthy indeed. But the amount of money in the world has not kept pace with our wealth, and things in the economic world are coming unglued because of it.

2) Some types of value can be destroyed, but we do not attempt to match that with money. When a war happens, we should really take a bunch of money, and burn it, because we’re destroying the value that it represents. (Although, for some wars – WWII, for example – we also need to mint a bunch more for the scientific discoveries that were made by necessity to cope with the war). In a recent war, we burned one of the oldest libraries on the planet.. that ought to be a huge pile of bills thrown on a bonfire somewhere.

3) Some types of value are multiplicative – that is, they create other value. Automation is a great example. Once discovered, automation is in category #1, but it also enables us to get more resources for less man-hours. This makes us all wealthier, but it can also make that wealth inaccessible to the people who just lost their job to a perl script

We need to make sure we – and especially our children – see money not as value, but as a symbol that represents value – and understand that it can only work properly if it accurately maps to the amount of value our race has. (And probably not even then! ;-)). Deciding not to give health care to people – live minds and hands that create the value money is based on – because of our debt – is in essence increasing our debt. We’re destroying real value by letting those people suffer and die, and we ought to be destroying money to match the loss of value that results.

Whenever a hardworking immigrant walks “illegally” over our borders, our nation becomes wealthier by the value that person can create, be it fixin’ cars or pickin’ strawberries.. and we ought to be printing money to match. Whenever someone leaves, we ought to be burning money to match the loss of their creative power and energy.

What’s most important is that the people making decisions.. the presidents, and kings, and governers, and senators.. understand that money isn’t value, but a symbol that abstracts it. Whenever we make a decision that reduces the amount of value in the world in order to increase the amount of money in it, we are demonstrating stupidity on a colossal scale, and the tool is using us instead of us using the tool.

What scares me is that NO WHERE in the recent government budget discussions did I hear anyone talk about this! And I see many people – mostly conservatives – who seem to be under the delusion that the money *is* the value, and use this argument to justify treating their neighbors and friends horribly for the sake of dollars. This to me is the ultimate in fiscal irresponsibility – letting the tool use you, instead of you using the tool.

Similarly, I see liberals who think that enough money can somehow will a resource that’s scarce into existence, without having to come up with some way to get it. While I talk about giving everyone everything, I do in fact have concrete plans (more on this later) on how we would do that. But I have heard liberals talk about shutting down all oil pipelines – right now – without considering how we would then get food given that our transit network runs on oil.

For some of my evolving thoughts beyond this, read http://www.sheer.us/weblogs/?cat=13

For more about this, read http://www.sheer.us/weblogs/?p=2346

NOTE: If you got here via http://valuenotmoney.sheer.us, please note that is a series of essays – please follow the link at http://www.sheer.us/weblogs/?p=2346 for the next one.

Happy birthday, 8088!

I use this a lot when writing a simple perl script that I want to take args like –flag and –database=this and –comment=”This is a comment with spaces”

while($arg = shift) { 
        if(($s1,$s2) = $arg =~ /–(.*)=(.*)/) {

                $l1 = lc $s1;

                $s2 = $a if(($a) = $s2 =~ /^\”(.*)\”$/);

                $arg{$l1} = $s2;

        } elsif(($s1) = $arg =~ /–(.*)/) {

                $l1 = lc $s1;

                $arg{$l1} = 1;

        }

}

Stick it in the top of the script, and you can then just use

if($arg{‘flag’}) {

}

$comment = $arg{‘comment’};

and so on and so forth.