Month: October 2011

John McCarthy is Dead

Fuck it, I’m renaming this month Black October. Along with technology giants Steve Jobs and Dennis Richie, John McCarthy has passed away this month:

The creator of Lisp and arguably the father of modern artificial intelligence, John McCarthy, died today. He studied mathematics with the famous John Nash at Princeton and, notably, held the first “computer-chess” match between scientists in the US and the USSR. He transmitted the moves by telegraph.

McCarthy believed AI should be interactive, allowing for a give and take similar to AI simulators like Eliza and, more recently, Siri. His own labs were run in an open, free-wheeling fashion, encouraging exploration and argument. He won the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1972 and the National Medal of Science in 1991.

He was a great mind that contributed an unfathomable amount of knowledge to the field of artificial intelligence. Like Dennis Richie, the works of John McCarthy are marvels that enrich our lives everyday but few know anything about them. He was another grand master who worked in the shadows to deliver us better computing technology.

I would damn him for creating the LISP programming language and the endless number of parenthesis it demands his contributions well makeup for the syntax of the language he born. We will miss you John, and while your contributions to society won’t be celebrated to the degree Steve Job’s were do know that many of use recognized you for who you were and the accomplishments you made.

Now if every other major player in the technology industry would do me a favor and stay alive until November I’d greatly appreciate it. I don’t enjoy having to write three obituaries in one month.

You’re Blaming the Wrong One Percent

The popular slogan of the Occupy movement is, “We are the 99%!” This slogan implies that there is a sinister one percent of the population that’s causing the current economic and social strife. Do you know what? Those protesters are right. Do you know what else? It’s not the one percent they think it is:

But there is another 1 percent out there, those who do live parasitically off the population and exploit the 99 percent. Moreover, there is a long intellectual tradition, dating back to the late Middle Ages, that draws attention to the strange reality that a tiny minority lives off the productive labor of the overwhelming majority.

[…]

In the end, we end up with about 3 million people who constitute what is commonly called the state. For short, we can just call these people the 1 percent.

The top one precent of wealth holders isn’t the group causing our problems, the roughly one percent of the population that makes up the federal government. While those two groups aren’t mutually exclusive the latter group is the only one that can make rules, regulations, and ordinances that have a nationwide effect of further destroying our economy:

Same goals, different means, two very different sets of criminals. The state is the institution that essentially redefines criminal wrongdoing to make itself exempt from the law that governs everyone else.

It is the same with every tax, every regulation, every mandate, and every single word of the federal code. It all represents coercion. Even in the area of money and banking, it is the state that created and sustains the Fed and the dollar, because it forcibly limits competition in money and banking, preventing people from making gold or silver money, or innovating in other ways. And in some ways, this is the most dreadful intervention of all, because it allows the state to destroy our money on a whim.

Simply eliminating the Federal Reserve and the problems it generates would move our country towards recovery and eventual reclaiming of our past economic prosperity. Removing a massive number of labor regulations from the books would also help decrease unemployment and allow people to once again make a living. And you know what? With a return to sound money you would effectively have “more” money as it wouldn’t be constantly devaluing due to inflation. If the value of our money would just stabilize we’d all be wealthier immediately.

So let’s fight the real culprits, the actual one percent that’s the source of our woes. Drop all of this pointless screaming about the top one percent of wealth holders being evil bastards who are destroying our lives. Many of those wealth holders are employing a great number of people and providing products that many in society enjoy. Instead let’s point the finger at the federal government, the bastards who have created the environment of failure that has caused our current economic crisis.

A Primer on Cost

One of the common complaints about e-book readers is that the books are too expensive. These complaints usually bring up the fact that e-books should be much cheaper than physical books because you don’t have various costs such as printing, shipping, and storage to deal with. While those facts are true there is one economic fact that everybody seems to forget, cost of production has nothing to do with the sale price of a good:

Consumers set prices based on their preferences. It doesn’t matter what a book costs; what matters is what a reader will pay for it. Likewise, consumers in the Western world determine the prices — not by haggling — but by buying or not buying.

The fact is we set the cost of goods by buying or not buying them at asked prices. Hewlett-Packard’s TouchPad wasn’t selling at all when the price was set equal to the iPad but started selling like hotcakes when the price was reduces to $99.00. Obviously somewhere between the price of an iPad and $99.00 lies a price people are willing to pay for the device. Firearms are anther good that demonstrate the cost of production has nothing to do with the price people are willing to pay. Heckler and Koch make extremely expensive firearms that are functionally no more reliable than other similar firearms on the market yet people are willing to pay their higher asking price. Well I’m not willing to pay their price but that gets us into the fact that different people value different things:

There is no necessary and direct connection between the value of a good and whether, or in what quantities, labor and other goods of higher order were applied to its production.… Whether a diamond was found accidentally or was obtained from a diamond pit with the employment of a thousand days of labor is completely irrelevant for its value.

Value is subjective and different from person to person. While I find the additional cost of an Apple computer acceptable for what they are many are not. I find the higher cost of certain beers well worth every penny while others who are fine with Budweiser value the cost of beer different.

While I would love to see e-book prices drop I know they won’t be doing so any time in the near future. The sale of e-books has exploded suggesting that people are fine with their cost often being similar to a hardcover or paperback version of the same title:

Book sales for all of last year rose 3.6 percent, from $11.25 billion in 2009 to $11.67 billion in 2010. But e-book sales rose a stunning 164.4 percent ($441.3 million vs. $166.9 million) and downloaded audiobook sales increased 38.8 percent, while physical audiobook sales decreased 6.3 percent.

A 164.4 percent increase in e-book sales would indicate that the price is currently set at a level acceptable to most consumers. When you complain that something is too expensive remember that you can vote with your wallet and simply not buy that product. If enough people follow you then the producer will have to reduce the price or face bankruptcy (unless the government bails them out). This ability to negotiate with your money is one of the greatest aspect of the free market. I only wish I could do the same with government services.

Something Tells Me Xe Just Earned a Huge Contract

Obama has finally announced the end of United States military occupation of Iraq:

All US troops will be pulled out of Iraq by the end of the year, President Barack Obama has announced.

He ordered a complete withdrawal from the country, nearly nine years after the invasion under President George W Bush.

This would be far better news if it didn’t likely mean our troops will be replaced by private contractors from the likes of Blackwater Xe. I’m actually willing to bet money that we’re going to increase the number of mercenaries in the region which means we’ll still be dumping untold trillions into this ill-fated war.

Another Government Stimulus Failure

I honestly believe John Maynard Keynes’s theories on monetary policy have been some of the most dangerous ideas to come out in the last century. Trusting the government with the monetary system is a bad idea because it only encourages them to print money uncontrollably in order to spend on ill-fated projects. As governments are removed from market price feedback they have no way of knowing whether the money they’re spending is a good thing or a bad thing. This becomes all the more obvious when you look at the results of what they spend money one.

The most recent round of stimulus money was supposed to jumpstart the American economy by producing jobs for currently unemployed citizens. On top of that the stimulus money was also supposed to jumpstart government initiates such as the development affordable electric cars. Needless to say it’s not surprising to see the government spend over half a billion dollars on those goals and getting the exact opposite in return:

With the approval of the Obama administration, an electric car company that received a $529 million federal government loan guarantee is assembling its first line of cars in Finland, saying it could not find a facility in the United States capable of doing the work.

I’m sure that Finnish plan is going to help a lot of American get jobs. At least it will lead to affordable electric cars right? Wrong:

Fisker is more than a year behind rolling out its $97,000 luxury vehicle bankrolled in part with DOE money.

At least I don’t think $97,000 can really be considered affordable to the average American. There you have it, yet another example of what happens when the government tries to interfere with the market to steer it towards specific goals.

Minnesota Permit Holder Facing Charges for Chasing Muggers

Most advocates of armed citizenry strongly warn those who hold or are seeking carry permits do so for the right reason, and that reason is for the protection of you and yours. Due to various complexities it is not advised that carry permit holders involve themselves in situations that don’t involve them or their loved ones. A Minneapolis permit holder tried being a good samaritan and things could be getting very dicy for him soon:

Just before 10 p.m., police got a 911 report that someone had been shot in a parking area behind the Super Grand Buffet restaurant about a block west of Cub Foods near the intersection of Lake Street and Minnehaha Avenues, according to police spokesman Sgt. William Palmer. When police arrived, a man with a gun who said he had a valid concealed-weapon permit told them he had interrupted the robbery of a woman in her 60s. The man said that he chased the robbers, a male and a female, exchanged fire and killed the male robber.

While I will personally commend the man for getting involved during the mugger his failure was chasing after the muggers after they attempted to flee. From what I understand the state of Minnesota has laws allowing for citizen’s arrests, but only for felony level crimes. In conversation with various carry instructors I’ve learned that while the initiation crime may have been felony level and thus warranting a citizen’s arrest it was no longer a felony crime, but a property crime, when the muggers attempted to flee.

Pursuing a fleeing attacker is dangerous for legal and personal reasons. Legally most state laws will put you in murky water if you attempt to chase after an attacker which exposes you to legal ramifications for doing so. On the personal side of things by chasing after a fleeing attack you’re increasing the window in which you may suffer bodily harm. As the good samaritan learned in this case the muggers were armed and by pursuing he placed himself at a greater risk of being shot by increasing his exposure time to armed criminals. The latter reason alone leads me to believe chasing after a fleeing attack is seldom a good idea (I say seldom because it may be necessary if the attackers have abducted somebody or another similar extenuating circumstance).

In any event this will likely be an interesting case to keep an eye on, especially for a Minnesota resident holding a carry permit.

Why the Federal Reserve is Evil

It’s impossible to miss all the anti-Federal Reserve propaganda floating around but many honestly do not know why the Fed is such a terrible organization. Thankfully Ron Paul wrote a very accessible and to the point article on the subject:

The Federal Reserve has caused every single boom and bust that has occurred in this country since the bank’s creation in 1913. It pumps new money into the financial system to lower interest rates and spur the economy. Adding new money increases the supply of money, making the price of money over time—the interest rate—lower than the market would make it. These lower interest rates affect the allocation of resources, causing capital to be malinvested throughout the economy. So certain projects and ventures that appear profitable when funded at artificially low interest rates are not in fact the best use of those resources.

[…]

The manner of thinking of the Federal Reserve now is no different than that of the former Soviet Union, which employed hundreds of thousands of people to perform research and provide calculations in an attempt to mimic the price system of the West’s (relatively) free markets. Despite the obvious lesson to be drawn from the Soviet collapse, the U.S. still has not fully absorbed it.

The Fed fails to grasp that an interest rate is a price—the price of time—and that attempting to manipulate that price is as destructive as any other government price control. It fails to see that the price of housing was artificially inflated through the Fed’s monetary pumping during the early 2000s, and that the only way to restore soundness to the housing sector is to allow prices to return to sustainable market levels. Instead, the Fed’s actions have had one aim—to keep prices elevated at bubble levels—thus ensuring that bad debt remains on the books and failing firms remain in business, albatrosses around the market’s neck.

If you’re unfamiliar with the subject of the Federal Reserve I highly urge you to read the entire article. I can say without any doubt that ending the Federal Reserve is the most important task we have as Americans. Without the Fed most of the other major ills perpetrated by our government would become impossible to continue and our economy would have the biggest barrier between it and recovered removed.

That’s Not Helping Your Cause

There are many ways to garner support for a movement; you can appeal to peoples’ sympathy, education the masses, or provide charity to those in need. One thing is for certain though, making live miserable for the average person is only going to generate resentment and hard feelings. It appears that a portion of the OccupyMN participants have decided that support is overrated and instead decided making life miserable for commuters was jolly good fun:

Seven OccupyMN demonstrators have been arrested for blocking traffic today after refusing to leave tents set up in the middle of the intersection of 6th Street S. and 3rd Av. S.

Yeah, because blocking an intersection with tents is such a grant idea. While those hauled off by the police probably think they were making a statement and people will flock to their aid after seeing peaceful protesters arrested the reality is far different. By blocking traffic these protesters have made themselves noticeable pains in the ass for the average person who probably hadn’t taken sides yet. When you become a pain in the ass people want you to go away so getting arrested in this case will probably be met with cheers instead of outrage by average commuters.

Civil disobedience only works if you have a large enough number of people on your side. Smoke outs work well because most people see little reason why somebody smoking marijuana should spend time in jail at taxpayer expense. This is because most people haven’t been negatively affected by somebody smoking marijuana. On the other hand if somebody was mugged by a person who just toked up there is a high chance the victim will develop a resentment towards marijuana smokers.

I’ve said many times that I’m glad to see people pissed off enough to make a statement. With that said if you’re going to make a statement you should probably try to make a positive one less people start becoming OK with the idea of cops in riot gear marching into your occupation launching tear gas and beating ass with batons.

I’m a Scientific Anomaly

When I was a teenager I listened to heavy metal, played violent video games, watched violent movies, owned firearms, and spent large amounts of time talking to people on the Internet. According to all of the studies that keep floating around I should be a violent antisocial psychopath who shoots other people. Well now it appears I should also be depressed and suicidal:

TEENS listening to head-banging heavy metal music are at risk of depression and suicide, a study reveals.

The Melbourne University paper says early intervention at schools is necessary before behavioural problems start.

Dr Katrina McFerran’s study spanned five years and found heavy metal music led to mental illness in some teens aged between 13 and 18.

“Most young people listen to a range of music in positive ways; to block out crowds, to lift their mood or to give them energy when exercising, but young people at risk of depression are more likely to be listening to music, particularly heavy metal music, in a negative way,” she said.

Either I’m the biggest fucking scientific anomaly on Earth or these studies are complete and utter bullshit.