But I do want to say a little bit about this concept of a false flag operation in the context of terrorists like the Tsarnaevs.  One of the things that’s odd about such a terrorist attack is it’s extremely unclear what sort of goals it might hope to achieve.  At least, it seems unlikely to frighten the US towards an isolationist policy, or achieve any end that directly supports the goals of (the violent extremist flavor du jour) militant Islamists.

The proliferation of this sort of tactic might be best understood under the concept of a false flag.  In a false flag operation, an attack is disguised so as to provoke a misdirected response.  In the archetypal case, this involves a government falsifying an enemy attack (or secretly facilitating a real enemy attack) to bolster public support for military action against that enemy.  But there’s an alternative scenario, in which an enemy seeks to have one of their potential allies blamed for the attack.  Even if the ally is not fooled by this ploy, the provoked counter-attack could provide the need to unite against a common enemy.

The best counter-attack against terrorism, therefore, is as restrained as it is effective.  I don’t mind that the police and military told people to stay home on April 19.  I don’t mind that they searched Watertown house by house.  Yes, it’s costly and disruptive, but having a bomber on the loose is also costly and disruptive.  Yes, the guy wasn’t found in the initial search, but there’s only so much you can do with limited information.

Ultimately, though, the town is getting back to normal.  We feel no need to buy the extremist’s implicit declaration that there’s a war on.  We can treat them as ordinary criminals.  Boston has dealt with those before.

Lately, I’ve been fascinated with the rise in value of Bitcoin (BTC), a distributed, anonymous, cryptographic token transaction system intended for use as a currency.  My original thought on the technology was “nifty idea”, but never would have thought it would have much in the way of real value (not that virtual goods can’t have real value, but BTC isn’t, by itself, much of a game).  I certainly didn’t see it rising again after the initial bubble and crash, but if you look at the charts, you’ll see that the value is now above the June 2011 bubble and crash.  That crash was precipitated by a security breach and subsequent flash-crash at Mt. Gox (the largest Bitcoin exchange). Subsequent high-profile security breaches in the immediate months following surely didn’t help, but it’s worth noting that such incidents didn’t cease in November 2011, BTC was able to regain its value despite the occasional digital bank-robbery.

So given my interest, and my surprise, I was fascinated by this essay by Gwern on anonymous black-market website Silk Road (the site itself can be found here, I link to this for educational/informative purposes only and not to encourage you to do anything illegal).  The essay is a very detailed, down-to-brass-tacks look at how Silk Road works and what its weaknesses might be.

Silk Road is designed to conduct business with only the minimum amount of information possible.  A normal e-commerce website ends up with the following information:

1. Payment information for the buyer
2. Payment information for the seller
3. Reviews left by the buyer for the seller
4. Information sent by buyer to seller (including at least a shipping address)
5. Information sent by seller to buyer (if sent via site)
6. The seller’s name / pseudonym
7. Users IP addresses
8. Metadata about users connections

Making the process anonymous involves several technologies:

• Bitcoin (1, 2) plus Coin Tumblers (but note that the latter may be illegal, on account of being very straight-forwardly money laundering)
• Public-key cryptography (4, 5)
• The Onion Router (7, 8)

So Silk Road actually ends up with:

1. Bitcoin addresses the buyer used to transfer bitcoins to Silk Road
2. Bitcoin addresses the seller used to transfer bitcoins from Silk Road
3. The reviews left by the buyer for the seller
4. Encrypted gibberish sent by the buyer to the seller (including at least the buyer’s address), plus a public key for the seller (which everyone can see)
5. Encrypted gibberish sent by the seller to the buyer, if any (the buyer has no need to post a public key, they can send it to the seller in their message if they need a reply)
6. The seller’s pseudonym
7. The last hop of the connection path users take to access the site

Silk Road can also strengthen their resilience against outside attack by only keeping recent data for items 1, 2, 4, and 5, and no data for item 7 (there is, however, no way for users to verify that they are in fact doing so).

Silk Road also employs several technologies / methods to mitigate the effects of anonymity:

• Pseudonymous escrow
• Reputation economy (presumably the reason they allow for pronounceable seller pseudonyms (6), while keeping information to an absolute minimum in so many other ways), plus methods for quantitative and qualitative analysis of buyer feedback data
• Seller account auctions (SR admins say the primary reason for this is to make the sort of attacks (note that includes scams or stings) that can be done with new accounts at least very costly to do repeatedly; of course, this also makes money for whoever’s running Silk Road)

So Silk Road not just a straightforward application of Bitcoin.  Bitcoin is just a main ingredient in the whole cypherpunk stew!

Also, this is not to imply that the system doesn’t have weaknesses.  It still falls short of the goal of full cryptographic anonymity.  For one thing, the seller ends up with a physical post address for the buyer.  Postal addresses are a lot harder to generate and anonymize than Bitcoin addresses or private keys, and the movement of physical packages is a lot easier to inspect and trace than TOR connections.

Gwern suggests that Silk Road could be brought down through DDoS or acquiring a large number of accounts for some coordinated scam.  Acquiring new accounts to do individual stings is too high cost for too little gain, especially since the value of “flipping” a Silk Road buyer is very low (there’s little they can do to get information on Silk Road sellers).  Perhaps law enforcement will decide to do some stings anyways to make an example of a few cypherpunk drug-purchasers; the ineffectiveness of that tactic as a deterrent doesn’t stop people from trying.

Gwern doesn’t mention the demise of Bitcoin scenario described by Moldbug in this post, where the value of Bitcoins is brought down by a broad-scale legal attack on the Bitcoin exchanges, indicting them all for money laundering (Bitcoin tumblers might be more deserving of this attack, but targeting the exchanges will be easier and more effective).  That wouldn’t prevent people from trading Bitcoins for goods.  But Silk Road’s selection still isn’t as good as Amazon’s, and Bitcoins are still not sufficiently liquid when it comes to things like rent and groceries, so the value of a Bitcoin in rent and groceries still depends on the exchange rate with less science-fictiony currencies.  Not that it would be impossible to find someone on Silk Road to ship you food, but you really don’t want to buy your necessities at black market prices if you can help it.  Being able to spend money earned at a black market premium on things not sold at a black market premium is a big advantage of illicit trafficking.

Update: Or maybe not.

Omega (a powerful (but not supernatural or causality-violating) logic-puzzle creating entity) has set up two boxes.  Box A contains $1000.  Box B contains $1,000,000 or nothing.  Omega offers the choice of taking Box A or taking both boxes.  But Omega has made a prediction (and Omega’s predictions are almost always correct) about the subject’s choice, and put the million dollars in Box B if and only if the subject was predicted to take just Box B (without using an external source of randomness, people who flip a coin and choose based on that do even worse than those that just choose both boxes).

This is one of the most contentious philosophical problems in decision theory.  One of the things that’s interesting about it is that it’s hard to just deny that the premises are logically coherent.  You can sustain the paradox without Omega being perfect in it’s predictions, so long as Omega can be usually right, by increasing the amount to be maybe placed in Box B.

Newcomb’s Paradox is one of the problems that the denizens of Less Wrong discuss extensively because rationality is their raison d’être and decision theory is (in one sense) the theory of what it means to make rational decisions.  The consensus there is that the right solution to the problem is to one-box (that is, to take just Box B), and Eliezer Yudkowsky make a compelling argument for that, which is essentially this: Given the premises of the problem, people who take just Box B walk away with $1,000,000, while people who take both boxes walk away with $1000.  Therefore, it’s best to put aside qualms about strategic dominance, (the illusion of) backwards causality, and whether or not this Omega fellow is generally a jerk; just do the thing that reliably wins.

To put it another way: It’s a premise of Newcomb’s paradox that one-boxers usually win, and it’s a pretty poor game theory that gives advice that contradicts a scenario’s premises.

I was reminded of this puzzle again recently because Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber has this unusual observation on it:

I was reading a postgraduate dissertation on decision theory today […] and it suddenly occurred to me that Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic has exactly the structure of a Newcomb problem.

[…] place yourself in the position of Max Weber’s Calvinist. An omniscient being (God) has already placed you among the elect or has consigned you to damnation, and there is nothing you can do about that. But you believe that there is a correlation between living a hard-working and thrifty life and being among the elect, notwithstanding that the decision is already made. Though partying and having a good time is fun, certainly more fun than living a life of hard work and self-denial, doing so would be evidence that you are in a state of the world such that you are damned. So you work hard and save.

[…] you work hard and reinvest, despite the dominance of partying, because you really really want to be in that state of the world such that you get to heaven.

It does seem to follow from the premises in a similar way, so presumably the conclusion would be analogous.  That makes sense.  When dealing with omnipotent and omniscient entities, trying to find loopholes is widely regarded as a bad idea.

I guess the problem for Less Wrongians (and here, I really must give credit to Crooked Timber commenter Prosthetic Conscience for the link, though some of the overlap in our ideas was independent) is that despite usually being atheists, they are often singularitarians, so they may genuinely worry about effectively omni* entities messing with them (or at least some version of future-them).  Sinners who could yet end up in the hands of an angry god-like-entity.

Round two:

Who the heck is moderating these?!  I guess it makes sense when you see the guy’s campaign ad:

The political cartoon has a venerable history, but I’m beginning to think the political remix is really capturing the zeitgeist of modern political satire.  Here’s something a bit more musical:

More from MC R-Money:

But before you think Romney’s the only one who’s been taking on a turn for the musical, I had to find some quality musical remix satire for Obama.  And not just the different, though also funny, type of remix that’s not political satire per se.  (This sort of thing is somewhere in the middle.)

Here’s one that’s pretty good (though probably cheating a bit and NSFW for swears):

What makes for a great political remix?  What’s your favorite example?

It’s probably the first political attack ad (political ad in general) to focus on driverless vehicles.  And there’s just so much to dig into!  It’s this amazing mix of forward and backwards thinking.

It’s got the designated-old-person narrator pushing the anti-autonomous-vehicles position when autonomous cars are likely to be an incredible boon for the elderly (stuck as they are in a car-dependent society with diminishing sight, hearing, and reaction time).

It’s got the misleading misquote from a Forbes article:  The ad says “Driverless Cars for All: More Dangerous Than Driving - Forbes”, but the actual Forbes article is titled Driverless Cars for All: An Idea More Dangerous Than Driving (emphasis mine), which is not about driverless cars being physically dangerous but the opposite, the “danger” is that manually-piloted cars will be forced off the road in the name of safety.

It quotes the headline of an opinion piece titled Will driverless cars really slow for pedestrians?, but that piece doesn’t imply that driverless cars won’t slow for pedestrians, just that there are complicated tradeoffs involved, and that driverless cars don’t solve that issue by their mere existence.  (Personally, I think autonomous cars will be great for pedestrians, but it’s unreasonable to expect that you can make everywhere safe to cross just by adding more computation and reducing reaction time, all while maintaining fast roads.)

It gets even weirder when you look into who’s funding the ad.  Just who is this Committee to Protect Florida?  Well, a PAC of some kind, they’ve got a hilariously generic description of their purpose.  But they disclose their expenses and contributions.  (Note that the “ecoreport” part of the URL probably has nothing to do with “ECOlogy”, but rather stands for “Electioneering COmmunications”.)

Expenses seem unsurprising, lots of postal spam and media advertising.

Politifact has a page on them (they have not gotten to this ad yet, though):

The Committee to Protect Florida is headed by Rockie Pennington, a political consultant for Richard Corcoran, a Republican candidate for State House District 45.

Corcoran, eh?  What’s he got to do with Brandes?

“I am honored to receive the endorsement of Richard Corcoran,” Jeff Brandes stated. “We worked hard during the 2010-2012 session to address the public’s desire to eliminate wasteful government spending and burdensome regulation. I will continue championing reforms in the State Senate that will boost small business and get Floridians working again.”

A major contributor to the Committee to Protect Florida is the Florida Leadership Fund, which has a very similar website and an even vaguer mission statement.  That gave to Brandes’s State House campaign in 2010, but now seems to be supporting his opponent, James Frishe, in the State Senate race.

Another contribution is Americana Media.  Which contributed web-design services, maybe?  They seem to specialize in blue websites for Florida politicians.

Committee to protect Florida is also supported by MARK PAC, which is where things get a bit weird:

Back in 2007, the Florida Elections Commission fined Democratic operatives Jeffery Ryan and Sara Henning a whopping $209,000 for  illegal financial dealings over several years through a political committee called Florida House Victory that had been set up to support Democratic candidates for the House.

This was all reported at the time. What got lost later was that Democratic Party lawyer Mark Herron—instead of Ryan or Henning—paid off the fine in two installments in Dec. 2007 and June 2008 through another political committee called MARK PAC, which drew its cash during the same periods from two Florida pari-mutuels, the Florida Police Benevolent Association, and health care giant Hospital Corporation of America (HCA). Democrats say there was nothing wrong with the arrangement, and insist the state party had nothing to do with House Victory or paying off the fines.

Anyways, there’s a lot going on here.  It’s amazing just how complicated political campaign funding has become in the US even at the state level.  A good thing to keep in mind as the 2012 presidential race accellerates to full velocity, with no one quite sure who’s behind the wheel.

Full Disclosure: I don’t work on autonomous vehicle technology, but some people at my company do.

I have to admit that when I meet a woman who I know is a graduate of, say, Princeton — one who has read The Second Sex and therefore ought to know better — but is still a full-time wife, I feel betrayed.

And one from the second, much longer essay Why Women Still Can’t Have It All by Anne-Marie Slaughter:

[…] I’d been the woman congratulating herself on her unswerving commitment to the feminist cause, chatting smugly with her dwindling number of college or law-school friends who had reached and maintained their place on the highest rungs of their profession. I’d been the one telling young women at my lectures that you can have it all and do it all, regardless of what field you are in. Which means I’d been part, albeit unwittingly, of making millions of women feel that they are to blame if they cannot manage to rise up the ladder as fast as men and also have a family and an active home life (and be thin and beautiful to boot).

The essays made a splash in the feminist blogosphere.  One thread of the reaction I followed from here:

But beyond that, the housewife model is what makes male superiority in the workplace possible, and creates disincentives to more family-friendly workplace policies. Men who have stay-at-home wives literally have nothing other than work to worry about. […] That model enables men to work longer hours and be more productive; women in the workplace cannot compete (yes, stay-at-home dads exist, but there are a few thousand of them in the United States, making them uncommon enough to be insignificant for the purposes of this conversation). And of course men see that women can’t compete, and it cements their view that women aren’t as capable, and they end up mentoring bright young men who in turn rise up the ranks. […] Corporate cultures that are built around a man-and-housewife model aren’t exactly family-friendly in the first place, and making them really change is going to be impossible unless men are forced to change their behavior. So far, the corporate response to large numbers of women leaving has been to make it easier for women to leave. […] If none of those men had stay-at-home wives – if the men currently occupying the highest-level jobs in the world had to take as much responsibility for childcare and homecare as working mothers — you can bet that corporate culture would look very different.

To here:

There’s much missing in the framing of these debates—from the expectation of power and privilege to a limited idea of what success is. What’s irked me is the continued assumption that this is a women’s issue. The problem isn’t that women are trying to do too much, it’s that men aren’t doing nearly enough.

A new report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that women—even those with full-time jobs—still do the bulk of housework and childcare. On an average day, 48 percent of women and 19 percent of men did housework. Married women with children who work full time spend 51 minutes a day on housework while married men with children spend just 14 minutes a day.

The breakdown of childcare responsibilities was not much different—55 percent of working men said they cared for their kids on an average day, whereas 72 percent of working women did. Women also reported spending more time during the day caring for their children than men. [links theirs]

Back to here:

As an aside, I have a secret fantasy of gathering a team of men to go to every male-dominated discussion (on specific issues in the law or a certain genre of film or investigative journalism or whatever) and when it’s Q&A time, earnestly ask the male panelists how they balance work and family.

That one has a list of suggestions for addressing the issue, beginning and ending, notably, with:

First, don’t marry or move in or reproduce with men unless they pull their own weight. Seriously. That might mean you end up alone. That might be a better option.

[…]

Eighth, I don’t really know what else, except all of these discussions are part of the reason why I am extremely hesitant to reproduce. [Emphasis mine.]

(Note that I’m doing some really rough excerpting here, and none of these should be taken as substitutes for the original sources.  All worth your while, especially the original essays.)

That line of discussion reminded me of a book I read recently.  Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids looks at twin and adoption studies and argues that there’s not much middle-class parents can do to effectively benefit their kids beyond giving them good genes and a reasonable middle-class upbringing.  More labor-intensive methods of parenting yield little result (either due to the extra work having minor effects or mixed effects).  Given that good parenting requires less effort than expected, the book argues that middle-class people should simply consider having more children.

Here’s a relevant passage on the rise of childcare hours among American parents:

[…] As expected, dads do a lot more [childcare] than they used to.  Since 1965, when the average dad did only three hours of child care per week, we’ve more than doubled our efforts.  Given how little dads used to do, though, doubling wasn’t hard.  What’s amazing is the change in the typical mother’s workload:  Today’s mom spends more time taking care of children than she did in the heyday of the stay-at-home-mom.

Back in 1965, when the typical mom was a housewife, she spent ten hours a week specifically focusing on her children’s needs.  By 2000, this number had risen to thirteen hours a week.  This happened despite the fact that today’s moms are much more likely to work outside the home, despite the fact that moms have fewer kids, and despite the fact that dads are a lot more helpful. […]

One pattern hasn’t changed: Stay-at-home moms spend more time with their kids than working moms.  However, both kinds of moms went from about eleven hours per week in 1975 to seventeen hours per week in 2000.  Working moms went from six hours per week in 1975 to eleven hours per week in 2000.  Modern working moms spend as much time caring for their kids as stay-at-home moms did thirty years ago.

These weekly totals sound low because they define “child care” narrowly.  Reading a book on the couch while my sons fight Playmobil wars wouldn’t count—even if I occasionally urged them to play nice.  When parents get full credit for multitasking, measured child care shoots up about 50 percent. [ed: I think that may be an under-estimate, compare this to this, for example (noting that the bins are different)] But however you measure, the main patterns remain.  The average dad has roughly doubled his effort.  The average mom spends more time taking care of her kids than she did when the average mom was a housewife.

[…] If the statistics are right, it’s clear why raising kids feels like a chore.  By the standards of the Sixties, modern dads do enough child care to pass for moms—and modern moms do enough child care to compete for Mother of the Year. […]

(This article indicates these numbers have continued to rise, especially among the college educated.  Though there may be over-reporting there; the article indicates the surveys do make a similar distinction between primary and secondary child care, but the survey methods may differ.)

It’s not that child-raising has become harder.  America has become wildly safer for children, both in terms of factors that parents have little control over (disease, war) and things that parents might hope to protect their children from some of the time (violence, accidents).  And that reduction in risk isn’t from the increase in childcare hours itself, crime rates have gone down across the board and accidents have become less dangerous mainly due to medical technology.

Another book, Free Range Kids (the author also writes a fantastic blog), argues that a culture of fear perpetuated by the extremes of the fear-and-blame-focused 24-hour news cycle and anxiety-driven status competition among parents has lead to an extreme system of parenting that’s bad for the well-being of parents and children alike.  We worry about and obesity, and then don’t allow kids to go outside.  An all-but-entirely-illusory fear of abduction leads to “don’t talk to strangers” hyperbole that leaves kids deprived of their best and easiest way to get help when they’re separated from parents and in trouble.  And much of that addition childcare work ends up being spent on car trips (a far, far greater source of avoidable danger to children than stranger abduction, but for some reason one which doesn’t get much attention in the corporate news media).

It’s also worth noting that for some of the things where nurture really does have a significant effect (e.g. people having positive memories of their childhood), more laid-back parenting could also be productive.  As the article above relates:

“Parents are feeling like they don’t have enough time with their children,” said Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute in New York, which conducts research on the work force. “It’s a function of people working so hard, and they are worried they’re shortchanging their children. I’ve never found a group of parents who believe they are spending enough time with their kids.”

[…]

Dr. Galinsky notes that although working parents typically feel guilty for not spending more time at home, children often have a different reaction. In a landmark study published as “Ask the Children” (Harper, 2000), she asked more than 1,000 children about their “one wish” for their parents. Although parents expected their children would wish for more family time, the children wanted something different.

“Kids were more likely to wish that their parents were less tired and less stressed,” Dr. Galinsky said.

(As an aside, it’s worth noting that some of the rise in childcare time is simply time freed-up by the use of labor saving technology in other sorts of household chores.  But technology should also be labor-saving in other sorts of childcare, especially the indirect kind.)

Given that context, there are a few important things to note:

1. It’s important for men to do more housework and childcare work, but specifically in a context that allows women to do less housework and childcare work (and specifically less of the sort that’s tedious and labor-intensive).  Just having everyone do 12 hours of direct childcare a week (in two-parent families), plus some multiple of that in for-the-whole-household chores and keeping-an-eye-on stuff, wouldn’t be better for women, men, or children.

2. The culture of unnecessarily labor-intensive parenting makes this whole gender-equality in work-life-balance problem look harder than it is.

3. The need to get companies to stop relying on the “housewife model” is still absolutely crucial.  For one thing, very young kids are still going to need loads of supervision (though modern American parenting still manages to be way more labor-intensive than necessary even in that case).  But the social model of helicopter-parent, always-supervised child is just as much of a problem, and just as much of a gendered issue.

4. The extent that “parenting correctly” has become some sort of class-anxiety-ridden status battle is bad.  Having that be another thing men expect their wives to take on for them is even worse.

Which brings me back to that first essay.  Wurtzel writes:

Seriously: Did Romney actually tell his wife that her job was more important than his? So condescending. If he thought that, he’d be doing it. […]

Hilary Rosen would not have been so quick to be so super sorry for saying that Ann Romney has never worked a day in her life if we weren’t all made more than a wee bit nervous by our own biases, which is that being a mother isn’t really work. Yes, of course, it’s something — actually, it’s something almost every woman at some time does, some brilliantly and some brutishly and most in the boring middle of making okay meals and decent kid conversation. But let’s face it: It is not a selective position. A job that anyone can have is not a job, it’s a part of life, no matter how important people insist it is (all the insisting is itself overcompensation). Even moms with full-time jobs spend 86 percent as much time with their kids as unemployed mothers, so it is apparently taking up the time of about 14 percent of a paid position. And all the cultish glorification of home and hearth still leaves us in a world where most of the people paid to chef and chauffeur in the commercial world are men. Which is to say, something becomes a job when you are paid for it — and until then, it’s just a part of life. [emphasis mine, links theirs]

So here’s another angle on that:  As feminists have pushed for women’s equality in the workplace, America has been making (middle-class) parenting more like a job, more like a career.  Status conscious, labor-intensive, very concerned with doing things “the right way”, who to blame when things go wrong, who’s qualified.  Wurtzel is dead right to note the emptiness of that “most important job in the world” rhetoric, but it’s also worth noting how that rhetoric has become embedded in the structure of modern American parenting.

In 2005, I would have leaned towards “fast”, but I was wrong.  All signs, including the Baltic caviar price curve for oil (instead of the sustained high prices I would have expected) point to slow.

A great case-study for this sort of collapse in modern times is the fall of the Soviet Union, which Dimitri Orlov analyzes in his book, Reinventing Collapse.  So I was struck by a recent blog entry that discusses how Greece is now following a similar pattern:

What brought this thought about was reading the heartbreaking article: Suicides in Greece increase 40%

And I remembered a comment I head from Dmitry Orlov in an interview about how much of his high school class were now dead. Yet there were no headlines and there was never any official crisis or emergency. They did not die in gunfights over scraps of food like in The Road. Rather, more quotidian things like alcoholism, unemployment, suicide, homelessness, exposure, lack of medications and ordinary sicknesses like bronchitis and pneumonia took their lives.  Russia’s life expectancy fell dramatically. It’s birth rate declined. Public health fell apart. Suicide rates went up. The population shrank. Entire towns became abandoned. In post-collapse Russia there was a slow die-off that occurred outside of the daily headlines that no one seemed to notice. They were ground down slowly by day-to-day reduction in the standard of living, a million little tragedies that, like pixels in an image, looked like nothing until the focus was pulled back.

And right now the entire continent of Europe is looking an awful lot like post-collapse Russia […]

An excerpt really doesn’t do it justice, go read the whole thing.

On a similar theme, consider this post on bus fuel efficiency improvements:

Orion buses, by stark contrast, are so far almost doubling the miles a coach can travel on a tank. Thanks to the fact that the diesel engine driving them is half the size of a conventional bus’s, they are also quiet enough for the driver to hold a conversation with a passenger on the freeway without either raising their voices. Oh, and don’t let that small engine fool; they move up hills faster than the conventionals. These buses are nice.

And they are going to be needed. As the financial crisis deepens, more and more are riding the bus. A financial analyst stumbled upon probably the best graph yet for visualizing the present perhaps post-peak world […]

The graph is question is this:

The post goes on to note:

Remember my excitement over the new Orion coaches? One of their chief investors in the hybrid technology, Daimler, has decided that increasing bus fuel mileage is simply not profitable:

Daimler Buses North America no longer will manufacture buses at its Orion facility in the Oneida County Industrial Park, officials announced Wednesday…

“Daimler Buses considered all possible options for reconfiguring our transit bus operations in North America,” said Harmut Schick, head of Daimler Buses. “But at the end of the day, Orion is facing a situation where the cost position is not competitive, the local market is in a continued slump and growth opportunities are not available from selling the product overseas.”

It’s not because these buses won’t prove cost effective in a future with ever-rising fuel costs. That’s not it at all. It’s because an era of ever-rising fuel costs will force everyone to reorganize their expenditures. Businesses that rely upon cheap fuel will cut back or go out of business, and closed and/or downsized businesses can’t pay as much in taxes.

Taxes pay for buses.

So just when they need to cut back on their own travel expenses, many workers will see a shortage of buses available to get them to and from work.

That’s slow collapse for you.  Mundane problems with mundane solutions so close at hand.  And yet…

Of course, the question isn’t just whether promises will be broken or renegotiated, but whose promises will be subject to adjustment.  The youngest generation had little say in the current political order, so to what extent will they be willing to foot the bill?

If there’s a generational conflict, the young don’t seem to be winning, as noted in the Esquire article, “The War Against Youth”:

In 1984, American breadwinners who were sixty-five and over made ten times as much as those under thirty-five. The year Obama took office, older Americans made almost forty-seven times as much as the younger generation.

This bleeding up of the national wealth is no accounting glitch, no anomalous negative bounce from the recent unemployment and mortgage crises, but rather the predictable outcome of thirty years of economic and social policy that has been rigged to serve the comfort and largesse of the old at the expense of the young.

[…]

Nobody ever talks about generational conflict. […] Even the Occupy Wall Street crowd, while rejecting the modes and rhetoric and institutional support of Boomer progressives, shied away from articulating the fundamental distinction that fills their spaces with crowds: young against old.

The gerontocracy begins at the top. The 111th Congress was the oldest since the end of the Second World War, and the average age of its members has been rising steadily since 1981.

And it’s not just congress (and other formal, governmental politics), but academia:

From 1980 on, the price of attending a four-year college has risen by 128 percent. While the price has spiked, the quality has tanked. […] In a survey published in 2011, 45 percent of students showed no improvement in “critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing” after two years of college. […] And how could the results be any different? Three decades ago, 43 percent of professors were adjuncts. Now, with colleges bloated by older, tenured professors who take up huge slices of academic budgets while teaching crumbs of courses, the vast majority of classes are taught by adjunct.

[…]

But maybe […] you want to get a master’s or a professional degree. With entry to the professions comes another opportunity to be taken advantage of, and it’s not just the inherently ridiculous price of a creative-writing M.F.A. or journalism school, where on some level, everybody understands the students are being played for suckers. The cost of medical school has spiked over the past three decades. In 1981, average medical-school debt was less than $20,000. Today it is $158,000. Law-school tuition rose 317 percent between 1989 and 2009 while American laws schools wildly increased the number of lawyers they graduate. Naturally, a glut of lawyers decreases their value. So kids pay more for a worse education that leads to lesser prospects in order for the schools to prosper temporarily. […]

And unions:

New workers will earn a “globally competitive wage.” […] Newer workers at unions across the country earn ten to fifteen dollars an hour less than established workers, and the unspoken but widely reported understanding with the AFL-CIO is that the wage of these workers will not increase. In other words, Boomer workers make almost double what their young counterparts do […]

To the extent that the recent economic crisis hurt retirees as well, it’s not clear that this doesn’t exacerbate the transfer of wealth and opportunity away from the younger generation, as would-be retirees delay retirement.  This MarketWatch commentator notes that the BLS statistics on that point may be exaggerated if compared with statistics from different samples at face value, but concludes the trend is still there:

Part of this story is a real phenomenon: More baby boomers are staying on the job because they are healthy enough to keep working. They like working. Further, many of them desperately need the money: They lost their retirement nest egg when the housing market collapsed and the stock market stalled. Fewer of them can rely on a defined benefit pension, and more of them must rely on their own savings to fund their retirement.

[…]

The good news is that employment has been growing faster than the population in every major demographic group. In other words, the employment-population ratios have been rising since the depths of the recession. But, except for the oldest age group, the employment-population ratio is far below pre-recession levels.

[…]

The same thing happened to the generation that came of age in the 1930s. They put their lives on hold for years, and we are still living with their legacy: the baby boomers who are now clinging to their jobs. [emphasis mine]

American politics in particular is hooked on wishful thinking about the future.  If the future is one of unmitigated economic growth, increase productivity might pay all bills and pave over the entire problem.  Admitting that this is not to be is politically untenable.  It is tempting (and reasonably so) for middle-class children to view their parents as excessively optimistic, as opposed to viewing them as short-sighted cowards who sold their children’s birthright to the ultra-rich in order to secure their own retirement.

And it will be hard to renegotiate the social safety net in the face of a retiree voting bloc convinced on the one hand that the whole thing was a bad idea after all and should be scrapped, but on the other hand it’s good that we can just barely afford to keep it around for those who are really counting on it.

As the Esquire piece concludes:

Youth should be the only issue of the 2012 election, because all the subsidiary issues — inequality, the rising class system in America, the specter of decline, mass unemployment, the growing debt — are all fundamentally about the war against young Americans. But the choice young Americans face is between a party that claims to represent their interests but fails to and a party that explicitly opposes their interests and actively works to disenfranchise them.

[…]

By bus and train and car pool, they will follow the gerontocracy to Tampa and Charlotte, the cities with the utter misfortune of hosting the presidential nominating conventions. Then we’ll see if the people inside the convention centers can find the youth anything better to do.

We’ll see then how the flowers of rage, planted and nurtured so carelessly for three decades, have sprung up and who will harvest them.

There’s some interesting discussion to be had on the role of guns in self-defense and aggressive violence, guns win fights but also escalate the stakes awfully quick:

Statistically, incidents of guns being used successfully in self-defense are extremely rare. The following events are a lot more likely:

• Criminal gets hold of your gun and uses it against you.
• The gun gives you a psychological feeling of self-confidence that will cause you to get into bad situations you otherwise would have avoided if you did not have the gun.
• Use of a gun in an ambiguous situation will get you in prison for murder, which is worse than getting beaten up.
• Being prosecuted for murder will ruin your life even if the jury finds you not guilty.

The Zimmerman incident is a good example of the truth of the above. The video showed that Zimmerman wasn’t beaten up that bad. Without the gun, Trayvon probably would have run away after giving him a good but not life-threatening beating. And according to Zimmerman’s father, Trayvon saw the gun, which caused an escalation in the altercation.

There’s something to be said about race relations in this country, something to be said about violence, about respect and community, about culture, about the standards of criminal evidence.  But most of what I hear about this case depresses me because it seems to be overwhelmingly characterized by those that no longer hope for productive dialog on this sort of issue, from one side:

“An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” Mikhail Muhammad said at a Saturday press conference in Sanford, Fla., in which he also called on 10,000 black men to “capture” Zimmerman. “He should be fearful for his life”…

Or the other:

In the last few days I’ve repeatedly discussed blacks’ common attitude that their response to any white authority figure who asks them anything is to resist, fight, ignore, or run away. But the commenter at Half-Sigma puts it better: Non-blacks may not talk to blacks, period. To say anything to a black is to step into his territory, it is to dis him, and thus to provoke his righteous vengeance…

Seems like on some issues the state of discourse in this country is only slightly better off than Trayvon Martin.

1. Eliminate unpaid internships
2. Replace the SAT with subject-specific tests
3. Replace ethnic or racial affirmative action with socioeconomic affirmative action
4. Eliminate bachelor’s degrees as a job requirement

All of those sound reasonable to me, though I don’t think those would make that much of a difference.  Neither does Murray, he thinks it would be more symbolic.

The big about degree requirements is interesting, in part because there’s been some action on a similar legal front with regard to high school diplomas.  The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has at least raised the issue of whether high-school diploma requirements could be discriminatory when that credential is not well-connected to actual job requirements.  There are probably quite a few jobs where the credential of a college degree (especially if not requiring any particular subject) is also not well-connected to the job requirements, and may have an adverse effect on protected groups.

Murray really does have a lot in common with meritocratic liberals.  A common mis-characterization of the liberal position on group differences among alt-righters seems to paint liberals as radical “blank-slate” believers, who either think there are no identifiable groups (plainly wrong), there are no differences between identifiable groups (plainly wrong), or that there are differences between groups but by really lucky coincidences none of those differences are morally significant (plainly wrong and incredibly implausible (unless you think no differences are morally significant, I guess)).  Rather, liberals mainly disagree with Murray on whether wandering into the rhetorical minefield of biological group differences is net-beneficial.

Murray himself notes in an essay summarizing his previous book:

In all cases, the variation within groups is greater than the variation between groups. On psychological and cognitive dimensions, some members of both sexes and all races fall everywhere along the range. One implication of this is that genius does not come in one color or sex, and neither does any other human ability. Another is that a few minutes of conversation with individuals you meet will tell you much more about them than their group membership does.

Which makes me wonder why he can’t avoid those minefields entirely instead of merely tiptoeing.

(There’s some further fascinating discussion of the op-ed here.  The comments are really worthwhile, in particular the comment (left March 8, 2012 at 10:19 am, sadly no comment permalinks on that site) by Albatross on meritocracy.)

One of the essays on the purported decline of America was “Belmont & Fishtown” by Charles Murray, summarizing Murray’s book Coming Apart, which discusses “The State of White America”.  (Presumably “white America” specifically for rhetorical reasons, given the fate of Murray’s most famous work.)  Murray discusses the richest and poorest of whites, using “Belmont” and “Fishtown” as emblematic labels for these groups.  Murray’s conclusion is that since the 1960s, “Fishtown” has gone into deep decline in terms of American core values (Murray refers to such as “Founding virtues”).  “Belmont” has avoided such decline, but become isolated (geographically (for more on that topic, see Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort) and in terms of tastes and preferences (becoming David Brooks’s bourgeois bohemians).

Murray talks about four values in his study:  Marriage (and single vs. married birth and parenting), industriousness (Murray just looks at hours worked and participation in work force), honesty (Murray just looks at crime rates), and religiosity (which Murray posits causes increased civic engagement, but I’d say that it’s just correlated to civic engagement in general; church attendance is just a civic engagement thing religious people do).

Why did this happen?  Murray goes into little detail (at least in the short essay version of his work, I have not read the book).  One reason cited is the sorting effect of elite universities, coupled with financial aid.  This is an unintended consequence of meritocracy, the best and brightest, no matter how poor, are able to escape from troubled “Fishtown” (and, presumably, ensconce themselves in isolated “Belmont”), leaving “Fishtown” with even less social, cultural, human, and financial capital to deal with its escalating problems.  (Affirmative action would presumably bring the same effect to a broader cross-section of de-facto-segregated communities, but Murray doesn’t discuss this because he’s focusing on whites.)  As the problems get worse, the best and brightest of “Fishtown” have fewer opportunities where they grew up and more incentive to leave.

There’s one big thing missing from Murray’s explanation, though, perhaps best explained by a graphic like this:

(Excerpt from a graphic by the New York Times, from this opinion piece, HT Nick Huber.)

I’d say that’s the real power behind the wedge that’s driving “Fishtown” and “Belmont” apart.  I’d guess that the decline in the top marginal tax rate has something to do with that phenomena, though that came too late to be the primary cause.  Once you have the wedge of economic inequality (that is, declining economic opportunity that disproportionatly affects those already worse off (and pretty much anything will disproportionately affect those already worse off)), all sorts of feedback loops start up related to Murray’s metrics:

1. Marriage: Less economic opportunity means fewer people can find a match who will make them better off. Job-related stresses also take a toll on relationships.
2. Honesty: Less economic opportunity means more desperate people on the fringes.
3. Industriousness: Murray asserts that divergence on this metric began when demand for labor was still high, but work that pays less (relative to national standards of living) is still less motivating.
4. Civic Engagement: Less economic opportunity means less funds for church dues and other activities.  Increased job stress may mean less time/energy for other activities.
5. Honesty + Marriage: Harder to get married if you’re a criminal.
6. Honesty + Industriousness: Ditto for finding employment, even if it’s available.
7. Honesty + Civic Engagement: Why participate in your community if you don’t like/trust your neighbors?
8. Civic Engagement + Marriage: A good context to meet people, and in terms of child rearing in or out of wedlock, you’re more likely to care about social censure if you’re a member of a social group in the first place.
9. Civic Engagement + Honesty: Building the sort of trust and norms that discourage crime.
10. Any one of those four + itself: Norms change, it’s a vicious cycle.  The sorts of capital that keep these metrics high is also driven out when they decline.  Successful people leave, organizations move or cease to exist, webs of trust break down.

The above isn’t an inclusive list, and that’s not all that’s going on.  Technology has a role to play, too, and given my earlier points about the Robot Revolution (related), I expect the trend in the graph above to get worse.

I think both liberals and conservatives are aware of the decline Murray discusses, though I’ve seen rhetoric from both sides accusing the other of being in denial.  The underlying problem is largely untargeted by either side.  Liberals only have the political power to defend stop-gap measures that help the poorest of the poor.  Conservatives deny that a gap between productivity and wage growth is a problem, or suggest that the poor will pull themselves up by their own bootstraps if only liberals stopped “helping”.  That line misses two things:  First, the “rising tides lift all boats bit” doesn’t really fit with the psychological reality of the situation, which is that people judge how well off they are relative to others in their society, so economic inequality means social breakdown even if standard of living continues to rise.  Second, there seem to be some implicit and very rosy assumptions about the form such bootstrap-pulling would take, especially if the “social safety net” really is removed (or overwhelmed).

(There’s been about Murray going around the blogosphere (especially among alt-righters), some posts to start on include this speculation about Charles Murray and the Future and this review of the book.  I’d be curious to see more left-wing reactions to the book, too, if there are good ones to read.)

First, a great bit of explanation from this alarmist essay:

[…] hyperinflation is not an extension or amplification of inflation. Inflation and hyperinflation are two very distinct animals. They look the same—because in both cases, the currency loses its purchasing power—but they are not the same.

Inflation is when the economy overheats: It’s when an economy’s consumables (labor and commodities) are so in-demand because of economic growth, coupled with an expansionist credit environment, that the consumables rise in price. This forces all goods and services to rise in price as well, so that producers can keep up with costs. It is essentially a demand-driven phenomena.

Hyperinflation is the loss of faith in the currency. Prices rise in a hyperinflationary environment just like in an inflationary environment, but they rise not because people want more money for their labor or for commodities, but because people are trying to get out of the currency. It’s not that they want more money—they want less of the currency: So they will pay anything for a good which is not the currency.

In other words, in inflationary conditions, everyone is pulling the currency.  They want (and need) more of it because everyone who they buy goods and services from wants (and needs) more of it.  On the other hand, in hyperinflationary conditions, everyone is pushing the currency, they want anything but currency and require more currency as a sort of bribe to except currency at all.  In either case, the currency flows more rapidly, the pushing and pulling happen in the same direction.  The symptom in terms of on-the-shelf prices is similar, but the effect on everything else in the economy is quite different.

One significant difference is what happens relative to alternate currencies, which brings me to the other piece:

I can guarantee that the majority of people who make the claim that gold is an inflation hedge have never looked at the data. Imagine you were a retiree in 1980 looking to protect yourself against inflation. If you were to accept conventional wisdom and bought gold to hedge against inflation, your retirement would have been a nightmare. […]

The reason I am very bullish on gold is because of the obvious debt problems we face. The truly monster spikes in gold are going to come because of sovereign debt defaults.

In inflation, people want more of the inflating currency relative to other currencies (not to sit on, to spend).  In hyperinflation, people want any other currency (since they still need to buy day-to-day stuff).  In the former situation, gold will do poorly against things that are significantly more useful.  In the latter situation, gold will do well to the extent that it functions as a not-currency currency.  It’s not tightly-coupled to other currencies, and “you can’t print gold”, after all.

Disclosure: I’m long in gold and silver, for pretty much the reasons above.
Disclosure disclaimer: The above should not be construed as investment advice.  Any investment advice I do give may be terribly bad.

There’s a great technical analysis of the problems with the bill on the Reddit blog here.  But I think the best analysis of the issue I’ve seen comes from this TED Talk given by Clay Shirky:

His central point is that SOPA and PIPA represent the latest in a trend in entertainment industry lobbying, away from getting Congress to define the distinction between legal and illegal copying (producing, for example, the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992), towards restricting copying through technical means and making it illegal to work around those “protections”.  The DMCA lets companies sell you “broken” (for the purpose of restricting copying) devices and makes it illegal for you to fix those devices.  PIPA and SOPA let the government (at the behest of the entertainment industry) break DNS to censor “pirate” sites, and would make it illegal to work around that (which requires search engines and the like to pay to police themselves so that they aren’t indiscriminately helping users find such things).

Cory Doctorow describes this trend towards technological control systems backed by force of law (and away from legislation about what sorts of things should or shouldn’t be legal, with restrictions on liberty sitting on the other side of due process) in a recent essay titled Lockdown: The Coming War on General Purpose Computing.

The bills have been defeated for now, and in the aftermath, many activists have pointed out that similar legislation will undoubtedly reemerge (under the same name, a new name, or grafted wholesale into something politically inconvenient for legislators to oppose).  But after watching Shirky and reading Doctorow, I’m convinced it’s not sufficient to oppose, whack-a-mole-style, the latest bit of oppressive-technology-backed-by-force-of-law that comes up.  It’s necessary to oppose the idea that companies should be allowed to sell computers that can work against their users in ways that the users are prohibited from fixing.  And it’s necessary to move the copyright debate back to what sorts of copying should or shouldn’t be allowed, regardless of what sorts of copyright law the entertainment industry might be willing to buy or sell.

Occupy is interesting, but it’s also interesting to consider the variety of tactics police have used in opposing the movement.  On the one hand, there’s the UC Davis incident, where the message of “if you are in the way, we will hose you down with military grade pepper spray at point-blank range” was communicated by actually doing just that.  That might be legal, even in the liberal 9th circuit, but doesn’t exactly defuse the situation, and it’s unclear whether it will prevent the protesters from achieving (some of) their goals.

On the other hand, there’s the aikido tactics of the St. Louis Police.  As related in this post by Brad Hicks, after a series of fake-out maneuvers, the police acted with a combination of power and restraint:

[…] [The police] didn’t show up in riot gear and helmets, they showed up in shirt sleeves with their faces showing. They not only didn’t show up with SWAT gear, they showed up with no unusual weapons at all, and what weapons they had all securely holstered. They politely woke everybody up. They politely helped everybody who was willing to remove their property from the park to do so. They then asked, out of the 75 to 100 people down there, how many people were volunteering for being-arrested duty? Given 33 hours to think about it, and 10 hours to sweat it over, only 27 volunteered. As the police already knew, those people’s legal advisers had advised them not to even passively resist, so those 27 people lined up to be peacefully arrested, and were escorted away by a handful of cops. The rest were advised to please continue to protest, over there on the sidewalk … and what happened next was the most absolutely brilliant piece of crowd control policing I have heard of in my entire lifetime.

All of the cops who weren’t busy transporting and processing the voluntary arrestees lined up, blocking the stairs down into the plaza. They stood shoulder to shoulder. They kept calm and silent. They positioned the weapons on their belts out of sight. They crossed their hands low in front of them, in exactly the least provocative posture known to man. And they peacefully, silently, respectfully occupied the plaza, using exactly the same non-violent resistance techniques that the protesters themselves had been trained in. […]

By dawn, the protesters were licked.

(Again, read the whole thing.)

The clearing of Occupy Boston used some of the St. Louis tactics, so maybe those are catching on.  More brutal tactics may or may not be self-defeating, but I suppose that depends on exactly how far police are willing to go, as Brad points out, addressed towards police:

In case you haven’t noticed, you are not the only police officers who have been asked to use as much force as necessary, in order to crack down on trivial ordinance violations, as an excuse to shut those citizens up. Your fellow police have been asked to shut down those protests in every country in Latin America, in every country in the Middle East, in every country in North Africa, and in almost every country in Europe. In country after country, one of three things has happened: the cops obeyed orders and the kleptocrats are getting away with imposing austerity, or else the cops obeyed orders but foreign governments stepped in, citing actual or impending police atrocities, and overthrew the kleptocrats, or else they did something that you chose not to do, this last week or two.

In a few countries, the cops saw that they didn’t have the choice of defending the perfectly law abiding, saw that they were being asked to defend criminals, concluded that they could not morally justify obeying the order to shut down the protests, and went home. Few if any of the protesters even asked the police to switch sides and join the protests against kleptocracy. Most of us know that that’s an unreasonable request, we know that most of you feel that you owe it to the uniform you wear, and to the oath you took, and to your fellow officers, not to join the protesters. But in the countries where the police, asked to use force to shut down peaceful protests against kleptocracy, took off their uniforms and went home until it was all over? Not just in the Arab (Spring) world, but in places like Iceland? Freedom is on the march. Nor have those countries slid into poverty because they refused to cover the debts that the thieves owed to the dishonest bankers; those countries are recovering from the global recession faster than we are.

Charles Stross has some interesting thoughts on how the police crackdown fits into the larger economic/political situation:

Public austerity is a great cover for the expropriation of wealth by the rich (by using their accumulated capital to go on acquisition sprees for assets being sold off for cents on the dollar by the near-bankrupt state). But public austerity is a huge brake on economic growth because it undermines demand by impoverishing consumers. Consequently, we’re in for another long depression. […]

Starving poor people with guns and nothing to lose scare the rich; their presence in large numbers is one major component of a pre-revolutionary situation. […] Worse, the poor have smartphones. […]

The oligarchs are therefore pre-empting the pre-revolutionary situation by militarizing the police (as guard labour).

The rest is interesting, too, including the comments.