WGWJC?

What gun would Jesus carry?

"The Technologies They Are A-Changin'"

Come gather 'round users
Wherever you brows
And admit that the technologies
Around you have morphed
And accept it that soon
You'll be legacy
If your data to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start upgradin'
Or you'll be obsolete
For the technologies they are a-changin'.

Come regulators and committee members
Who choose standards with your votes
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't finalize too soon
For the markets' still in spin
And there's no tellin' what
The next big thing is
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the technologies they are a-changin'.

Come CIOs, managers
Please heed the geeks
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the funds
For he that gets canned
Will be he who has stalled
There's a revolution outside
And it is ragin'
It'll soon shake your Windows
And rattle your Macs
For the technologies they are a-changin'.

Come developers and analysts
Throughout the web
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your users and clients
Are beyond your command
Your old road map is
Rapidly agin'
Please get out of the business
If you can't keep up with new standards
For the technologies they are a-changin'.

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin'
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the technologies they are a-changin'.

Capitalism's Discontents

I am a believer in capitalism, but...

Most people in a capitalistic society work at jobs and try to get the biggest paycheck they can.  Those who make more than they require for their daily needs squirrel some away for retirement.  They put the money in the stock market or bonds, money market funds, or more exotic investments.   Most people have jobs that don't require them to be finance experts.  The few who do make their living in finance have a distinct advantage in the investing arena.  And by some strange coincidence they have some of the largest incomes.   These are the experts on the capitalist system itself.   So, while the rest of us, the people who make goods and perform useful services, we only dabble in finance.  The professionals grow wealthy on it.  They are the greasers of the wheels of capitalism.

To a certain extent capitalism is a game.  The truly wealthy got that way because they are very, very good at playing the game.  Some people are very, very bad at the game.  Most people just muddle through.  A very few are quite excellent at it.  This does not make them either good or bad.   One thing many of those people are good at is acquiring more wealth.

Capitalism has 2 aspects.  In one way, when an economy grows it usually helps most of the people in it.  The popular expression is: A raising tide lifts all boats.  This is the aspect of capitalism that everyone hopes for and gives capitalism its optimism.  But there is another aspect to capitalism.  Sometimes one person's gain is another person's loss.   It is that aspect of capitalism that needs to be addressed.  Some would say that it is appropriate for the smarter, more clever, people to grow wealthy off of the less clever.  The government tries to put some limits on this with consumer protection and other laws.  But, as they say, a fool and his money are soon parted.  Even educated people in the middle class are no match for the masters of capitalism.  This is the root of the growing disparity between the wealthy and the rest of the country.  There are some wealthy people who cheat and steal to advance themselves.  They are some of the worst.  The Bernie Madoff's of the world.  Even if all of the crooks were rooted out the divide would continue to grow.  There are plenty others who would never consider breaking a law and legally enrich themselves beyond anything imaginable by most people. Warren Buffet.  Currently the top 1% wealthiest people have about 37% of the wealth of the country.  The top 20% have about 80% of the country's wealth.  And the disparity is continuing to grow.  Clearly, those people at the top are very good, better than 99% of the country, at amassing wealth.  That skill seems to know no bound.   It is also clear that the continuing growth in the disparity is unsustainable.  The only questions are:  When will people decide something must be done about it?  What will they decide to do about it?

(Aside:  Could it be that Jimmy Buffet is Warren's wayward son?)

The Occupy Wall Street people are gone for the moment but I am pretty sure they will be back.  As long as the disparity between rich and middle class continues grow it will get more recruits.  Most of the wealthy, with a few notable exceptions, seem to be very smug about having earned what they have and wanting to keep it.  At some point they will have to realize that their financial situation is dependent on a stable government, stable society, and stable economy.  Whether they realize it or not it is in their best interest to do whatever they need to to keep the status-quo. If the current economic trends continue it could destabilize things and then their investments could end up being worthless, as in the Great Depression.

Magic and Wizards in the Computer Age

As we all learned in grade school, people used to believe in magic because they didn't understand the forces of nature.  Over the years science has increasingly reduced what is unknown about nature.  At the beginning of scientific advancement, when the most basic principles were determined, most people were able to understand and accept them.  As science and technology have advanced fewer and fewer people understand their more advanced aspects.  The people who understand the advanced aspects seem almost mystical to the average person.  They are commonly called wizards or gurus (e.g. he's a computer wizard).

Although people aren't often faced with making decisions based on advanced knowledge of particle physics they are when it comes to common technologies, such as cell phones and computers.  When faced with a program that is behaving badly we often find some "trick" to getting it to work.  By pressing some combination of keys or selecting some menu option or something we are able to  get the computer to do what we want it to do.  We have no idea why it was not performing according to our understanding of the manual.  We just know that it works when we perform our mystical ritual to appease the computer gods.

If you ask most people they say they understand that the computer simply executes a series of logical instructions.   The same people will acknowledge that they have no understanding how their computer performs its most basic functions.   Even people who are computer professionals only know a small aspect of the computer and are in the dark about much of the rest of it.  There are chip engineers who design the micro-processors and other integrated circuits and circuit boards that are the physical host on which the system resides.  There are operating system designers who know the interface between the hardware and the applications.  There are thousands of application domains that each have their own specialists.  Each specialist has little or no knowledge of what is in other specialties.   To each the other areas are mystical.

About 20 years ago I had a fair idea of how my PC worked, from CPU to word processor.  My understanding has become murkier and murkier over the years as computers have become more complex.  Nearly everyone has a cell phone these days.  Almost no-one understands how they work beyond the most basic concepts.  When I was a kid many people worked on their cars.  It was well within most people's ability to understand it down to a very low level.  Car motors have become vastly more complex and are now controlled by computers.  Medical science is so full of specialties that very few specialists understand what is going on in closely related specialties.  It becomes scary to think about how little the general practitioner knows.

Before science starting making its leaps and bounds magic and religion used to be used to explain what people didn't understand about the world around them.   There was a period where magic was on the wane because science explained a lot of things in a way most people could understand.  Now there more of the world has been explained but it is harder to understand.  There is also too much information for anyone to absorb.  So now people are returning to a mystical acceptance of the world as not understandable.   So many people accept that their computer is really behaving in a non-logical way.  That there are computer wizards who know some sort of magic that can make their computer behave.  That you have to blindly perform a bizarre ritual to make the technology work.  That technology behaves in arbitrary and capricious ways.  

As concepts of science and technology become more remote from the common understanding we can expect more people to treat it as mystical.  The people who have some understanding of it will be called and treated as wizards from the middle-ages.  And they will be, more than the middle-age wizard, able to control things that appear magical to average person.  (Of course there will be false wizards who have only better knowledge of what special key combinations to press without having a deeper under standing of the technology, and real wizards who really understand it.)  The age of enlightenment is ending and we are returning to an age of mysticism.

Not that long ago I had a discussion with a seemingly intelligent college educated woman.  She complained that a recent scientific studied showed that the dietary supplement she was taking did not provide the medical benefit she thought it did.  She said she felt the scientific community had let her down since, years earlier, the claim was made that there was scientific evidence that the supplement worked.   She didn't understand that the dietary supplement industry often over-states the significance of small short term preliminary studies.  And that these are not definitive.  A lot of the people who take supplements or follow the latest trends in the health-food  industry have this miss-understanding.  Unfortunately there are a number of industries, especially in the health sciences, that thrive on confusing people about what is proven science and what is just theory.

The Second Amendment

As long as guns are easily obtained by anyone who is not already a convicted felon or certified as mentally ill there will be random acts of horrific violence in this country.  That much is indisputable.  The questions are: Does the second amendment require us to allow anybody not convicted of a serious crime or certified as mentally ill to be allowed to obtain them.   And do we accept that easy access to guns is essential enough to our society that we just have to accept random massacres as the price?

There are some who argue that gun ownership is the only thing standing between the American people and a dictatorial government.  (Most of those people actually believe we have a dictatorial government now.)  During the US revolution the populace was able to use their arms to overthrow British rule.  Perhaps having an armed populace helped keep dictators at bay at the beginning of the new country.  Now democratic institutions and a democratic ethos pervades this country.  I have met very few people, especially those in the armed forces, who don't have an almost religious devotion the democratic principles this country was founded on.  Reverence for our democratic institutions is inculcated in our children from kindergarten on.  I have full faith in the american people that no clique could pull off a take-over.  There would be such a backlash against anyone who would try it from every part of the military, the government, and the rest of society that a successful coup is beyond imagination.  Another factor making it ever more unlikely is the growing ethnic diversity of  the county.  The diversity guarantees that no one group could gain enough power to take-over.  I can't imagine in my wildest dreams that this country could possibly be taken over from within by a non-democratic forces.  Occasionally a politician seems to endorse policies that don't appear to be totally democratic.  The best bulwark against them has never been armed insurrection, but public debate and press coverage.  In my mind this is the most direct evidence that the old saying is true:  the pen is mightier than the sword.

Others argue that they use guns for hunting and sport.  I have a lot of sympathy for rural people who have grown up with guns and consider them something akin to a cross between a hammer and a football.   I have to say that when it comes to balancing a minority's desire to participate in a sport against the many lives lost due to gun violence it seems a no-brainer which side wins.

Some argue that they feel they need guns for self-defense.  My understanding is that there are statistics that show that unless a person is very used to using guns, like a police officer or a military person, they will not use it effectively if they are attacked.  It is more likely that the gun would be taken away from them and used against them. Also, if the owner has children it is more likely they will harm themselves or others than it will be effectively used to defend them.

Of course the supreme court has said many times that the second amendment does not guarantee a citizen the right to bear arms.  It guarantees a well regulated militia the right to bear arms.   Having said that if we imagine that the supreme court was and is wrong in its many pronouncements on the subject I would suggest this:  The founders were referring to the arms available to them at the time.  Not to the high-powered automatic weapons of today.  So lets let the right to bear arms be granted to the average citizen.  Arms as understood by the founders:  Single shot guns and riffles that were difficult and time consuming to load, often misfired, and were not accurate beyond 20 feet.

Having said all that, the least we can do is put the same requirements on gun ownership as we put on car ownership:  registration of the gun, licensing of owners, and special registration and licensing of trucks (i.e. high-powered or automatic guns).

The Volunteer Army and War

The Vietnam war showed the country how divisive a draft could be for an unpopular war.   During Vietnam the question of whether we should be at war shedding American blood on the other side of the world was hotly debated everywhere.  Since then, the wisdom of being in the first Gulf war was debated, the need to invade Iraq, and the need for our continued presence in Afghanistan was and still is debated.  There is no doubt that if there were drafts for the current wars popular unhappiness with the length and cost in blood with the wars would have ended them much sooner.  Also, it is much less likely that the US would have gone into Iraq.  The debate on war would be at a much higher decibel level if there was a draft.  A draft focuses the attention of the populace because it potentially involves every family in the country.   A volunteer army only involves a small, self-selecting, and somewhat isolated section of society.  This allows the politicians much greater leeway in starting and prosecuting wars.  I have no doubt, that if the politicians of either party had their way, they would have an army of foreign mercenaries, like the French Foreign Legion.  For their purposes the ideal army would be composed of soldiers who had no relatives among the electorate to bring pathos to an anti-war debate.  The benefit of this would be that the military would be freer to prosecute wars the way they saw fit.  This would probably lead to cleaner  The danger is that the electorate might become enamored of war since they had no personal connection to its horror.

Did George Bush Ignite the Arab Spring?

If Al Gore became the president in 2000 the US would of undoubtedly not invaded Iraq.  I hope we would have gone into Afghanistan although that is uncertain.  The take of most people was that the invasion of Iraq was justified by blatantly incorrect information and that Bush pushed us into it.  Iraq has been a very costly war in terms of money and life on both sides.  No-one regrets the loss of Saddam Hussein but people often question whether we should have done it.  For years many people, including me, have argued that it was tremendous and costly mistake that only served to energize anti-American sentiment across the middle-east.

As a consequence the US take over of Iraq the first Arab democracy in the middle-east was created.  The new Iraqi government is tremendously dysfunctional and may not last very long.  That said, it did provide a model for other middle-eastern countries of a state where the dictator was overthrown and replaced by something resembling a democracy.  The Iraqis have had several elections and are, at least partially, attempting to move forward using the messy process of democratic rule.  One can't help but wonder if it wasn't at least one of the inspirations for the democracy movements that have sprouted during the Arab Spring.  During the run-up to the start of the Iraq invasion Bush argued that the Arabs were ready for democracy.  I am sure he feels some amount of vindication by the events of the last year.  His rederik at the time made it sound like he wanted to be the Simon Bolivar of the middle-east.  Thank god popular sentiment prevented him from going further.  If the US tried to "liberate" more countries we would have been demonized even more and there could have been a pronounced backlash.  The way things went and are continuing to unfold, with the US very reticent to get involved, is probably best in the long run.