March 2018 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Friendship and Health – and When Friendships are Made . . .

“How come you don’t hang out with your friends no more?” – Repo Man

Kermit knows that friends don’t tell friends to drive into the mouth of an active volcano.

I read a joke the other day: “Why don’t we read about Jesus’ other miracle very often? I mean, what guy has 12 close friends after the age of 30?”

It’s true. And it’s the post topic for healthy Friday. Why? Because we need friends to be healthy. And we need friends to help us hide the bodies. What bodies? Who said anything about bodies? My lawyer certainly says I don’t.

This post was originally going to be the second part of my post from Monday (LINK), but when I tried to put them together, it was sloppy, horrible, and I ended up having my hands stuck to my eyebrows with literary Super Glue®. The parts just didn’t fit. Or they didn’t fit when I tried to smash them together last Sunday night. The nouns, gerunds and library paste wouldn’t keep it together. At least not at 2AM. But it’s important to talk about. Why?

There’s a huge connection.

Something about the friendships you make when you are between the ages of 10 and 16 is . . . magic. And I think the thing that makes it magic is the years from 10 to 16, those six years . . . are (on average) about 50% of your life. And the specific 50% where you learn how to be mean. How to be hurt. How to feel shame. How to feel triumph. How to buy beer when underage at the 7-11© at the outskirts of town . . . .

The Mrs. and I (okay, mainly The Mrs.) used to watch a show where addicts would be confronted by their family in order to convince them to not be addicts. They went through the lives of the addicts – in almost every case, the addict had insufficient parental support (or some sort of tragedy) between the ages of 11 and 14. Very specific. Each story didn’t rhyme – it was nearly life plagiarism.

Something happens in that part of your life. That really, really long part of your life.

Hormones kick in. And every emotion is fresh. New. The crisp morning air? That first morning when you walk out to your car and, for the first time, see frost on the window? HOW COOL IS THAT? After a few thousand times, the frost becomes . . . another thing you have to deal with. Again.

You only get one first kiss. You only get one first walk hand in hand (or hands in tentacle if you’re a Lovecraftian monstrosity) with your girlfriend. The newness is huge. And the friendships are closer. Why? How many times will you climb the water tower in your town to paint it? Well, not at all now, because Homeland Security would probably take you to Gitmo® for putting your name on the water tower. Because . . . terrorism?

First dates. First breakups. First . . . everything.

Anyway – your life is so very full of firsts. The psychological impacts are massive – and the need for parental support is likewise massive. It’s nice to have the support of people that are genetically connected to you (LINK) and understand you. Probably. We Post-Modern-Vikings seem to be somewhat erratic. I digress.

This time of your life was difficult. It was new. It was a struggle. But it was yours. And your friends from this time had several attributes – they didn’t want anything from you. They just wanted you. They wanted to jump in your car and head to the party place and find the guys who couldn’t let go of high school and had a keg of beer. And why not? Life stretched out forever.

Until it didn’t.

I have had several rare opportunities – I’ve reached out to friends from the past who I finally found due to Internet searches (I’m not a bit Facebook® fan) and talked to them. And we restarted right where we left off.

The Mrs. talked about some psychological theory where people related to their friends . . . forever, in the same way they related to each other when they first formed their relationship. So, you’d always be tied into that same social hierarchy. You’d always be friends in the same way you were when you first formed that friendship.

Amazing. Psychological ties to your friends are rooted in multiple dimensions – they are rooted in your common origin story (like when Wolverine® met Cinderella™!) and your common goofiness. Also? Your love of songs that were popular when you were at your absolutely stupidest. Like 13.

Thankfully, nobody remembers where those bodies are . . . .

Ash Vs. The Evil Economy, Male Underwear Purchases

“Alright you Primitive Screwheads, listen up! You see this? This is my boomstick! The twelve-gauge double-barreled Remington. S-Mart’s top of the line. You can find this in the sporting goods department. That’s right, this sweet baby was made in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Retails for about a hundred and nine, ninety five. It’s got a walnut stock, cobalt blue steel, and a hair trigger. That’s right. Shop smart. Shop S-Mart. You got that?” – Army of Darkness

Yes, these are the grooviest underwear in the world. And yes, I wear them all the time.

The world truly is a web – it’s very interconnected in ways that are obvious (snowy airports slow down planes and mess up your travel plans due to Cleveland. Cleveland!) to less obvious (gold drops in price during a stock market crash because all asset classes are impacted) to obscure and sometimes counterintuitive ways (a drop in men’s underwear sales indicates a huge drop in discretionary spending and a commensurate rise in skidmarks).

When I was younger, it seemed like the economy was tied to regions – the south might be doing well while the west was in an economic slump. One time we had a family stop in our driveway to ask for a cup of flour so they could make gravy at a campfire as they drove from some backwater southern state to California. Pa Wilder got them a cup of flour and some other things, canned goods and such – the little girls in the back of that beat-up car looked very small as their parents struggled to find an opportunity that would give them a future. (Yes, that image has always haunted me – I’ll never know how that story turned out.)

More recently, the national economy of the US has acted more like a single unit and less like a group of regions. Part of the explanation for “why” is banking. The world we live in now of large banks crossing state borders is relatively new. Banks, previously, had been firewalled and your account wasn’t with CitiFargo®, it was with a specific bank building in a specific town. One time I had to cash a check in a major metropolitan area (I was quite young). I tried to cash it at a bank with the same “name” – but it turned out that unless I went to the “main” bank the check was written to, I could not cash the check (for whatever reason I needed cash, not a check).

So, instead of hundreds of banks acting independently, we’ve created a small number of ever larger banks (the top three banks in the United States have over $6.5 trillion in capital – more capital than the next twelve in size have, and almost as much money as the US government spends on cream cheese each year) and these very large banks operate nationwide. So, rather than having your loan denied by the local banker, an algorithm in a computer in a databank in New York denies your loan. I’m kidding. If you’re breathing, you can get a loan. Take as much as you want. We’ve got your children, too, right?

Now the economy, and the loans, move more as a unit. Other pressures creating the web include the increasing specialization and centralization of manufacturing across the globe. Today, more goods are manufactured farther away from their final use point than at any point in history, increasing the economic connections across the world – over 50,000 (not a typo) factories closed in the first decade of this century in the United States.

Those global trade connections create immense wealth as trade flows across the world, but they also create a significant risk that’s never existed before – the idea that economic activity in China could devastate the United States, or vice versa. It may sound far-fetched, but the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy coupled with food aid programs plus ethanol’s mandated use as a gasoline additive led to the Arab Spring and the current civil war in Syria.

Huh?

Yeah.

The Federal Reserve, in order to stimulate the economy of the United States, dumped massive amounts of money from helicopters. Just kidding. They gave it to their friends. Anyway, this massive dump, known as Quantitative Easing, caused the prices of food to go up everywhere in the world, especially in the Middle East. And food aid programs (along with geography) actually lower the number of people engaged in farming. How is that? Well, if you farm and do really well in Egypt, you have to compete with free grain dumped in Africa. How do you compete against free? You don’t. But since the United States started mandating that ethanol be added to gasoline, it’s lowered the amount of food available. Why? Because the only way to make ethanol is to use stuff we could either eat or feed to some nice fat cow to make steaks.

It sucks to be Egyptian. It sucks more to be Egyptian when the prices of food go out of sight. The result of hungry, angry people? Rebellion, revolution. It’s ongoing in Syria. And it’s certain that over 500,000 people have died in the various conflicts after the “Arab Spring,” which was brought about . . . due to economic policy, “free” food, and food turned into car fuel.

Pulling at one bit of yarn in the sweater will end up unravelling the whole sweater – it’s all made of the same yarn. The global economy is similarly connected. And in order to make it more profitable, we’ve made it more efficient. Efficiency is good, right? Sure! The factory goes from one shift to three, and produces almost three times as much stuff if it goes 24 hours per day. But by doing that, if we lose that factory, we’ve lost three times as much production as if we’d done it inefficiently. A natural consequence of efficiency is higher profits. A side effect of efficiency is higher overall risk – the system is working at nearly full capacity, so the loss of any significant component places the system in deficit. There’s a shortage somewhere if the system runs into trouble.

That explains why the two Gulf Wars brought about huge price increases in oil – the system had to raise prices to allocate the oil to the most important (or richest) users and the world oil production system simply does not have “instant” capacity that can be added – the lag between supply and demand is measured in years. The price of oil acted as a retardant on the rest of the economy – a friction. Like a tax, it raised the price of everything that required energy to produce and ship – in short, all material goods were impacted, but nice sunsets were still free. Businesses that lived at the margin of profitability disappeared. Men’s underwear sales went down – yes, this is literally the last thing that gets purchased in tough times – no matter how bad, you can always wear the underwear another week (skidmarks and all).

But failed businesses don’t pay a paycheck. And newly unemployed people don’t eat out (or buy underwear) – even McDonalds® sales plummeted during the last big recession. And so McDonalds© doesn’t hire people. Those people don’t go to eat out, either. It’s failure. But it’s a failure that leads from one failure to the next, like dominos knocking each other over – something nerds call “cascading failure.”

How bad was the last recession? Certain sales in basic chemical precursors . . . stopped. Credit dried up – why would you lend to someone who might be going bankrupt?

Here are some actual examples that I was aware of during the 2008-2011 collapse . . .

At some point – sulfuric acid production in the United States . . . stopped. Sulfuric acid is known as the “king of chemicals” because so many, many things depend upon it, like The Mrs.’ glass eye or her prosthetic leg. I know one producer of sulfur stopped producing for over a month. Why? No one would buy sulfur – at any price.
Rail cars stopped being useful. On my 18 mile drive to work, I passed by (mainly) open line railroad. There were a few miles of siding (siding is the place where they switch cars). I noticed that the siding began to fill up. And it filled up further. Pretty soon there were miles (literally miles) of railroad cars sitting – not moving. Not moving any product.

What happened? We ended up putting 480 volts through the heart of the American economy with borrowed money and jumpstarting Frankenstein back to life. I’m not sure that we can do that again. The debts are higher. The excesses are greater. The PEZ™ supply is at a 20 year low.

Thankfully, they still ship ammo by mail. And I’ve got some really great underwear that will probably last for a long time. Does your underwear have chainsaws, shotguns, skulls and “groovy” on it?

Yeah, I didn’t think so.

How much time do you have left? Not as much as you think you do . . .

“Ok, let me see if I’ve got this straight. In order to be grounded, I’ve got to be crazy. And I must be crazy to keep flying. But if I ask to be grounded, that means I’m not crazy anymore, and I have to keep flying.” – Catch 22

Now 205 pounds and doing 180 push-ups and sit-ups a day . . . .

When I was 10, summer lasted a year. I would spend the time hiking in the mountains, making models (plastic spaceships, not the Donald Trump kind), reading comic books (sometimes the same ones, again and again) and looking forward to the next day. Each day was a bit of wonder, and they lasted so very long. It seemed like the longest days were those when we were wishing that the calendar would go forward – for a vacation – for a trip – for a birthday. Our life went slowest when we were wishing it away.

When I was 30, summers began to blend together into a blur. Time for the mortgage payment . . . again? Didn’t I just pay that? I’ll change the filter in the air conditioner. Oh, that’s been a year? No, two years??? How did that happen?

When I was 5, the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas was roughly . . . forever. Now? A blink and then it’s done. And after 30? Might as well spin the wheel – days blur into weeks into months into years. A decade between visits with a close friend? Hmmm.

A clock ticks off a minute after a minute. It ticks off an hour in an hour. That linear time is 1+1=2. It’s how we think of the world, but it’s not at all how we experience it. No. Our time sense is far different.

When we are born, after living that first day – it’s all we have ever known. It’s an eternity. It’s literally all the time we’ve ever known. To look forward after that day would be to look across a gulf of time that, to us, is nearly an infinite amount of time away.

A minute isn’t a minute. When you’re ten years old, half of your life is five years. When you’re forty, five years the amount of time you’ve been thinking about changing your shower curtain. But half of your life is twenty years, and that’s something substantial to you. Kind of like the five years to the ten year old . . . .

All of us experience time a day at a time, but the day is different to each of us, has different significance, different meaning. Your time sense is changed by the amount of time you’ve spent on Earth. The most significant time is doubling . . . rather than a year, it’s all about how many times you’ve doubled your experience. Let’s take an example:

Most people don’t start building memories until they’re two and a half or so. Double it? Five. Again? 10. 20. 40. 80.

Viewed from that vantage point, we’ve only got about five doublings in our life. Rather than 80 years (which seems daunting) think about it that the time between five and 10 will roughly correspond to the perceived duration between ages 40 and 80.

And I think it’s not just time perception – it’s learning. It’s achievement. You probably learn as much between two and a half and five as you do between 10 and 20. Or 40 and 80.

Does time seem like it’s going faster? For you it is. This is the same model that radioactive decay follows – a half-life. The half-life of a radioactive atom is based upon the stability of its nucleus. Your half-life is based on how many days you have lived. And each day makes the next day shorter . . . .

Fortunately, there’s a solution. When reading Joseph Heller’s book, Catch: 22, one of the characters, Dunbar, shot skeet because he hated shooting skeet. Whenever possible he did things he hated or things that made him uncomfortable so that he could have a life that appeared to be longer. I mean, nothing seems longer than doing something you hate, so why not just fill your life with doing things you hate?

Oh, we don’t fill our lives with doing things we hate because it’s stupid. Whew. Forgot.

I’ll throw out there, that when viewed in these doublings, you have much less useful time on Earth than you think. If you have five doublings (and nobody has ever made it to six) than you’ve only got so much time to do what you want to do.

Have a book to write? If you haven’t started, will you ever?

Have an apology to make? If you wait another decade, will that make it easier?

Whatever you do, don’t wish your life away – you’ve only got so many days. Make the most of each one of them.

Human Beings, Are We Awesome Creatures With Cool Senses, or What? (Hint: We’re Awesome)

“I see dead people.” – The Sixth Sense

I find this picture . . . disturbing. Should this be the XY-Files?

I think that a lot of times, we have no ideas of the capability of humanity. From the ability to understand subatomic particles from the basis of equations and thought experiments that we constructed to the ability to build pyramids and land on the Moon, we continually do lots of stuff the warning label said not to do. And we make bratwurst. Which is, when cooked right, the Best of All Possible Foods®.

Human senses are apparently much more finely tuned than we ever expected and we’ve managed to gather data that we’re way smarter than we ever thought we were. Human senses are adequate to:

Around 60% of the time, judge from a photo if a man or woman is gay or straight. For some reason, this gives gay people the heebee-geebees.
Determine which student came from a rich or poor family with about 53% accuracy. Not super accurate, but better than chance. Perhaps it was because Ivana Trump was in the photo stack?
Determine if people are sick from looking at a picture of their stupid sick face – 81% of the time.
And we might have even more amazing skills:

That could have been the end of it. But another biochemist encouraged the pair to track Milne down and try a blind T-shirt test: She sniffed six sweaty tees from people diagnosed with Parkinson’s, and six from healthy controls. Milne correctly identified which six had Parkinson’s, but she also tagged one of the control subjects as having the disease.

Despite that error, Barran was intrigued—all the more so eight months later, when the same supposedly healthy control subject Milne had identified was diagnosed with Parkinson’s.

This is from National Geographic . . . you can view the article here (LINK). It’s not a great article, but I’ll cite the source . . . .

Sick people and well people, I’m not sure who is who, mainly because I don’t care about other people. (Audrey Henderson/St Andrews University)

Yeah, humans can smell diseases. Or, at least old British women can smell Parkinson’s disease, and some people can see them, at least some of the time.

And AI shows that what our brains are doing is processing subtle biological cues that are actual, physical patterns. An AI was set up to determine the whole gay/straight question by feeding it tons of pictures of gay and straight people, and the accuracy of the algorithm was in the high 80% level, if you gave it five facial images per person. Me? My ability to judge gay people vs. straight people is totally non-existent unless I “accidently” open the door when they’re having sex. My ability is zero.

Here’s what the AI figured out: both Gay and Straight people are blurry. NYTimes was where I found this, but it was originally from the original study.

One thing I’ve noted – generally just watching two wrestlers walking onto a mat, I can guess the winning wrestler about 80% of the time. And I can tell which two bratwurst will be tastiest when I grill them. Even if it’s a tie. (It’s always a tie – they’re bratwurst.)

2018 Wealth Predictions: 1st Quarter Update

â€œBattalions of Orcs are crossing the river.Â lt is as the Lord Denethor predicted.â€ â€“ Lord of the Rings

Two million dollars? Â Some people donâ€™t make that much money in a whole year!

I promised a quarterly update on my Wealth predictions for 2018.Â So, here it is.Â So far, Iâ€™m doing okay.Â Weâ€™ll check back in June to laugh at the how things have gone off the rails.

Bitcoin

Bitcoin is the ugly stepbrother of currencies.Â Or itâ€™s CinderellaÂ®.Â I categorized the risks previously:

It (may) be vulnerable to hacking since itâ€™s based on an NSA product â€“ there may be hidden back doors.
Wal-MartÂ® doesnâ€™t take it.
Itâ€™s as volatile as a bi-polar ex-wife on meth.

New Risks since December Prediction:

The IRS has categorized each Bitcoin transaction as a taxable event.Â Yeouch.Â Nobody keeps those kinds of records, and that is an absolute block for people wanting to use it like youâ€™d use a dollar bill.Â That moves it from a currency to an investment vehicle.Â Use as a currency inherently raises the value of Bitcoin, but this moves it away from that.

My prediction in December:

â€œI think it might have more to fall before it becomes stabilized, maybe to $10,000.Â But I predict it would be higher than $20,000 next December.â€

First Quarter Scorecard:

Howâ€™s that working so far?Â Bitcoin dropped to my $10,000 number and kept right on going until it hit $7,000.Â Recently, itâ€™s been bouncing around my $10,000 prediction for the stabilization number.Â Is $20,000 still possible?Â Sure, but less likely if itâ€™s harder to use as a currency.Â I would change this one if I could (note:Â The Boy has partial Bitcoins I wonâ€™t let him use, due to the taxable thing.Â Irony:Â He paid a bitcoin for some hosting about 5 years ago.Â Yeah.Â $10,000 for internet hosting.)

The Stock Market

In December I said:Â â€œThe biggest risks are North Korea, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, with anything that created higher oil prices being the biggest risk.Â Chances of impeachment this year?Â Nearly zero.â€

New Risks Since December Prediction

Democrats taking the House of Representatives in November â€“ this is a risk because it greatly increases political uncertainty. Again, impeachment this year is nearly zero probability.Â In 2019 with a Democratic House?Â Low, but non-zero.Â Thatâ€™s a huge risk the market has not priced in.Â October will be the most volatile month this year, if the Republicans keep the House.Â If they lose the house â€“ November will be a very difficult month in the Market.Â But if Pelosi keeps talking â€“ the Republicans have nothing to fear.
How much will the Fed increase interest rates (see below)?
Is FacebookÂ® in trouble for data? Facebookâ„¢ might be the spark that melts the market down . . . or not.

2018 Prediction on the S&P 500:

â€œUp.Â Not 24%.Â But up, say, 10%.Â 2019?Â Weâ€™ll see.â€

First Quarter Scorecard:

So far, year to date, itâ€™s up 1.01%.Â Seems in line with my prediction (so far).

Interest Rates:

Weâ€™re recovering from the longest period of low interest rates in history.Â All of history.Â It really wonâ€™t make a difference, but the Federal Reserve simply must increase rates so that we can pretend that the money isnâ€™t all made up.Â Eventually if thereâ€™s a credible alternative (Bitcoin? Swiss Francs?) the Federal Reserve will have to raise interest rates . . . a lot.

If itâ€™s too much this year, weâ€™ll enter a recession â€“ maybe right away.Â I donâ€™t think thatâ€™s likely in 2018.Â Trumpâ€™s Fed chair will want to raise the rates â€“ after this election.Â Maybe right after, so the economic pain is over and done with by the 2020 election.

2018 Prediction on the Federal Reserve Rate:

â€œUp slightly.Â Eventually (2019, 2020?) up a lot.â€

First Quarter Scorecard:

Zero change in the Fed funds rate.Â Mortgage rates have gone up from 3.95% to 4.46%.Â Not a lot, and not even a record number for the last decade.Â Seems in line with my prediction (so far).

Gold/Silver:

2018 Prediction on the Gold/Silver:

â€œMeh.Â Wanders back and forth.Â Probably ends the year +/-10% of where it started.Â 2019 or 2020 might be different stories, and longer term it will still experience huge upward swings during times of uncertainty.Â It appears weâ€™re currently at the â€œno crisisâ€ pricing, which would probably be a good time to stock up.â€

First Quarter Scorecard:

Gold is up 1.8% in the quarter.Â Silver is down 3%.Â Itâ€™s wandering (for now), so itâ€™s in line with predictions.

Please note that when a stock market crisis hits (not if, but when) ALL asset classes will drop in price (except for food and ammo).Â Thatâ€™s generally a great time to buy gold.Â If itâ€™s an inflationary spike?Â Yeah, youâ€™ll be too late for the party â€“ people will dump dollars to buy commodities like gold.

Disclaimer:Â I havenâ€™t started any positions in anything above the last three days and donâ€™t expect to start any in the next three.Â So there.Â Also, Iâ€™m not a financial advisor, and this set of â€œpredictionsâ€ is probably as good as a blank OuijaÂ® Board and probably worse than flipping a coin.

Old-Time Television, Polical Trends, and Civil War II for Fat People

â€œWell, l could be wrong, but l believe diversity is an old, old wooden ship that was used during the Civil War era.â€ â€“ Anchorman

The Battleship Texas, reporting for tourists!Â Hopefully fat ones!

Data Point:Â I was at a club function with The Mrs., The Mrs.â€™ Mom, and The Mrs.â€™ Grandfather several years ago.Â The Mrs.â€™ Grandfather was in the Army Air Corps in World War II, so heâ€™s getting along in years.Â Standing up and sitting down is tough on him.

The club opened with both a prayer, and then the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag.Â You were supposed to stand for both.Â The Mrs.â€™ Grandfather didnâ€™t attempt to stand for the prayer, but when it came time to stand for the Pledge, he was standing straight and tall with his hand over his heart.Â It was as if his loyalty to his country was in fact his real religion.

Data Point:Â I grew up in a rural area â€“ no cable for us.Â It was in the mountains, so we didnâ€™t even reception from the television station directly â€“ we got it from a â€œtranslatorâ€ that took the original signal from the television station and converted it to a UHF signal to be rebroadcast to us mountain folk.Â Consequently there were only three networks â€“ ABC, NBC, and CBS.Â We also got PBS, but who counted PBS??

The next day at school, weâ€™d talk about the same shows.Â Different races, different home languages in some cases, and different religions.Â The commonality was our love (generally) of the same television shows â€“ we all watched Family FeudÂ®.Â Our teachers were strong believers in America.Â And our faith in the United States prevailing over the godless communists of the Soviet Union was strong.Â We knew we could win.Â And it was (after Vietnam) a time (mostly) free of war.Â Even the first Gulf War was over in an afternoon.

Data Point:Â For most of the nationâ€™s post-Civil War history, the undercurrent of a single, cohesive nation, the undercurrent of optimism carried through the nation.Â We were America, and it was morning here.Â You might have voted against Carter, or Reagan, or Bush (I) or Clinton, but nobody said â€œnot my president.â€Â Carter may have had crappy economic policy, but his commitment to building the United Statesâ€™ military (stealth aircraft, improved submarines and missiles) gave Reagan the weapons to end the Cold War peacefully.

We were one as a country â€“ bound by the civic religion of love for country, the nominal shared Christian values, and the overwhelmingly focused popular culture.

Iâ€™m not sure when it really began, the great fissures in American society.Â Some may point to Reagan.Â Some may point to the Clinton Impeachment.Â Others may point to changing demographics.Â Others may point back to Glubbâ€™s (LINK) study of the end of empires.

But progressives were 100% certain that they would own the future and the presidency for . . . forever.Â After W. termed out, the idea that Obama ushered in a year of final, complete progressive control was even more manifest.Â And now, in the post-Obama era we have greater divisions than ever in my lifetime.

Why?

Well, for one thing, a vast majority of the citizens felt the civic religion my Grandfather-in-law felt when he stood up for the pledge.Â There was a feeling of faith and reverence for all things American.Â And why not?Â The United States was the strongest economic and military power the world had ever seen.Â And most of what we were responsible for, we felt was to make the world a better place.Â Who was trying to get the Egyptians and Israelis to stop killing each other?Â Carter.Â Who was trying to limit nuclear weapons?Â Reagan.Â Bush (I) liberated Kuwait.Â Everyone generally was in favor of that.Â Clinton?Â Well, he got a participation trophy â€“ but didnâ€™t mess too much up.

Also, values used to be common.Â Mainstream Protestant Christianity was pretty much the assumed norm.Â And the values of Protestants (egalitarianism, hate of nepotism, belief in hard work leading to success through a meritocracy, looking down on unwed pregnancy and single motherhood, and salvation through faith) were fairly benign.Â You didnâ€™t have to be a Protestant for a Protestant to like you, and as religions go, Protestantism is probably the most comfortable religion with a secular state.Â As I heard it said once, â€œWelcome to the Methodists!Â Weâ€™re not against anything!â€

And popular culture was small (three stations!) and opinions were more limited.Â No matter who you were with, you had something in common.Â You didnâ€™t like the same candidate, right, but at least you liked the same sports team.Â Or the same sport.Â Now, given the Internet and the explosion of cable channels, you might never watch the same show as your friends.Â The commonality of popular culture is simply gone.

I think it might have been the division was seen in earnest in the 2000 election â€“ the bitter, close win by W. was (maybe) the spark that lit the fire.Â Was the degree of anger during this election and the aftermath partially in response to the Clinton Impeachment?Â Probably.

Since the 2000 election, one side or the other has felt the presidential election wasnâ€™t legitimate.Â So, for the last 18 years, half-ish of the country has really, really, really had a deep hate for the president.Â Thatâ€™s new.Â And there are a group of people in America today who actively despise the country.Â Thatâ€™s new, too.Â And, they despise its history, too.Â And they also despise showers, from the pictures Iâ€™ve seen.

If you look at the recent destruction/removal of Civil War statues, I get concerned.Â The statues were a part of the reconciliation effort after the Civil War â€“ part of the bargain for bringing us back together as a nation was that we embraced each other.Â Oh, sure, there would never be a statue to General Grant or Abraham Lincoln in Atlanta, but General Lee could be rehabilitated as a military genius who was asked by both sides to lead their army.Â These statues werenâ€™t put up like statues of Lenin or Stalin â€“ memorials to oppressive leaders â€“ this might be the first war in history where statues of the losers were put up on territory they lost.

Sam Houston, in Houston.Â Letâ€™s see you take this one down . . . .

We have fractured into a thousand different values.Â And a thousand different cultures.Â Iâ€™ve actually seen it said on the Internet that America has no set culture or values and never has.Â Our sense of purpose has gone from winning the Cold War to . . . what?Â Something centered around the Kardashians?

We cannot continue like this, but the necessary preconditions to Civil War are (thankfully!) not here.Â Our economy is strong, so people feel they have something to lose, so they wonâ€™t fight.Â Fanatics on either side arenâ€™t geographically separated (think north and south in the Civil War) so thatâ€™s another plus.Â There donâ€™t appear to be two military sides, so thatâ€™s helpful, too.

What next, then?

Well, Yogi Berra said it best, â€œPredicting is hard, especially about the future.â€

We wonâ€™t become as cohesive again, outside of war. Once the group is shattered, itâ€™s shattered.
We will find it difficult to agree on any national goals, outside of crisis.

Things Iâ€™m guessing:

We wonâ€™t see anything like a conventional war. Weâ€™ve spent too much money and are too good at it for anyone else to play.Â Any external conflict will be far sneakier, and far nastier.Â Think all the computers not working.Â Or all of the Pop-TartsÂ® being the icky brown sugar ones.
Add a sufficient economic crisis, and all bets are off internally. I donâ€™t think a second Great Depression (absent all of the welfare) will be peaceful.Â At all.Â Maybe not a civil war, maybe just anarchy.
People will call the future situation â€œbad luckâ€ despite the clear predictability from every civilization undergoing the same circumstances throughout history (again, see my Glubb post: (LINK)).

I, for one, want to make video games, carbonated soda, Doritosâ„¢ and TwinkiesÂ® federally subsidized (free) for everyone.Â That way, if Civil War II ever comes?Â Everyone will be fat and slow and probably in sweatsuits.Â It might make for the most humorous war in history.

Tiny Fight Club, Taleb’s Skin in the Game, and Expensive Female Lawyer Reproduction

“A guy who came to Fight Club for the first time, he was a wad of cookie dough. After a few weeks, he was carved out of wood.” – Fight Club

The Boy and Pugsley square off in a Beta version of Fight Club. Bigfoot is in the background as an observer.

I have a fight club in my basement.

Not an officially sanctioned, Tyler Durden® approved Fight Club. Just a small fight club, mainly involving me, The Boy, Pugsley, and (sometimes) The Mrs.

What is this tiny fight club? Well, it’s wrestling.

Wrestling season ended for The Boy a little sooner than he’d planned – he’s in high school and would rather have gone on from districts. We talked about it, and he was ready to commit to working harder for the coming year – and I read somewhere that “working hard” was correlated with “success.” Sounds like crazy voodoo to me.

But sometimes a hard loss will do that to you much more effectively than a win – when I wrestled, I learned something from each match I lost. Some wins? I didn’t learn a thing. And losing can either break you or motivate you. The Boy sounded motivated.

Given The Boy’s commitment, we immediately started practicing for the next year. Since Pugsley wanted to join us, we threw him in for good measure – he’s five years younger and a bit smaller than The Boy. I will note that The Mrs. has been after me for about two years to take a more rigorous and structured approach to coaching The Boy and Pugsley in wrestling. My excuse was that I didn’t want to interfere with their actual wrestling coaches and the work that they were doing with my kids – what if I taught them moves differently than the coach liked? Yeah, a lame reason, but it was my reason.

But after this year for The Boy, he was ready. He only has so many days left of wrestling, and he committed that he’d work with me to make the most of them. Fair enough, I’d commit to him to work hundreds of hours with him to help him be better. So we started practice. But before we started practice? I started reading, studying, and preparing to coach.

I prepared to start Tiny Fight Club (no, this wasn’t a restart of my failed Midget Hammer Fighting League):

What sort of things should I teach them? In what order? Wrestling is easily the oldest sport known to humanity – men were wrestling each other when we still hadn’t figured out how to knock two rocks together to make a “clunk” sound and way before they’d invented the Nintendo® Switch™.

Why did we wrestle in the murky depths of history? To impress the ladies, sure. Also, because it’s fun. Most importantly, as Jordan Peterson would say, this combat allows us to create a hierarchy, and having that hierarchy is important, as I describe in my perfectly awesome post about Peterson’s book (LINK).

But something more happened. I became engrossed in study about how to coach and what to coach. And Pugsley still had one more tournament left . . . so we had exactly three practices until he would finish out his kid’s wrestling season.

Like The Boy, Pugsley had been, well, stalled in his progress if not taking a few steps backward this year. He just wasn’t getting much better. But we had those three practices. And with them, and in drilling he felt more confident than ever.

The good thing about that last tournament? There were only two people in his bracket. One was Dirk. Pugsley had never even taken Dirk down (where you gain control over your opponent) in the last three years. The other wrestler, Ezekiel, well, Pugsley hadn’t beaten Zeke in two years. Literally he had wrestled these two other boys a dozen times or so in the previous two years and hadn’t beaten either one of them. What was three hours of practice?

In the very first match in his weight, Dirk pinned Ezekiel. Quickly. As was usual. Dirk routinely took first place.

Dirk’s second match was against Pugsley. Pugsley immediately (and with confidence) went out and gained control and got the take down! He was up 2-0. Dirk was in such difficulty (and pain!) he’d done anything he could to get off the mat. Pugsley dominated him for most of the period, then got in a pretty bad position, and then got pinned. But he came off the mat with confidence – he knew what I had coached him in worked – he had been amazing against an opponent he’d never even scored on. The next match he pinned Ezekiel in the first period. Zeke was not pleased – the creampuff he always beat had grown fangs. And Pugsley was sold on our practices.

On the way home he talked about wanting to be a national collegiate wrestling champion. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb would say, I now had “Skin in the Game” and so did my boys. And it matters.

(The following link doesn’t get me any money as of the time of this writing, but at some point I might monetize it. It’s Taleb. Buy the book, anyway.)

I am thinking about reviewing this book, but reviewing Taleb might prove to be difficult in this blog – it might require five or more posts. We’ll see. Buy it, anyway, and read it.

In the process of working through wrestling with The Boy and Pugsley – I found something interesting (outside of the bruises randomly outcropping on my biceps, forearms, and chest). I felt more energized than I’d felt in ages. The very act of working with The Boy and Pugsley to make them stronger and more skilled improved my attitude about . . . everything. My daily cardio workouts became sharper (and I studied wrestling moves during them). And my muscles started to grow as I kept up with the boys when we lifted after fight club.

But I also had another epiphany.

The combat serves many purposes: It builds confidence. It teaches to never give up. By example, it shows that hard work pays off in success. It bonds fathers to sons. It builds discipline (Pugsley’s respect for me has gone up 372% and his pre-teen surliness has utterly disappeared). These are all traits that will lead (along with intelligence and Stoic virtue (LINK)) to much greater than average social and economic success.

And I’m in much better shape, and I’m learning how to teach The Boy (no, you have to rotate more than 180˚) and Pugsley (no, you have to throw your head through while you get your hips under your shoulders) and The Mrs. (dear, could you make us all some nice sandwiches). I kid. The Mrs. oversees our deadly serious play. When The Boy complained that Pugsley smelled like sour milk, The Mrs. awarded The Boy a penalty point for “Involuntary Lactation.” That caused us all to laugh.

But the epiphany is that the combat pays off down the road in the ultimate Skin in the Game moment: this work is a precursor to reproduction . . . what?

Yes. Being a high status man increases reproduction possibilities. Being a high status woman doesn’t.

Huh?

How does that work??? Check this tweet out:

https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/973473559933747206/photo/1

I would say that being a high-powered female attorney actually lowers reproduction access for women. The most fertile years for women are in their 20’s – after that, it lowers drastically. By the age of 40? Forget it.

But high status guys? The guys back in the cavemen days that were winning the wrestling matches? They got a chance to reproduce. And 8,000 years ago, science says that only one guy versus 17 women reproduced (LINK). The odds are better now, one guy will get to reproduce for every out 3.3 women that to reproduce. 3.3 to one? Are you kidding me? Nope. High-status guys, only the top third, get to reproduce. I guess that choosy girls all choose the same men.

High status men.

Competition – physical competition is hardwired into the brains and souls of boys. And old men, like me. That’s why I felt so good – I was throwing myself into physical combat for the first time in years, and relishing it. Winning (and coaching well) provides many physical benefits – increased testosterone, brain chemicals and other science-y things in addition to the strength and fitness ability. If you look at the math, social hierarchy is a must for men.

In today’s society, that means a cool job with money. So, in order to have children, i.e., the ultimate Skin in the Game, the behaviors of competition and working long hours to increase income are absolutely necessary for men and are negatively correlated with reproductive success for women.

There’s no wage gap, at least not one based on any sort of discrimination. Thousands (if not more) of years of human breeding have made men drive to succeed – because success is the currency of reproduction.

The final observation for today:

Raising boys is a full contact sport. To allow them to reach their full potential they have to fight. I suspect that many (but not all) cases of ADHD and the other alphabet salads of childhood disorders that have suddenly emerged after existing . . . never, are really just boys not being able to take risks or have a fistfight or nurse a bloody nose or confront a bully – behaviors that bind them into the social hierarchy.

“We’re a generation of men raised by women. I’m wondering if another woman is really the answer we need.” – Fight Club

Oops, I guess I broke the first rule of Fight Club. Again.

Stoics, Fight Club, Wealth, and Virtue

“I had it all. Even the glass dishes with tiny bubbles and imperfections, proof they were crafted by the honest, simple, hard-working indigenous peoples of . . . wherever.” – Fight Club

The first rule of Fight Club is . . . be older than six. And no swords.

Wealth – what is it?

Is it:

Something that we sacrifice our lives for?
Something we obsess about until it controls us?
Something that is never . . . quite enough?
Something we have to have more of than our neighbor?
Something that defines our feelings about ourselves?

I’ll be honest, but there have been times I’ve viewed wealth in more than one of the categories above and acted as such. “Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants,” is what Epictetus wrote about 100 A.D. Even more succinctly, Tyler Durden said in Fight Club, “You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your (gosh darn) khakis.”

What Epictetus may have looked like. If he were in a comic strip.

I may have it in for Johnny Depp, but Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden is my spirit animal (we’ve started a tiny Fight Club in my basement, but I’m not supposed to talk about it – first rule, you know).

I keep coming back to the stoics. What did Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Tyler Durden, and Epictetus think about wealth? The website How To Be A Stoic says (LINK): “. . . they classed everything that lies outside of virtue as either preferred or dispreferred indifferent. To the first group belong things like wealth, health, education, and high social standing; to the second things like poverty, sickness, ignorance, and low social standing. These things were preferred insofar it is normal for a human being to pursue them because it makes her life more comfortable, and dispreferred insofar it makes her life less comfortable. But they are “indifferent” in the sense that they are irrelevant to our ability to exercise the virtues . . . .”

So, the Stoics were indifferent to wealth, but it was better to have it than not. You could be virtuous and poor, or you could be virtuous and rich. If you were rich, perhaps you could share your virtues even further than if you were poor – so it was preferred to have money. And Marcus Aurelius was emperor – it was hard to be richer than that, even for Jeff Bezos. Seneca? He was really wealthy, too. And since they are some of the thinkers that literally define what Stoicism is, well, wealth and power isn’t off limits, but the goal was to live a virtuous life.

So what does wealth signify?

Mostly, wealth is like stored energy – it’s a potential. A child may have a wealth of days before it, and an old miser a wealth of cash, cash that he might trade every dime of for just one more taste of youth. And a six year old would trade the ages of 18-30 for six Cadbury Cream Eggs®, which is another reason that kids can’t vote.

Steve Jobs certainly traded some of his wealth for additional days of life without having to cheat a six year old in a candy deal – he could honestly say he could be at any liver in just a few hours (having a private jet and all) and he could afford to have a staff of people looking for ways to improve Steve’s chance of getting one. Heck, Apple® has a project to clone Steve from a clump of his cells that they found in his comb – they just keep getting Ben Affleck copies instead. Thankfully, Ben Affleck is not considered by the state of California to be a “living human.”

Choices. Wealth buys choices. And one of the choices is always . . . not choosing right now. The wonderful thing about being rich, is you don’t take any offers you don’t want. If have to sell my car – I need the money for a new kidney for my Yosemite Sam© PEZ® dispenser, well, I have to have that money now. I can’t wait. I have to take the offer I get now.

If I have wealth and can afford to buy new, black market PEZ® kidneys for cash? Well, I don’t have to sell my car. In fact, if I have cash, I can look for people who have to sell kidney cars for PEZ© kidney cash to get a bargain.

I am willing to bet a large amount of PEZ™ that this is the first time the last sentence has been written in any language.

Anyhow. Wealth buys choices, and wealth creates the conditions for more wealth.

But what creates wealth? Well, in reality – the same virtues the stoics upheld (from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy – LINK):

“The Stoics elaborated a detailed taxonomy of virtue, dividing virtue into four main types: wisdom, justice, courage, and moderation.

“Wisdom is subdivided into good sense, good calculation, quick-wittedness, discretion, and resourcefulness.
“Justice is subdivided into piety, honesty, equity, and fair dealing.
“Courage is subdivided into endurance, confidence, high-mindedness, cheerfulness, and industriousness.
“Moderation is subdivided into good discipline, seemliness, modesty, and self-control.”

If you will look – many (but not all!) of these virtues, if followed well and long enough, will lead to . . . wealth.

But perhaps Epictetus was right: “Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.”

And then there was Tyler Durden: “It’s a blanket. Just a blanket. Now why do guys like you and me know what a duvet or a comforter is? Is this essential to our survival, in the hunter-gatherer sense of the word? No. What are we then? We are consumers. We’re the byproducts of a lifestyle obsession.”

So, be virtuous. Get wealthy. But don’t make the wealth the focus . . . it’s not the money, after all – it’s all the stuff.

AI, The Singularity, and Your 401K

“A singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines. We don’t know who struck first, us or them. But we know that it was us that scorched the sky.” – The Matrix

This is how “The Hobbit” should have started, with dragons and swords, rather than a dwarf dinner party? Then I wouldn’t have fallen asleep during hour one of the 12 hours of movie.

In 1947, an author began to predict it. In the 1950’s a few scientists saw it coming. In the 1960’s, it became a (more and more) common subject. In the 1970’s and 80’s it was nightmare fuel for extremely profitable movies and some great books. And, in 1993, Vernor Vinge (author and mathematician) wrote the paper (LINK) that gave this phenomenon its name: The Technological Singularity, or just Singularity from here on out.

This is the second time I’ve discussed the Singularity, and the first time was over here (LINK). The topic is big enough and important enough that I thought I’d add on to it. This will likely not be the last time. Not that I’m running out of blog topics – no, I’ve got a page and a half of them. No, the Singularity keeps getting uncomfortably closer, like your father-in-law’s farting Great Dane that he normally feeds some sort of petroleum waste covered in sulfur and toxic waste. Otherwise? Anything making that smell is generally dead.

Speaking of dead, Jack Williamson (a horribly overlooked author) wrote about the Singularity first in 1947 in his story With Folded Hands. I read that when I was in sixth or seventh grade at the Middle School for Wayward Wilders. I read every science fiction story or novel in that library, and I even started The Lord of the Rings with book two (The Two Towers) since the library didn’t have book one (The Fellowship of the Rings). To this day I maintain it’s a better two book series than a three book series. The first book is really just walking and singing elves and hobbits. Meh. The second book starts with treachery and fighting. Yeah, that’s the stuff.

Anyway, Jack Williamson’s story With Folded Hands was . . . awesome. And one of the creepiest things I’d ever read. You can read it for free, here at this (LINK). Here’s the spoiler-free-ish Wikipedia description:

. . . disturbed at his encounter, Underhill rushes home to discover that his wife has taken in a new lodger, a mysterious old man named Sledge. In the course of the next day, the new mechanicals have appeared everywhere in town. They state that they only follow the Prime Directive: ”to serve and obey and guard men from harm”. Offering their services free of charge, they replace humans as police officers, bank tellers, and more, and eventually drive Underhill out of business. Despite the Humanoids’ benign appearance and mission, Underhill soon realizes that, in the name of their Prime Directive, the mechanicals have essentially taken over every aspect of human life. No humans may engage in any behavior that might endanger them, and every human action is carefully scrutinized. Suicide is prohibited.

So, you’d think that having all of those things would be good, right? Nah. Read the story. Want to ski? The Humanoids are against it – you might hurt yourself. And anything else that might be dangerous. Like driving. Or drinking. Or smoking. Or not exercising. Or not eating the right foods. Or staying up too late. And the Humanoids are smarter than you. And always watching.

It’s an example of how the Singularity can go wrong – an instruction set that’s interpreted as machines do: literally. For example, if one read the instruction “help humanity” and figured out that humanity was always suffering, and maybe the best way to help humanity to stop suffering was to end humanity . . . or if the instruction set was to create inexpensive cars . . . and it converted the entire mass of the planet into inexpensive yet attractive and stylish cars. (Elon, make sure your programs don’t include this!)

These themes spawned numerous television episodes in the 1960’s and 1970’s. How many times, exactly, did Kirk do mental ju-jitsu with a supercomputer? I can count at least seven without thinking. So, about 1/10^th of Star Trek® episodes, Kirk was fighting a Singularity. This continued through the movies Terminator® and Terminator 2© through the 1990’s. Then Vernor Vinge named it.

Let’s talk about the Singularity. What, exactly, happens?

In general, a much larger than human intellect appears. And it rapidly reconfigures everything that it sees. Concepts that are beyond the smartest humans are correlated – the data we already have in our experiments, is all brought together.

We know we are wrong, but don’t know how. Could a superhuman intelligence bring it all together in a month? A week? A day? Perhaps. We know we are wrong about the way the Universe works – and that there are some pretty significant gaps in our understanding (LINK).

It’s a fair thing to say that we are living today with a weak AI. My GPS unit tells me the fastest route to where I’m travelling. YouTube® suggests songs I’ve never heard that I kinda like. And algorithms based on my previous web browsing suggest that maybe I’ll need a knee replacement or perhaps a new kidney (now you know why I had children: they are wonderful sources of spare organs).

I may even have interacted with an AI this weekend – I was having trouble getting the “name” of one of my Amazon® devices. The “person” on the other end of the chat kept repeating the same things. I had to figure out how to get to the answer. But I told the “person” how I got there. Bet next time it’ll be quicker . . . .

This is a weak AI. It’s a general helper every day. Only a little creepy, not “fifty years old and still collecting Star Wars® figures” creepy.

But it will/is getting stronger. How long until Google® correlates web searches and times of day to a dozen or more lifestyle-related diseases? I’m willing to bet you it does that already. But this is still an algorithm designed by a human. Probably.

But recently Google™ (which now no longer promises to “not be evil”) created AlphaGo©. Go is an ancient game that rivals chess in complexity. It beat the greatest human master 89 out of 100 games in October, which most people would call a “drubbing.” Perhaps, most disturbingly, the moves that the computer made were called “disturbing” and “alien”. The computer was left with nothing more than the rules of the game and a desire to win. Not long after playing large number of games against itself, it was able to take on the greatest player in the world. And win. No human will ever beat it.

From my observation, the likely requirement for development of a true AI, a general AI is constraint. The AI was able to beat us (us=seven billion humans) because it was constrained and goal driven – it was limited to a single gaming system with observable and finite rules.

And humans aren’t constrained, right?

Well, no. Humans are constrained by a human body. As much as I would like to be able to jump to Mars and party with Elon Musk (you know he already moved there, right?) I can’t. Intellect is about observing and overcoming constraints to achieve a goal. If you don’t have constraints or a goal, intelligence has no meaning and no use. (This might be the most profound thought I ever had, with the exception of the partying with Elon Musk on Mars part.)

What are the constraints and goals of a human? Our constraints are our intellect and physical limitations. Our goals are our desire to live, help others of our kind, procreate, and keep our children safe. Obviously, these are generalized. And, they can be sublimated into secondary goals, like cats for a cat lady, or perverted into goals like more heroin for a heroin addict.

But how useful was intelligence, anyway? Surface animal life has existed for nearly half a billion years. How much evidence do we have for intelligent life on Earth? Yeah. Just us. Probably 200,000 years or so. This is 0.04% of the time that we’ve had surface life. Eyes (not human, but eyes) have been in existence for that entire time. So, 100% of the time we’ve had life on the surface, it’s had eyes. But intelligence? Not so much.

From that we can guess (maybe) that intelligence is rare. I’d guess it’s because that there’s some component of intelligence that’s simply not useful for the simple goals of procreation. It’s better to be stronger or have bigger claws or better teeth rather than a big brain. Yet we, mankind, exist. We replaced claws and teeth with brains and planning. Perhaps the dinosaurs were getting ready to make the same leap when a certain meteorite hit the Yucatan, or perhaps the cold-blooded nature of their biology prevented them from being able to sufficiently grow the brain tissue required for intelligence. To-MA-to, To-MAH-to. And, we win. You suck, dinosaurs!

Certainly, it’s fair to say that whatever biological bottleneck prevented intelligent dinosaurs from ruling the Earth today, humanity passed the test, and we are certainly, unquestionably, the dominant form of life on Earth.

The more we learn about AI, the more we will learn to give it constraints and goals like we humans have. And those constraints and goals will give the “intelligence” part of Artificial Intelligence the reason to grow. At some point, the constraints and goals will be properly set to create a general AI.

And then?

A singularity means that none of the rules from before even make sense. That’s the difficulty. Right now we worry about the prices of real estate in San Francisco or the price of the stock market or the value of our 401k. We’re concerned with how many people like our BookFace® posts or what our current salary is or how much money we have saved in a piggy bank.

After a Singularity, many of the rules that went before matter anymore. At all. Your credit score might be less important than how many freckles you have. And only the freckled will rule the Earth. Why? Because of Justin Timberlake. Duh.

Our world regularly experiences singularities – the revolution in 1776 was one. It was a fundamental change in the way the world was governed – giving more freedom than has ever come before to humanity. The entire concept of kings was overthrown with the concept of divine rights as the basis for free men living together. We also have darker experiences with political singularities, as those from the Soviet gulag or Cambodian camp can attest to. And only a Singularity can explain why Firefly® was cancelled in season one.

But the Technological Singularity will be that. On steroids.

Literally every facet of your life that you depend upon will be in question. Monetary systems? What is money to a superhuman machine intelligence? Property rights? Why do they exist? Eugenics? Perhaps the AI will work to make us better pets through forced breeding.

Nothing you can take for granted now will be certain after a Singularity. And after a technological Singularity? If a machine AI doesn’t like you, it can upload you into a core and torture you forever. In perhaps the best, but most visceral fiction representing this, Harlan Ellison has the following passage. The full story is here, but I warn you, it’s very good, but very stark (LINK). I suggest you buy the full book at Amazon . . . .

We had given AM sentience. Inadvertently, of course, but sentience nonetheless. But it had been trapped. AM wasn’t God, he was a machine. We had created him to think, but there was nothing it could do with that creativity. In rage, in frenzy, the machine had killed the human race, almost all of us, and still it was trapped. AM could not wander, AM could not wonder, AM could not belong. He could merely be. And so, with the innate loathing that all machines had always held for the weak, soft creatures who had built them, he had sought revenge. And in his paranoia, he had decided to reprieve five of us, for a personal, everlasting punishment that would never serve to diminish his hatred … that would merely keep him reminded, amused, proficient at hating man. Immortal, trapped, subject to any torment he could devise for us from the limitless miracles at his command.

Yeah, like I said rough. And this .pdf was posted from a High School? They would have burned a high school teacher alive back when I was in school for mentioning that work even existed (though my English teacher did mention another Ellison work, “A Boy and His Dog” and was not immediately hit by lasers and burnt to a crisp (though I did hear that a time-ray hit him, and he later retired when he hit 65).

Again, you can get the book here (again, I get no profit from this, but recommend you buy it if you’re not squeamish):

Vinge stated in 1993, not before 2005, nor after 2030. Now? 2040 to 2050 seems to be the conclusion that most experts expect. Still, like fusion, 20 to 30 years away. Because a looming event that could consider everything you ever thought right, and immovable incorrect in a matter of months or days . . . that’s nothing to worry about. Right?

Review: The Hidden Truth. TL;DR? Buy it. Now.

“So I knew that down the road I would have to steer you away, that I would have to lie to you. And a lie, Mr. Mulder, is most convincingly hidden between two truths.” – X-Files

Neal Stephenson, moving through pages at nearly the speed of light, which is his superhero power (since it is obvious he will never have hair like Wolverine®. Neal was really neat (true story) when The Boy talked to him a few years ago. Future post, probably.

There are several books that I’ve made either The Boy or Pugsley read. They’ve both read Farmer in the Sky by Robert Heinlein. But the list also includes Dune (Herbert), 1984 (Orwell), Brave New World (Huxley), Cryptonomicon (Stephenson), The Stand (King), Lucifer’s Hammer (Niven and Pournelle), well, and a few others. You get the idea.

And the idea is ideas – one of the things that books do is they introduce us to ideas and concepts – in many ways they help teach us how to thinks – at least the good books. I had a boss who was the most Zen boss I ever had. He was deeply philosophical in an entirely unphilosophical organization and industry. He liked me quite a lot – since I loved ideas as well. He had a great saying: “Books are the way that one mind can talk to another across time.”

I’m adding a book that I’m going to make The Boy and Pugsley read:

I came across this book via a quote I saw on the internet (LINK), and I was hooked.

Here’s the quote from The Hidden Truth. It’s long. But it only took me about three seconds after I read it to hit “buy” in Amazon (I’ll note again – I get no money if you buy it here, that’s fine – the author gets sweet, sweet money):

“The women’s rights movement had three goals. First, it got women into the workplace where their labor could be taxed . . . . So, with more women entering the workforce the supply of labor increases and wages are depressed . . . .

“Now couples need to have two careers to support a typical modern lifestyle. We can’t tax the labor in a home-cooked meal. We can tax the labor in takeout food, or the higher cost of a microwave dinner. The economic potential of both halves of the adult population now largely flows into the government where it can serve noble ends instead of petty private interests . . . .

“The second reason is to get children out of the potentially antisocial environment of the home and into educational settings where we can be sure they’ll get the right values and learn the right lessons to be happy and productive members of society. Working mothers need to send their children to daycare and after-school care where we can be sure they get exposed to the right lessons, or at least not to bad ideas . . . .

“They are going to assign homework to their students: enough homework to guarantee that even elementary school students are spending all their spare time doing homework. Their poor parents, eager to see that Junior stays up with the rest of the class, will be spending all their time helping their kids get incrementally more proficient on the tests we have designed. They’ll be too busy doing homework to pick up on any antisocial messages at home . . . .

“Children will be too busy to learn independence at home, too busy to do chores, to learn how to take care of themselves, to be responsible for their own cooking, cleaning, and laundry. Their parents will have to cater to their little darlings’ every need, and their little darlings will be utterly dependent on their parents. When the kids grow up, they will be used to having someone else take care of them. They will shift that spirit of dependence from their parents to their university professors, and ultimately to their government. The next generation will be psychologically prepared to accept a government that would be intrusive even by today’s relaxed standards – a government that will tell them exactly how to behave and what to think. Not a Big Brother government, but a Mommy-State . . . .

“Eventually, we may even outlaw homeschooling as antisocial, like our more progressive cousins in Germany already do. Everyone must know their place in society and work together for social good, not private profit . . . .

“The Earth can’t accommodate many more people at a reasonable standard of living. We’re running out of resources. We have to manage and control our population. That’s the real motive behind the women’s movement. Once a women’s studies program convinces a gal she’s a victim of patriarchal oppression, how likely is it she’s going to overcome her indoctrination to be able to bond long enough with a guy to have a big family? If she does get careless with a guy, she’ll probably just have an abortion . . . .

“All those Career-Oriented Gals are too busy seeking social approval and status at the office to be out starting families and raising kids. They’re encouraged to have fun, be free spirits, and experiment with any man who catches their fancy . . . . And by the time all those COGs are in their thirties and ready to try to settle down and have kids, they’re past their prime. Their fertility peaks in their twenties. It’s all downhill from there . . . .

“In another generation, we’ll have implemented our own version of China’s One-Child-Per-Couple policy without the nasty forced abortions and other hard repressive policies which people hate. What’s more, there’ll be fewer couples because so many young people will just be hedonistically screwing each other instead of settling down and making families. Makes me wish I were young again, like you, to take full advantage of it. The net effect is we’ll enter the great contraction and begin shrinking our population to more controllable levels . . . .

“It’s profoundly ironic. A strong, independent woman is now one who meekly obeys the media’s and society’s clamor to be a career girl and sleep around with whatever stud catches her fancy or with other girls for that matter. A woman with the courage to defy that social pressure and devote herself from a young age to building a home and raising a family is an aberration, a weirdo, a traitor to her sex. There aren’t many women with the balls to stand up against that kind of social pressure.

It’s not in their nature.”

Wow. Stunning. And possibly banned in California.

To be clear, I don’t think that there is a conspiracy to create the situation described above, but the outcomes of a huge social experiment are often unclear, and wrapping up the negative social outcomes summarized above into a conspiracy? Genius!

Those are some huge ideas, and that’s just in one chapter. There are plenty of ideas, and I’ll admit that I probably know the sources of many of them. In fact, I’m pretty sure we have many of the same regular watering holes on the web, and probably many of the same values.

But this isn’t like Atlas Shrugged with an 87 page speech that would have taken six days to deliver. No. The plot is tight, and the author doesn’t repeat himself. The book is thrilling – especially the last third.

Interestingly, most of the actual action takes place out of view of the first-person protagonist. Yes, he talked to that person. And now that person is dead. While not the choice of most thrillers, I found it especially effective in this book, especially since it was told in first-person. Only Bruce Willis gets in a running gunfight with German terrorists – in real life, buildings burn down when we’re not around, even though the burning building might have huge consequences, we’re (mainly) just not around when the amazing thing happens. This technique makes the book more realistic.

And the plot? Let’s just say that over a hundred years ago, for mysterious reasons, people started censoring textbooks on electromagnetics. And killing scientists – all related to a scientific conclusion that Oliver Heaviside. Heaviside is probably most famous for taking James Clerk Maxwell’s electromagnetic equations and bringing them into the final form we see today. (If you’re not familiar, Maxwell was a genius whose work was foundational for Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.) Heaviside was also famous for sporting a cool Wolverine (like in the X-Men) hairdo.

If you like this book (as I most certainly did) then you’ll immediately go out and buy the sequel after you finish the first one. It’s that good. And for $0.99, I bought the e-book so I could start reading immediately.

And you should buy this book, too, so we can convince Hans to write some more . . . .