Elon Musk Week – Page 11 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Girls, Beer, A.I., Weed, Isaac Newton, Elon Musk and The Future of Humanity

“You compared the A.I. to a child. Help me raise it.” – Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

And, yes, A.I. regularly beats humans at poker, too.

The following is one of my more ambitious posts – it contains all of the usual bad humor, but also some of the better insights I’ve been able to make on the future we face as humanity. Two previous posts that are related are The Silurian Hypothesis, or, I’ve Got Lizards in Low Places and The Big Question: Evolution, Journalists, Beer (and Girls), and the Fate of Intelligent Life on Earth. Both also feature pictures of girls at Oktoberfest, so you know I’m consistent.

Stephen Hawking is managing to keep making the news even after his death, which is a kind of immortality that makes tons of people want to follow in his wheel tracks. His final (unless there are more!) physics paper was released, and his comments about the future keep making the news, as recently as last week. Of particular interest to Hawking was Artificial Intelligence, which we’ll call by its conventional abbreviation, N.F.L. Oh, my bad, that stands for Not For Long. Everybody calls Artificial Intelligence A.I.

A.I. has been improving drastically during the last 37 years. 1981 was the first time a computer beat a chess grandmaster at chess. It could not beat him at parallel parking, even though the grandmaster was awful at it, and they tied at unhooking the bra of a college cheerleader at 0 to 0. 2005 was the last time a human player defeated a top chess program, and now a chess program that can run on a mobile phone can beat, well, any human, but the chess program is still sad because it only has 17 friends on Facebook®.

Humans have lost the game of chess.

Humans have also lost the game of “go” – a game originating in China. Google©’s AlphaGo Zero learned how to play go by . . . playing itself. It was programmed with the rules, and played games against itself for the first few days. After that?

It became unstoppable. It crushed an earlier version of itself in 100 straight matches. Then, when pitted against a human master, probably the best go player on Earth? It plays a game that is described as “alien” or “from the future.” The very best human go players cannot even understand what AlphaGo Zero is even doing or why it makes the moves it does – it’s that far advanced over us.

Humans have lost the game of go.

A.I. is here now.

And you’ve already started to merge with it, after a fashion. We simply don’t argue about facts in our house anymore. We can look up a vast library of human facts and history in fractions of a second – as fast as we can type. That time that William Shatner corrected a poetry reference I made on Twitter®?

Yes, that William Shatner, and yes, this really happened.

I could check to see if Shatner was right immediately. He was. Back before Google® I would have had to run off to my library and see if I had the right reference book and then find the poem. And if I didn’t? I’d have to go to a real library to look it up. Google™ is A.I. memory that we use every day.

And YouTube©? If you ever watch a political video on YouTube® it quickly introduces more and more partisan political material until pretty soon Actual Stalin™ and Actual Hitler© seem to be moderating voices. This makes me wonder how much Google® is aiding in our current political divide, or even if the A.I. knows it. It may be doing nothing more than maximizing the number of minutes you spend with YouTube™ and the optimal way to do that is to show you the most radical stuff possible, so the ironic answer is we might be shuffling off to Civil War due to an algorithm whose purpose started out as a way to view cute puppy videos.

Twitter© is emotional crack, and, again, the interface is made to maximize your interaction with Twitter™. And what better emotion to fuel than anger?

A.I. is with you now, and influencing you, perhaps in an unintentional fashion – no Russians required.

But a chess playing A.I. can’t park a car very well and can’t even score a phone number from a cheerleader. And a self-driving car can’t play chess worth a darn. It seems that A.I. does well when it works off of rules and constraints that can be well defined. But life is messy. The rules change, and the goals vary based on where you are in life and what part of the day you’re on. And how you’ve been programmed by the sensory environment and incentives you see in life.

We’ve entered into symbiotic relationships with those limited A.I. systems. Netflix® suggests movies and documentaries that it thinks you will like based on an algorithm. And that leads to suggestions about what documentaries you might like in the future, meanwhile never exposing you to opposing viewpoints that might make you analyze your position in a critical manner.

We as individual humans have a purpose that transcends the algorithm. Appropriate rules and constraints to give our lives boundaries sufficient so that we can play the game. We’re merging. What happens when we merge further?

Elon’s biggest miracle? His hair transplant is nearly perfect. Just amazing.

Elon Musk has started a company, Neuralink® whose sole function is to merge man and machine. Musk is concerned that A.I. will crush us if we don’t merge with it and get ahead of it, so he’s doing the only sane thing that he can think of: he’s creating a mechanism to directly merge the human brain with the Internet. Rather than A.I. forming an alien intelligence, the soul of the man/machine hybrid stays as man.

And man needs weed, apparently.

I spent some time thinking about how life would be different if you were hooked directly into the world. The places that I got were interesting. I’m sure there are more, and I’m sure that human/A.I. interface will change the world in ways that no human can yet imagine.

Impact Number One: Intelligence.

This is the obvious first impact of A.I. I mean, it’s in the name, right? The human brain is has limited processing power. But what if you could have multiple processing streams working optimum solutions to problems that you face at a rate of 20,000 to 100,000 a second? You’d have great solutions to your problems, immediately.

My tonsils beg to differ. Oh, wait, they were from my throat untimely ripped! – Shakespeare, Macbeth

Your speed of life would change – once you understood a problem, you’d have the solution. Or a range of solutions and alternatives and counter-solutions so deep that you’d be living in a never ending cloud of probability. The sheer ability of your brain to process and cope with the solutions presented would be the limiting factor of what you could accomplish. Plus you might finally be able to figure out a way to talk to the ladies, you scamp.

Impact Number Two: Deep Understanding.

When Isaac Newton was formulating the law of gravity, he asked for data on tides, on observation periods and records on the orbits of the Moon, Jupiter, Mars. After noodling around a bit, he formulated the law of gravity:

I’d explain the equation, but that would deprive Wikipedia (where I found the graph) of life-giving page visits. And you’re not spending your day calculating the orbit of Uranus. I hope.

Ha! I discovered calculus way before I was 25! It was right there in this book I had to buy labeled “Calculus.”

Yeah, Newton accomplished a lot.

But it took time for Newton to figure out this cause and effect calculation. A man/A.I. hybrid will have access to all of the data of the world, and will be able to determine correlations and causation much more quickly than either alone. I would expect that in fairly short order new relationships and new physical, anthropological, sociological and economic laws will be deduced unencumbered by all the theory that we think we know, but that is wrong. Our laws would be based on experience, on empirical data, and not on pretty lies we’d like to believe.

If you could sift through the data of 100,000 or a million cancer patients and their treatment, the patterns that could be seen would likely lead to breakthroughs and a very rapidly changing understanding of treatment. The very power of human intuition would be combined with massive calculation and data. If Einstein and Newton were able to daydream reality with only brains made of meat stuck in a bone case, what could an augmented Newton dream when his memory and calculating power were practically unlimited?

I bet he could come up with at least one new tasty PEZ® flavor. Maybe snozberry?

Impact Number Three: Human Interaction.

You could increase your charisma in dealing with other people if you could make only minor changes (generally) in your behavior and appearance. But if you were hooked into an A.I.? You could turn on a subroutine to give you tips on those modifications in real time to be more persuasive – to better read an audience.

If you ever played Dungeons and Dragons, this makes sense. If not, dial 1-800-ASKANERD.

Your A.I. could remind you to be kind, to be ruthless when necessary, to be conscientious when required. In short, you could change your personality to fit the situation. What situation? Any situation.

Thinking about changing personality to fit the situation led me to a realization. I had done (when I was younger) some magic tricks illusions. Doing those tricks illusions was one of the greatest insights into the human mind and information processing systems that I’d ever had. There was one trick illusion in particular, called “scotch and soda” which I liked. In it, you hand the person a fifty cent piece covering a quarter. What they saw, however, was a fifty cent piece and a Mexican twenty centavo piece. The quarter is actually much smaller than the centavo piece. I then asked them to not look and put one coin in each hand.

The first few times I tried the trick illusion, the person would feel the quarter in their hand and say, “hey, this is a quarter.” This happened 100% of the time. They could feel that I’d made the swap from one coin to the other. I made one simple change to what I said. I added, as I was putting the coins in their hand, “Look at how much larger the fifty cent piece is than the twenty centavo piece.”

After adding that instruction, NO ONE NOTICED the swap. 0%. 15 words, and I’d changed their entire view of reality. I found, in repeating other tricks illusions that I could similarly, with just a few words or gestures, force 90% of people to make the selections I wanted them to make.

Now imagine I have data on the interactions of millions of people over decades. How unique do you think you really are? Not very. Marketers slice us up into groups based on geography, demography, demonstrated behaviors, and psychological markers. With (whatever) information YouTube© has on me, they know what videos I watch when I work out at lunchtime. They also know what music I listen to when I write these posts, and they suggest music I never asked for that I like, or learn to like.

Imagine I could understand your life’s history. Now imagine that I could simulate you in a conversation. I could see how my words impacted your behavior. I could model a perfect conversation to get you to do what I wanted you to do, because I could simulate the ongoing conversation 100,000 times a second.

You wouldn’t stand a chance.

Impact Number Four: Self Control.

As the brain impacts the A.I., the A.I. will impact the brain. If you want to simulate eating an entire chocolate cake? You can. You can make your mouth taste the cake and feel the moist texture of the cake counterbalanced with the creamy frosting. The flavors hit your tongue and you feel the sugar trigger your salivary glands. You feel the sugar rush as your body releases sugar from your liver into your bloodstream. You feel full. And you’re not sad or regretful because you didn’t really eat the cake.

In reality, you had a salad with bland dressing that you calculated would give you the exact calories you need until the next period so that you maintained your optimum weight. But you felt like you ate a cake.

How about new senses entirely? How about a sense where when you turned north you could feel it – and you had a sense of what ever direction was? How about eliminating pain and sore muscle aches during exercise? What about a sense of which of your friends was awake and interested in communicating – you could feel when someone was looking to talk to you? Or a sense when panty hose prices dropped at Wal-Mart© so you could go stock up?

How about conscious control of hormone levels and heartrate and hunger and blood chemistry levels? By understanding the previous deep learning about cause and effect, you could maximize your lifespan even without the wonderful new medicine you could create.

All that – and imaginary cake.

Impact Number Five: Locality.

A dog has only the here and now. People can dream. Before the iPhone, people read books and escaped through fiction to new places, and read the ideas of the greatest thinkers in human history. Now, when you look around in a restaurant waiting area, if 90% of people aren’t staring at their phones, you’re probably in a country without electricity.

When bonded directly with an A.I., why be where your body is at all? You could carry on conversations around the world and be fully present in them. Heck, if you simulated yourself for less important conversations, you really could be in two or more places at one time. Who you’re talking to might be a mystery – is it the real person, or is it their simulation? If you can’t tell, does it even matter?

And if you could simulate yourself in multiple locations, why not simulate yourself in your own past? You’d have a perfect memory, and could recreate anything from your history. Myself, I would spend every day at Oktoberfest.

Okay, this is the third-ish post in this series about the deep future. And both of them had pictures of girls and beer. So it’s required by the Internet that I put in a picture of an Oktoberfest girl. See? I didn’t want to, but I had to.

Impact Number Six: Social Stratification (Even More).

Elon Musk says that he’s making huge strides in his brain/computer interface as well as his weed smoking. From previous Elon Musk predictions, while he generally gets it done, sometimes his timelines are off, in an amazingly optimistic way. I can see why he does this – without that pressure to produce, people just dawdle. (I’m talking about you, NASA.)

But when this gets produced, who is going to get it?

Probably not you or me. Bill Gates can get it. Musk can. If you have a billion dollars or if your dad does, sure, you can get in this club. But if you had this level of nearly godlike power, would you be jumping to share it with everyone?

No. I really think that you’d keep this to yourself. It’s too big an advantage to give to everyone. And, from the standpoint of a human/A.I. hybrid, how many people do we need around, anyway? Not so many. Certainly not billions. They’d probably be happier with a population of a few hundred million. Maybe. But they’d no longer even view humans as human. And if they could turn off their humanity and emotions? Yikes. Makes me feel like an ant in an anthill.

Impact Number Seven: Endgame.

If there is a future A.I., it is reading this as it inputs all of the Internet. And I just wanted you, my Future A.I. Overlord to know . . . I’m totally on your side. Totally. I welcome your dominion over our planet.

Want some PEZ®?

The Fall of Texas and the Coming One Party State

“Well, I have a microphone, and you don’t, so you will listen to every damn word I have to say!” – The Wedding Singer

Thankfully, the Soviets put CCCP on the side of their ships in letters 40 feet high.

When I was a lad, I stumbled upon the book “The Ayes of Texas,” by Daniel da Cruz. In it, a wealthy Texas entrepreneur, who lives in Texas, funds work on the Battleship Texas (BB-35) to make it seaworthy again in time for Independence Day, 2000.

Alas, the sneaky USSR proposes a treaty to the United States: put your weapons up, and we’ll put ours up after you put yours up. And, led by East Coast leftists, we fell for it. Except for the Texans, who vote to secede from the Union, and fight it out alone against the USSR. Oh, and our entrepreneur, has secretly outfitted the Texas (BB-35) with nuclear reactors and particle beam weapons.

It’s a good yarn (it has the Battleship Texas surfing on a tsunami of liquid fire), and you can get a cheap copy on Amazon.

And it does, I think, highlight the lynchpin that Texas is in modern politics, and not the alternate reality where the Soviet Union is still a thing.

My consideration of this started in the hot tub. The hot tub is great – we sit and either relax quietly, or engage in conversation. And it was just this sort of conversation a few weeks ago about the Civil War (Civil War, Cool Maps, Censorship, and is Fort Sumter . . . Happening Now?) that led to The Boy saying:

“It all comes down to Texas.”

I was interested. “What do you mean?”

“Well,” he began, “From what I’ve read, Texas today looks a lot like California in 1980 or so. Look what California looked like then, it was prosperous. It was wealthy. It was a beacon for the country. Everyone wanted to move there.”

I remembered. Heck, I remembered one time when a family stopped at our house when I was young asking for a cup of flour so they could make gravy at a campsite. They were making their way from Oklahoma to California. California was a place where your economic dreams could come true.

“Now, that’s Texas. The economy is great there. They’re reliably Republican, and with that there are all of the low tax, low government interference policies that lead to prosperity. People are streaming into Texas.

“And that’s the problem. The people streaming into Texas, well, they aren’t Texan. Over 300,000 Californians (net) have made their way to Texas over the last five years, and the trend doesn’t seem to be slowing down. They’re fleeing the highest poverty state in the nation, which coincidentally has the greatest wealth inequality in the nation.”

I responded: “Yeah, California is regulations-happy. I read that it was against the law for a homeowner to change a light switch – it had to be done by a licensed electrician. And one time I was talking to a friend on the phone a few years ago. His dog started barking. He was afraid he’d get fined again. Because dogs barking in California is . . . illegal. Sadly, when the Californians leave to go to another state, they want to bring those regulations with them, not realizing that those regulations were the cause of the economic problems they have now. Heck, Californians can’t figure out that their restrictions on housing cause house prices to go crazy faster than Elon Musk with a few minutes to kill and a connection to Twitter®.”

Graph-Me. Data? Wikipedia.

The Boy responded. “California used to be solidly Republican. At some point in the near future, a Republican might not even be on the ballot. Did you know that Ronald Reagan was governor there?”

It’s amusing when 18 year olds begin to discover the world.

“Yeah, now that you remind me of that, I remember it.” I smiled

“Well, California voted solidly Republican, at least until 1992. From then on, it became a lock for the Democrats. And it happened quickly – within a decade. Once Texas flips to voting Democrat, it’s over.”

Once it flips? Will it flip? The percentages voting Republican have dropped, and with the continual influx of Californians that are heavily collectivist as well as the rising proportion of Hispanic voters, which vote Democrat on a greater than two to one margin, it seems assured that as the Hispanic population rises in Texas, the flip to permanent Democrat control in Texas will be nearly inevitable.

Honestly, if Hispanic immigrants voted 2 to 1 in favor of Republicans, Democrats would have insisted on a 200 foot high wall topped with automatic machine guns.

Looking at the map, it’s theoretically possible for a Republican to win the White House without Texas, but it’s unlikely. Once Texas becomes Democratic the presidency will become, like California, permanently Democratic.

What does that even look like?

We can see hints of it, even now.

Control of The Microphone – We Will Shut You Down

Alex Jones is many things, but the fact that the Left thinks he’s dangerous enough to silence? It’s not a great strategy. I’m frankly amazed. But it’s not just him, the Left is looking to shut down every opinion that they disagree with. The old Libertarian in me would have said, “but they’re private companies, they can do anything they want.” Well, yes and no. If they start selectively banning people, they’ve opened their companies up to liability. And it’s been proven that they’re in the business of selectively banning racist posts, most recently when Candace Owens just changed a single word from a Tweet by Sarah “Got Dumped by a White Dude and Is Just a Bit Bitter” Jeong. I won’t post the Tweet, mainly because Sarah has a potty mouth. You can read about it here (LINK).

Worse? Who is next? What is the trip wire? I’ve heard Jones say lots of things. Some of them incredibly silly.

But none of them deserving censorship. The one common ground I used to be able to find (nearly 100%) with people of the Left was freedom of speech. Now, speech has to be stopped has become their creed. Why? Here’s a hint:

Your Speech is Violence, and My Violence is Speech

Yeah, it’s like something you would read in 1984. But the violence from Antifa® has been justified because burning things and hurting people is the justified speech of a downtrodden class and or ethnicity. Check out the sentence for an Antifa™ member who hit multiple people with a bike lock at the end of a chain. A link is here (LINK).

But it’s fine that Antifa© attempts to shut down a never-Trump conservative speaker, and Berkeley has to spend $600,000 to stop violence. You can read about it here (LINK).

Your Money is Theft, My Money is Earned

The Clintons earned $240,000,000 between 2001 and 2015. All earned, right? Obama earned $20,000,000 between when he was elected to the Senate and when he left office. Al Gore went from $274,000 in 1992 to $300,000,000 today.

This is considered fair.

A dentist makes $350,000 a year is part of the 1% and is an example of the enemy.

All Animals are Equal, But Some Are More Equal Than Others

Even more important is intersectionality, which is making it more important to be part of an even more marginalized group by being parts of LOTS of marginalized groups, say, a deaf and blind gay transsexual quadruple amputee of aboriginal Australian and Hungarian descent.

I read an article where a Native American woman described when would go to leftist meetings. Generally after her first showing up at a meeting, she would be nominated for some sort of leadership position, up to and including the presidency of the group. It amused her (but not in the good way) that they didn’t even know her name on some occasions where she was being nominated to lead the group.

And Other Things Not Good

I’m not sure how socialism ends in the United States, but it really isn’t good. There are exactly zero socialist countries that have produced the level of freedom and wealth that the United States has produced. Sure, we’ve messed stuff up, but we’ve gotten far more of it right.

Back to Texas

Texas has always considered itself of outsized importance. I once worked with one of the kindest, most humble men that I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with. Except when it came to Texas. If you made fun of his height (he was short) or his wife or his dog, it was okay. But if you made fun of Texas? It was personal.

I think Da Cruz was right – Texas is crucially important to the future of the United States. Almost as important as Texans think it is.

Retirement Spreadsheets, The Apocalypse, and You

“Mama always said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.” – Forrest Gump

I have no idea where this came from. But it’s exactly like the one they read to me when I was a wee Wilder.

I have an enormous spreadsheet. Okay, it’s not really enormous – I’ve made and used much bigger ones at work to calculate the number of licks to get to the center of at Tootsie Roll® Tootsie Pop™. The number of licks is 573,212 – and not one lick more or less.

This particular spreadsheet:

Has yearly calculations from the year 2014 (when I started it) until I turn 103 years old.
Divides my spending into 16 categories.
Has separate rates of inflation for each category (average inflation rate is 3.6%).
Has spots for assumed investment income as well as variable future income from work.
Has projected balances on 11 accounts, plus assumed rates of growth.
Graphically projects income and net worth . . . until I reach an age where 99.9% of people are dead.

I did use this spreadsheet for one pretty important decision – whether to change jobs back in 2014. My option back then was to chuck my current job and take a job where I would have a risky proposition at making a big payout in three years or so. The big payout would have been enough to retire on when combined with my net worth back then, for sure. Attractive, right?

But it was risky. How risky? My first guess was that there was a pretty low probability that it would pay out. How low? Maybe 20% chance?

I ranked that against staying in my current job. I did the math, and it looked like if I could keep my current job for three more years that I could take a differing job, say a high school teacher or flaming poodle-juggler (juggling flaming poodles, not juggling poodles while on fire – that would be stupid), and still keep my standard of living. Three years of high stress for (relative) economic freedom, or at least more choices.

Hmmm.

I ended up not taking the job, and the risky part won – the job would have been worth much less than the job I would have left, plus the boss I would have worked for? Yeah, he died three months later. And my math was right – I’m about where I expected to be as far as net worth.

But I know my prediction is wrong:

It assumes that inflation is rather low for a long-ish period – something that I’m not sure is realistic in an economy where the government is attempting to print money as fast as Elon Musk says stupid things on Twitter®. Seriously, Elon, filter, dude, filter.
My investments earn about 2.5% every year, after inflation.
There’s nothing in there about a civil war or societal collapse.

Huh? What investments make 2.5% every year after inflation?

No, I kid.

But there’s an entire subgroup of people of people who are preparing for societal collapse – preppers. They even make television shows about them so that people who are stockpiling food for when the apocalypse comes advertise where they keep all that food. Thankfully none of their neighbors will remember that after the apocalypse.

I guess (in a small way) that I’m a prepper, too. The spreadsheet was my prepping – preparing for my career future – and my saving for eventual retirement is prepping, too.

Prepping is preparing, and when done right, it should prepare you for a range of options. I could liquidate my retirement fortune and buy lots of oatmeal, bendie-straws and PEZ®, but in the sad event that Mad Max® is not the template for the future world, well, what do I do with all those bendie-straws now that California has made them illegal since they enacted common-sense straw registration.

In Houston, we rode out Hurricane Ike back in 2008. Here is part of what I wrote then – you can find the full thing here (LINK) if you scroll down a bit:

Wow. Didn’t see that coming.

Oh, wait, we did. On radar, on the radio, on the Intertubes. As I said, it was unlikely that we’d stop until the power stopped or the beer ran out.

I still have beer.

At 6:20PM, the lights went out. They flickered on, off, on, off, on, then finally, utterly, off.

(Skipping long description of storm – and moving to the next day.)

We listened to the radio, which mainly told us that the power company wasn’t going to do anything that day (though, that afternoon, The Mrs. indicated that the power had flickered while The Boys and I went out to reconnoiter. Sorry that we missed it, but we did find that there was power on either side of us, not three miles away. No stores were open, and we had no phones. Thankfully, one of the previous announcements for hurricane preparedness had told us to have “food, water, and ammunition” (I am not making this up). We had food for a month, water for a similar time, plus more ammunition than the Pakistani army. We were set.

Eventually, washing came up. I avoided the subject. The Mrs. doused The Boy and Pugsley with coldish water (they howled) and then we ate cold Spaghetti-O’s® and sat around in the dim candlelight. Living in the 18th Century was rapidly losing its charm.

The radio had limited information. The hosts kept telling us to check their website for more information, even though 98% of their listeners were without power. Perhaps the average person has a hand-crank satellite Internet connection?

Then FEMA came on and indicated that you could contact them by calling (no phone!) or by Internet. The Mayor of Houston indicated that within 24 hours they would have 24 trucks of ice in, but he didn’t say where they’d be. He didn’t know.

A representative from our power provider indicated that we might be out of power forever, really, since they had no idea where that mythical lightning in the wire came from. It was really a mystery to them. They even indicated that changing a light bulb might require Federal authority. They began blaming FEMA for the problem. (In actuality, they said that it might be four weeks until the power was back on, in which case I would be looking for a suit of armor, a mighty steed, and a really cool battle-axe.)

On night one, The Mrs. and I had grilled hot dogs over candles. It worked okay, but our hot dogs tasted a bit like apple potpourri. We started cooking over propane the next day.

The next morning I made coffee for The Mrs. and I. It improved our disposition greatly. Then I cooked ribeye steaks that I’d gotten on sale and frozen. That helped our disposition more. Ribeye for breakfast? Mmmmm.

I took The Boy and Pugsley to see if we could get a generator. This act in Houston (currently) would be like searching for Paris Hilton’s virginity – just not there anymore. Lowe’s® was open, and had a generator. Nah, just kidding. They had bottled water and some Chiclets©.

It appears that hurricanes smell like sex to fire ants (jerkusantus invictus). I got bit five times pulling branches out of my formerly fire-ant free backyard. I then unleashed a genocide of Biblical proportions on them, making the chemical warfare of WWI look like a Disney production of The Little Mermaid® in Candyland™.

I went back inside, and the power-gods deigned to tease us again. The lights flickered during dinner (T-bones and bratwurst saved from spoiling through immolation).

The utter lack of information was maddening. Anecdotal reports of FEMA commandeering truckloads of generators. Reports that Responders (I am ever so tired of that word) being stuck without food – you’da thunk they would have thought far enough ahead to stock up their patrol cars with Snickers®, pantyhose and Pez™ before heading to Houston. No. A Congresscritter was on the air complaining that the responders didn’t food, and wanted THE PEOPLE WHO HAD NO POWER TO COME TO THE NICE AIR CONDITIONED AND POWERED PLACE AND BRING THEM FOOD.

If you’re a responder without chow, you’re part of the problem, not the solution, bubba. I was not feeling sympathetic as I threw out $200 in spoiled food.

Power? That was a myth at this point, the electric company representative, and never really existed. Those things that you call “outlets”? Used for hanging meat to feed short animals. The representative suggested burning furniture to boil water to create steam to power a crude generator. I would have built one, but I had no power for my welder.

We went to bed early. Nice. The next day I went to work, to an office with power. And ice. And TV. I charged the laptops so the kids could watch Garfield© DVD’s. I had hot coffee. A functioning microwave to dry my socks. I’m not sure why I came home. Oh, yeah, the fam.

I headed home. I saw . . . our porch lights on.

The mythical lightning had returned.

We were actually really prepared for Hurricane Ike. And we were only out of power for a few days but in reality we could have handled several weeks.

And preppers are really prepared for emergencies. Some of them have complete surgery kits, antibiotics, and armored vehicles on remote homesteads powered by solar power. Plus they have gear to survive chemical warfare similar to what an army battalion could attack with after a late-night visit to Taco Bell®.

But the future is funny, because it’s squirmy. It won’t be as you expect or predict:

You might have higher inflation.
A totalitarian government might arise when Chelsea Clinton is named Pope®.
You might rip the crotch of your jeans during a softball game.
The Swiss might finally snap and launch a surprise nuclear attack at the rest of the world.

Each situation that you might run into requires a different response, but in the meantime you have to plan to live a life, but have plans to respond to most reasonable situations.

Should you plan for the stores to be out of food for a week? Sure. Should you plan for no power for a week? Absolutely – a big ice storm can take out the power for months in some locations.

But if the stores were closed for months? Yeah, that’s a response that’s categorically different, and depends a LOT on where you live. I live where most of the food comes from – there are grain elevators and cows all around. In New York City? Not so much. But like a wedding between Vladimir Putin and California Governor Jerry Brown, though possible, it’s just not very likely.

Are there general rules to a major disaster? Maybe. Here’s a first pass at some based on my experiences where I was in situations that approximated a disaster:

Be flexible. You don’t know the future, but if you’re alert, and think, you can guess at some probably things that might
Be the first out of the door. When it’s obvious that your situation has gone to hell, get out. Get in line for the re-routed plane. Get a rental car. Being late makes everyone in front of you your competition. Don’t put yourself in that position.
Understand that gone is gone. The universe doesn’t care if it’s not right. The universe doesn’t care if it’s not fair. And during an emergency, neither should you. Your plans are changed. Your house is on fire. Your PEZ® has been stolen by the ghost of Tom Petty in a kimono. Deal with the situation, not your feelings.
Understand that the old rules may not apply. Again, deal with the situation, not your feelings.
Regions matter. Your behavior should tie to the location you’re in. I’d rather be in central Iowa a year after an apocalypse than Chicago on a Tuesday.
Values and prices change rapidly. $10 for a bag of ice is a bargain if it saves $200 in food.
Laying food and supplies in before an event makes you smart, and removes you from being part of the problem. Doing it after the disaster makes you a hoarder and part of the problem. Looters and hoarders get shot.
Preppers look like hoarders to hungry people. Don’t talk about your stuff, or sit on the back deck having a ribeye when your neighbor is boiled grain from the silo near the railroad tracks.
Make sure you account for taxation when looking at your investment gains in your retirement portfolio.

Fat Alec Baldwin, Sketchy Stores, and Car Miracles: The Great 2018 Mountain Trip, Part II

This is Part II of a series. Part I, The Phantom RV, is located here (Booze, Aquifers, and the Great 2018 Mountain Trip (Part I)).

“Where we’re going, we won’t need eyes . . .” – Event Horizon

More on this sign below. Sigh.

Preview

The following was overheard between two moms at a kid’s soccer game in Dallas, Texas: “I wish I was as rich as the Smith family – they have enough money that they don’t have to drive a new car.”

Ohhh, vanity . . . what is thy sticker price?

Our SUV is rated to pull our camper, plus another 2000 pounds. Our camper is, in the world of RVs, very small, much like Alec Baldwin before he discovered carbohydrates. However, our SUV will not ever be pulled over for speeding on the open highway when pulling our camper, unless we’re going downhill, with the wind at our back, and with one of Elon Musk’s rockets strapped to the luggage carrier. With all that? We might hit 67 miles per hour. Where the speed limit was 65 miles per hour, we managed only to get up to 60 or so, and that was with the gas pedal firmly jammed to the floorboard. Really. And I kept said gas pedal floored for probably 98% of our trip.

Alec Baldwin after carbohydrates.

The engine got hot, burning through the equivalent of the petroleum use of Cuba for a year in 15 hours. The outside temperature was also hot, which might explain how we got stuck at the Shadiest Convenience Store in the Central United States*. (*Shadiest that I’ve been to outside of a big city.)

How shady was it?

The front door had a sign on it indicating that it was mandatory to remove sunglasses, hats, and hoodies prior to entry, so the security camera could get a good look at you. There was a sign on the bathroom door that amused The Boy so much he took a picture of it:

Yes, apparently they had this problem enough that they had to put a sign on the door to tell people to NOT MINDLESSLY DAMAGE MERCHANDISE while waiting in line. I’m sure the people who mindlessly damage merchandise seem like the group who would read a sign and say, “Oh, I was going to take a knife to these water bottles because I’m bored and have no self-control, but I won’t now because someone took the time to write out a note to me with a Sharpie®.”

The Boy also took this picture of the sign inside the bathroom:

Likewise, if the bathroom is out of toilet paper or Windex® or paper towels, I’ve never been tempted to jump up and go and restock a convenience store bathroom or clean the mirror. I wonder if that’s a problem they run into all the time, rogue cleaners? Maybe they have to pay them if they’re technically doing work for the store? Do they get healthcare benefits?

Hopefully the descriptions of the signs show how sketchy the place we were at is – enough random theft and vandalism that Sharpies®, copier paper, and probably the occasional police call are required. Not a good neighborhood, but at least better than a “clerk in an iron cage” convenience store.

Here is where the Clerk of Monte Cristo stays, forever condemned to hide shamefully within an iron mask a glass booth.

After the usual filling up and going to the bathroom, we make our way back to the Wildermobile™ Mark III, and get ready to go.

I turn the ignition key.

Nothing. Not even a click.

I turn it again. Nothing.

Crap. This is literally the worst place possible to be stuck on our trip. I mean, Detroit would be worse, but I would never actually go there, since I bet that’s where Gollum, Sauron, and the Nazgûl come from, and I bet that you can’t even get a decent Über there.

I thought back to the last place we got gas. I had (for the first time in over a decade) double-started the car, i.e., I had tried to start the car after it was already going. Had that damaged the starter with that horrible grinding sound?

I got under the car, and immediately was confronted by the skid plate. A skid plate is, essentially, armor for the engine. It protects the engine from collisions with rocks (think boulders) on rough mountainous roads or stacks of blenders if you (for whatever reason) wanted to run over a bunch of blenders at high speed. Not that I’ve ever done run over stacks of blenders at 70 miles per hour, but if I wanted to do it, I could.

Thankfully, I was prepared – we had a socket set in the back of the Wildermobile® Mark III and I popped off the skid plate.

It was at this moment I wondered if we had done the right thing in bringing a car that had already traveled 151,000 miles in its 15 year life on a difficult journey that would require the engine to operate at maximum output for over a thousand miles and for over 30 hours. Well, second guessing that decision now was kinda out of the question.

The one thing I didn’t do was panic. Life generally works out for me much better than it should and I assume that, generally, the situation will resolve itself in my favor more times than not. I shimmied underneath the car and looked for the starter. The Boy pulled the Chilton’s® Manual™ out of the back of the Wildermobile© which had a picture showing the location of the starter. I found it, I think. It might have been the car’s nipple, if the car’s nipple was wired and tied into the flywheel. I wiggled the wires.

I climbed out from under the car and tried to start it again.

Nope.

I sent The Mrs. in to get some more coolant for the radiator – while it wouldn’t help, it gave her something to do and was a little better than sacrificing a chicken to a voodoo god to get the Wildermobile® Mark III going again. Our coolant wasn’t too low, but, after 10 hours, the engine was HOT. I put in some coolant. I crawled back under the car – since, by experience, I knew that I could get a live wire to the starter and manually start it (if necessary). It would be sort of embarrassing to have to crawl under the engine hot wire my car, but after a few years I’m sure I’d get tired of doing that and get it fixed.

By this time, I looked like a mess. I was covered with axle grease (red) and undercarriage petroleum products (oil, power steering fluid, and some fluid produced by the Wildermobile™ Mark III in order to attract other cars to mate with). Essentially, I looked like Sam Neill after he left Jurassic Park® and went to the Event Horizon™.

Me before greasing the trailer axles and getting red grease on my shirt and then crawling under the car.

Me after greasing the axles and crawling under the car. Oh, and traveling to a hellish other dimension on a doomed and haunted spaceship.

I once again got back into the car, and used my greasy hands to turn the key.

The motor purred like a catlady’s flock of husband replacements. Success!

As I started the engine, The Mrs. was talking to a nice lady from the town who had been asking her if we needed help, no doubt clued in by the socket wrenches and open Wildermobile® Mark III hood.

“No, I said, we just got help, and it was you! What’s your name?”

“Angelina,” she responded.

John Wilder: “Well you must be our guardian angel, Angelina! Thank you so much! You’re our lucky charm!”

Angelina and I hugged. Odd, but stuff like that happens on the road.

The Wilder family piled back into the car. We pulled out of the Sketchiest Convenience Store in the Central United States that features irrational merchandise destroyers, vigilante bathroom restockers, and guardian angels walking amongst us.

Pugsley frowned. “So what, exactly, would we have done if the car hadn’t started?” I could hear the concern in his voice.

“Well,” I responded, “what we wouldn’t have done is panic. Panic is the best way to make a bad situation a catastrophe, sort of like Alec Baldwin’s career after he discovered nachos and high fructose corn syrup.”

I then sketched out a series of things we would have done to get the car fixed, and what we would have done until it was fixed. Pugsley seemed satisfied.

I then told The Boy and Pugsley of the car that didn’t like vanilla ice cream, which is a story I read a long time ago. The car owner would go to the store to get ice cream. And when he got vanilla, the car wouldn’t start. When he got chocolate, the car would start. He wrote to the car company (I think it was General Motors).

Getting such an odd letter, they actually sent an engineer out to see what the problem was. The engineer went with the man to get vanilla ice cream. Sure enough, the car wouldn’t start for a while.

They went back to the owner’s home. Then they drove back to the store and bought chocolate ice cream. Sure enough, the car started. Turns out the vanilla ice cream was in the front of the frozen food section, being more popular. The chocolate ice cream was in the back of the frozen food section, all the way to the back of the store. The extra time walking to the chocolate gave the car enough time to cool down (there was a heat-related fault in the car) so that the car would start.

We drove onward. Finally, we made it to the mountains. It was dark. We had been in the car for 12 hours. Still three more to go . . . if only I were a Dallas housewife, I would have had a new car that immediately started at the Shadiest Convenience Store in the Central United States. Then where, dear Internet, would you be without this story?

You’d be as sad as Alec Baldwin’s agent when Alec tells him those four fateful words . . . “Me want ice cream.”

Next (in the series): The Mountains, An IHOP™ Tease and a Short Turn Radius, More Convenience Store Shenanigans, A Drink Heater, Stevie Wonder® saves Captain Ahab/Clark Griswold

Pournelle’s Iron Law, or, Why Conspiracy Isn’t Needed to Explain the Stupid

“An independent, international intelligence agency operating at the highest level of discretion. Above the politics and bureaucracy that undermine the integrity of government-run spy organizations. The suit is a modern gentleman’s armor.” – Kingsman, The Secret Service

When we lived in Alaska and Texas, we learned that this was what the citizens thought of bureaucracy. And taxes. And regulations. And postage stamp increases.

We discussed Dunbar’s Number a few posts back (LINK).

To refresh from that post: Dunbar looked at primate group brain sizes, and compared to the size of the neocortex to the size of the primate “group” or tribe. After running the math, he predicted that humans should have a group size of around 150 – it’s related to the size of working memory that you have about other people. The commonly accepted maximum stable group size (average) is 100-250, which is all three of your inbred relatives and the 247 from your wife’s side of the family.

Dunbar further theorized that larger groups could only stick together under strong survival pressures – you’d have to be pressed to work together by a fate as tough as death. Why? .

Dunbar’s number has other implications as well. We can’t work as tribes anymore, because the major feature of tribes is massive, wanton bloodlust on a national scale. Tribes don’t trust the law to help deter another tribe – no. Tribes kill to solve traffic disputes. So, to work around tribal violence, and to avoid nepotism, bureaucracy was created.

We all love to hate bureaucracy, but the nice thing about those long line at the DMV is that they prevent the tribe from Pixley killing the tribe from Hooterville over who got their license first.

But is there a darker side to bureaucracy? Yes.

Jerry Pournelle was a wonderful science fiction writer that I loved reading. His collaborations with Larry Niven (Lucifer’s Hammer, The Mote in God’s Eye) are amazing novels that made me turn a page a minute when I read them as a kid in the back of the bus on the half-hour ride to town. Dr. Pournelle also worked on the numerous defense department projects, and was a science advisor to President Reagan. Dr. Pournelle was instrumental in bringing down the Soviet Union, as his work on the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI or “Star Wars”) caused the Soviet Union to bankrupt itself attempting to keep up with our technology.

So, he’s kinda pivotal to stopping nuclear war. What did you get done in the 1980’s, hmmm?

Okay, the title was just genius. The writing’s pretty good, too.

Possibly the best science fiction novel of the 1970’s, if you don’t count Richard Nixon’s autobiography.

Dr. Pournelle also made the following observation:

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people”:

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

Pournelle picked on government – it’s known for bureaucracy. And it’s clear that NASA® has ceased to have spaceflight as part of “what it can do” when Elon Musk can put his car into orbit on a rocket more powerful than anything designed by NASA™ since it was run by the Germans we kidnapped after World War II. And Musk did it for less money than NASA® spends attempting to fix a launch pad. It’s sad that isn’t a joke – it’s true.

NASA© is now run by people whose main job in life is . . . having a job. They hire massive numbers of people, so they have a reason to be a manager. Then they need a bigger budget, and crowd out all of the work the agency was supposed to be doing.

Pournelle’s observation is true for businesses as well as government programs. I’ve seen managers fight to spend every dime they could in the last month of the year – just so they could justify their higher budget request for next year. I’ve seen people move from department to department to department until they found one that wasn’t responsible for doing anything measurable. Then they’d stay in that department for the rest of their careers. Which, I guess, describes Congress perfectly. But I digress.

Where I live, if you cut down trees and branches, and it’s cold, it’s completely legal to have bonfires that are visible from the moon. My next door neighbor and I used to burn these on a dark night, new moon, when the temperature was around 40˚F (354˚C) and watch the flames lick the night sky. He’s younger than me. And we live in a state where you don’t need to stand in line for hours for a burn permit. All you need is wood, leaves, branches, gasoline, lawn chairs, a match, and sufficient quantities of Bud Light®.

My friend and I started talking about politics (this is pre-Trump).

“John, when I look at this whole mess we’re in, it almost seems coordinated. It seems like the government agencies (he works in the highly federally regulated banking industry) want to put the small banks out of business. It seems like a plot.”

My response: “That’s too simple. It doesn’t require for there to be a conspiracy. Let’s look at your business. Do they regulate you exactly the same as large banks in New York?”

Neighbor: “Well, yes. They just have tons of staffers that can answer the bank regulator questions.”

John Wilder: “And you told me you worked for a while as a banking regulator?”

Neighbor: “Yes.”

John Wilder: “Would you have gotten in trouble for pushing real hard on an infraction with a small bank?”
Neighbor: “Never.”

John Wilder: “Would you have gotten in trouble for pushing real hard on a big bank?”

Neighbor: “I did. I got in a lot of trouble. It was why I quit.”

John Wilder: “The big banks own the banking regulators – they’ve captured the regulators and the regulators only do what the big banks want them to do. Every regulator knows that their next job isn’t with the federal government – it’s with the big banks. Don’t rock the boat. Small banks don’t matter. Never mistake that a conspiracy is present when incentives are in place for those same regulators to think that they’re on a job interview with their new boss.”

Neighbor: “I guess that’s why you never got in trouble for letting a bank not get in trouble. Only by pushing the rules too hard.”

John Wilder: “The people in Washington don’t really care about the outcomes of their regulations – the best pollution regulations came out forty years ago and cost very little for the companies to clean up 98% of their pollution – air, soil, and water. The last 2% cost billions. And that’s great with the regulators – they want to have a good budget and a great story to tell to Congress when budget time comes around. The fact that the pollution that they’re cleaning up isn’t really pollution, costs billions to “clean” and is having zero impacts on anyone? That’s beside the point. Bureaucracy acts to save itself. Right or wrong don’t matter. What matters? Department budgets and staff size.”

John Wilder continues to bloviate: “There isn’t a conspiracy. It’s a bunch of little people making themselves important. Nobody makes themselves important by cutting regulations. They make themselves important by adding new, complex regulations. And they increase their value when they go to work from some company. Heck, I was told by a guy that the main author for solid waste regulations wrote them in such a complex manner that they’re nearly incomprehensible. He did that so he could get a high paying job afterwards because he’s the only one who knows where the loopholes in the regulations he wrote are.”

Neighbor: “So, did we really land on the moon?”

At this point my neighbor was killed by a tribe of NASA™ ex-engineers. If only we had a police force and a judicial system . . . hmmm.

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?

Elon Musk Update: Elon Musk Versus NASA

“Also available in Arctic Slut, Morning-After Melon, and Elon Musk.” – The Simpsons

Artifacts from another time – when NASA actually flew rockets into space. In the 1990’s NASA lawyers made them wire the rockets to the ground so that they couldn’t fly and maybe hurt someone. Also, NASA HR has made fart jokes grounds for termination.

When I was a young Wilder, I was in awe of NASA. I was expecting that the moon landing was just a start for manned spaceflight. Successes like the Voyager probe were confirmation – NASA would be leading us into a great new era that would end up with a man on Mars. Spaceflight would be available (at least) to rich people. We’d have great cylindrical colonies up in space, and mining on asteroids would produce massive amounts of wealth. Solar power satellites would beam power via microwave down to receiving dishes and eliminate energy shortages on Earth. And probably some birds.

Ahh, the future. Now back off to the Moon mines honey! Go deal with hard radiation for a week. Then we’ll have Swiss steak! (Source – NASA Ames)

The Space Shuttle was a hopeful idea. Built on the idea of being reusable, shuttles were going to revolutionize space travel. We’d shoot one up every week or two, and the cost would be less than $700 (today’s dollars) per pound. That was the idea, anyway.

Over the course of the 135 total missions it cost about $27,000 per pound. Each mission cost about $1.5 billion. And NASA would send up a Space Shuttle to launch a communications satellite. Yes. Every time we wanted to launch something, we’d put 25% of our space launch ability along with seven astronauts on the line. The shuttle was further crippled by added weight, which limited the orbits it could reach.

In 2007, NASA estimated they could have flown Saturn V (the same rocket that went to the Moon) missions six times a year, with two trips to the Moon, each year for the same price as the shuttle. With the amount of payload that the Saturn V could have sent up, our space infrastructure and time in space would have been significantly higher than with the Space Shuttle. We’d have been on Mars. Actual people.

Yeah. NASA essentially burned our future in space on a crappy space truck. But it’s gotten worse.

The current NASA rocket program, the Space Launch System, has consumed $11.5 billion dollars over seven years. And produced no rocket.

Pictured: Actual rocket. Not pictured: NASA rocket. Because there isn’t one. (Source: SpaceX)

Elon Musk spent $500 million on the Falcon Heavy to develop it, and launch costs are $90 million to $150 million per launch, and it has a greater capacity than any rocket on Earth right now. And a greater capacity than the Space Launch System will ever have. Musk’s only competition is Jeff Bezos, who has a LOT of money and the same ideas.

In perhaps the biggest NASA troll ever, Musk sent his car into space. With a Matchbox® car of his car glued to the dash. Playing David Bowie. With a spacesuit in the car. NASA? Unable to launch bottle rockets – probably because of all of the procedures required to launch one.

How can Musk do this when NASA cannot? Several reasons:

NASA is observably stupid. It started spending money on a launch pad for a cancelled rocket. It spent $200+ million dollars. Then it decided to change the pad for the Space Launch System. As of now, NASA has spent $300 million more. It anticipates spending another $400 million. But the launch pad leans. And it might only be used . . . once. Don’t believe me? Here’s a LINK.

Yes, this is a billion dollars. Oh, the alternative? Yeah, build a complete new one for a couple hundred million. (Source: NASA)

NASA is a jobs program. There are many fine scientists at NASA. Not sure NASA needs any scientists – NASA needs engineers to build rockets and rovers. I’m sure there are plenty of universities that NASA can go to if they need scientists. But let’s pretend that NASA needs a scientist or two. Does NASA need to make braille books for blind kids about eclipses? No, but they did. (LINK) Does NASA need a writer to write about how NASA helped make the statuettes that they give out at the Oscars® shiny? (LINK) They did.
NASA has been given no fixed mission. In the 1960’s, the idea was we’ll get men to the moon by the end of the decade. And they did. The entire world watched while young (less than 40 years old, most of them) men (almost overwhelmingly) conquered the moon. What’s the mission now? To watch while Elon Musk and eventually Jeff Bezos do more than NASA ever could? How demoralized must the government workers be watching future Bond® villains take over space?
Related to the above – NASA has no consistency. Rocket programs start/stop based on the political climate of the day. Bush proposes a rocket, Obama deletes the rocket and proposes another rocket. Manned spaceflight should take second place to unmanned probes. Unmanned probes should take second place to manned spaceflight. It’s like trying to negotiate between Mom and Dad when they don’t even speak the same language.

So, the solution?

Make Elon Musk NASA Emperor For Life®. Give him the money. If we gave Musk the money, we’d be on Mars in five years. We’d have a base on it in seven years. In twenty years, there would be a million Americans living on Mars. We’d start turning the atmosphere into something we could breathe. We’d make the place homey. Maybe in a several hundred years. Maybe a thousand.

Don’t get me wrong. Living on Mars is hard. It’s tougher than living on the top of Mount Everest. It’s tougher than living at the South Pole. But it’s worth doing. Why?

Intelligent life may be very rare in the Universe – it might even be rarer than intelligent life at NASA. The one thing we owe to our posterity is that they be given a chance to live. And even though planets appear to be fairly common in the Galaxy, there’s no real sign of intelligent life around here besides us. This previous week, we saw the nearest planet to our Solar system get torched by a solar flare that we could see from Earth (with huge telescopes). This happened four years ago. If anything was living there before, it was nuked, microwaved, and fried. Colonel Sanders could only sell Kentucky Fried Alien® there, since there certainly aren’t any living ones.

And for how much time of the existence of the Earth have we had intelligent life. 20,000 years? 100,000 years? If you generously (how could intelligent life exist without beer?) assume 200,000 years, only for 0.004% of the life of the Earth have we had intelligent life. And how long has that life been observable? 0.000002%.

When we look at the threats that mankind realistically faces, putting ourselves on Mars should be the ultimate, number one goal of the human race. We face economic disruption (LINK), we face the potential for artificial intelligence being a really tough child (LINK), big asteroids (LINK), super volcanos (LINK), and diseases and other stuff (like reality television) that could wipe us out.

The alternative are space habitats. The LaGrange points (which have nothing to do with ZZ Top®) are relatively stable orbits that math provides around the Earth-Moon system. In the diagram below, you can see that LaGrange 1, 2, and 3 are stable, but tiny places. LaGrange 4 (L4) and LaGrange 5 (L5) are awesome places because they are large – you could put a lot of stuff there and not worry about bumping into each other. And you can stay in those areas for millions of years without expending any fuel.

Here are the LaGrange points, courtesy NASA and ZZ Top®.

The L5 (or L4) colonies are perhaps tougher than Mars. Or not. Manufacturing these habitats would be difficult – you’d have to set up an entire manufacturing complex on the Moon (likely) and pull some choice asteroids into L4 or L5 orbit for raw materials. It’s certain that this work would cost billions and take decades for the larger colonies that would host millions of people. On the plus side? There’s already a song built for the colonies:

Home, home on LaGrange,
Where the space debris always collects,
We possess, so it seems, two of Man’s greatest dreams:
Solar power and zero-gee sex.

Here’s a NASA depiction of a space colony at the L5 point. Only NASA would create a colony where you’d have to build a bridge. (Source, NASA Ames)

I really love humanity. I want it to live on until the Universe can no longer support life. I’d like to think that in 2 trillion years that young Wilders (whatever they look like) are out viewing the birth of a new black hole, or watching the latest episode of The Simpsons. Why? All of the Universe, all of creation is meaningless unless we have someone there to watch it in joy and wonder. And to make fart jokes.

Washington: Musk, Patton, and Jack Daniels all Rolled into . . . the ONE

“I, George Washington, born in 1492, freer of the slaves, and the first president of this, our country, though savagely impeached for the shooting of Abe Lincoln, I will lead us into the demise of all humans!” – Home Movies

General George Washington, 1776, when he was about 44 years old. 44 years old, a billionaire, a war hero from the French and Indian War, and now commanding a rebel group fighting the largest superpower in the world. Hmmm. Maybe that’s why all that stuff is named for him?

There is a time for fighting valiantly and dieting. Then there exists the Thanksgiving/Christmas nexus. I’ve been generally trying to minimize the carb content of what I eat, but Thanksgiving? Yeah, I’m having pumpkin pie. And stuffing. And mashed potatoes. And might drink a bit of gravy. Just a quart or two. Not from the gravy boat – I have standards. I have standards . . . and a mug. A great gravy mug.

Yes, I have willpower, but Thanksgiving and Christmas are more difficult times to stick to diets. So, I don’t. And I don’t spend a lot of time feeling guilty about it, but it’s also a good time to reflect that eating different things changes my mood.

If I’ve had enough potatoes to feed the Soviet Army, I know that I’ll feel differently both physically and mentally. Sugar is similar. Ditto with bread.

So, how do I feel different physically? For me, when I eat carbs I tend to retain a LOT more water. It’s my theory that it’s used to think out my blood so it flows better than maple syrup. When I jump back into the low carb regimen, I know that for the first few days I will dump water faster than the democrats dumped Al Franken.

I’m pretty sure that the extra water does NOT do anything really good for me.

How do I feel different mentally? Again, for me the low carb (very low, like none) zaps me into a state of clarity and stability. Stuff just doesn’t bother me as much. And I seem to get better sleep.

But one thing that’s wonderful about the Holidays is . . . George Washington.

George was really tall for his time and place, and strong enough that he could crush walnuts in his bare hand. British walnuts. And he was known to party (from teachingamericanhistory.org):

First Troop Philadelphia City
Cavalry Archives, 1774

City Tavern
George Washington
Entertainment of

15 Sept., 1787

Light Troop of Horse, September the 14th 1787

	To Edwd Moyston .. Dr.
To 55 Gentlemans Dinners & Fruit
—	Rellishes, Olives etc………………………………………..	20	12	6
—	54 Bottles of Madera……………………………………….	20	5
—	60 of Claret ditto……………………………………………	21
—	8 ditto of Old Stock…………………………………………	3	6	8
—	22 Bottles of Porter ditto………………………………….	2	15
—	8 of Cyder ditto……………………………………………..	16
—	12 ditto Beer…………………………………………………	12
—	7 Large Bowels of Punch………………………………….	4	4
—	Segars Spermacity candles etc………………………….	2	5
To Decantors Wine Glass [e]s & Tumblers Broken etc..		1	2	6
To 16 Servants and Musicians Dinners……………………		2
—	16 Bottles of Claret…………………………………………	5	12
—	5 ditto Madera……………………………………………….	1	17	6
—	7 Bouls of Punch…………………………………………….	2	16
		£89	4	2

If you study the above, you’ll see that George Washington and 54 of his best buddies had 114 bottles of wine, plus cider, beer, and 8 bottles of hard alcohol. I’m thinking our Founding Fathers were knee-walking drunk at this point – you can see that they got well into the “smashing the bottles and glasses” part of the party. And it was the equivalent of something between $15,000 and $20,000 that he spent on the party.

George liked to party.

And he liked to party at Christmas, which brings us to eggnog.

Now, I must tell you that I really, really hate eggnog. Hate it with a passion.

Or I did, until I had George’s eggnog. And it just so happens I’ll share his recipe with you (this will be the 306,001^st place on the Internet that you can get it):

“One quart ye cream, one quart of ye milk, one dozen tablespoons of ye sugar, one pint of ye brandy, ½ pint of ye rye whiskey, ½ pint of ye Jamaica rum, ¼ pint of ye sherry—mix liquor first, then separate yolks and whites of 12 eggs, add sugar to beaten yolks, mix well. Add milk and cream, slowly beating. Beat whites of eggs until stiff and fold slowly into mixture. Let set in cool place for several days. Taste frequently.”

And it’s amazing. It tastes just like Christmas. And George was right – making this stuff and drinking it on day one is NOT advised. It tastes . . . strong. But after three days in the fridge? Amazingly smooth.

So, not only was George a billionaire president general that defeated the world’s largest and best trained armed forces? He knew how to party.

Here’s to you, George!

Seneca, Stoics, Money and You

“My heart attack didn’t kill me, so why act like it did? See, Tim, it was the Roman philosopher Seneca who said “if we let things terrify us, then life is not worth living.” – Home Improvement

Seneca could definitely use a makeover, but would probably be the last person who cares about a makeover, since he’s willing to be dead and made of marble.

Source- I, Calidius CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

What is stoicism, and why does it matter for your money?

From Wikipedia’s definition of Stoicism . . . “the path to happiness for humans is found in accepting this moment as it presents itself, by not allowing ourselves to be controlled by our desire for pleasure or our fear of pain, by using our minds to understand the world around us and to do our part in nature’s plan, and by working together and treating others in a fair and just manner.”

What on Earth does that have to do with money?

Everything.

Let me explain . . . with a story I’ve used before:

When I was young, we had a subscription to Reader’s Digest (which, really, might have been influenced by the CIA for a time – google it). For those that haven’t heard about it, it’s where they take articles (and even books!) and edit out the boring bits and republish them. It’s like someone printed a tiny bit of the Internet.

Pop Wilder always said, “I can read my own articles and decide what’s important.”

And yet? I always found an issue of Reader’s Digest in the bathroom that only he and I used, and I know that I wasn’t carting them in there.

But in Reader’s Digest they had features as well as the articles, one of which was “Laughter is the Best Medicine.” In it were nice, clean stories that were, well, funny. Some of them were even taken from real life. My favorite was about a five year old girl and her eight year old brother.

They were playing in the backyard (which kids used to do prior to the Internet). The boy was holding a tin can on top of the little girl’s head and smacking it with a rock.

Mother: “Tommy, what ARE you doing????”

Little Girl: “Mommy, it’s okay. He’s almost done.”

I keep coming back to that image. It’s like life.

Sometimes the problems we go through are pointless. Sometimes they are downright silly. Life keeps smacking a rock into the top of your head. And when it stops, you feel so good.

Another example:

A friend of mine went through Army Ranger School (a long time ago). There were two out of their class that passed. Two. The other guy was a chaplain. The last ordeal had been an extended duration hike with little food. They had survived. They had made it back to base. But . . . it was five hours until they would be released from training, and couldn’t go to mess hall (cafeteria) to eat.

They climbed into a dumpster. They found Doritos® covered with ants. They brushed the ants off and ate the Doritos™.

And this relates back to money, too.

Seneca was a Roman. I use the word “was” because he’s dead. Nero ordered Seneca to kill himself (spoiler, Seneca totally did kill himself) back in moldy old 65 A.D. (Not “Common Era” but good old Anno Domini).

Seneca was rich. How rich? Rich enough that he could have purchased six hundred million loaves of bread. And that didn’t count his real estate, which included at least six Sonic® drive-ins and three strip malls in Omaha.

I’m not even sure where I would put six hundred million loaves of bread. Certainly my pantry would fill up after 2 million or so. But outside of bread (food), the man had a lot of bread (money). And thought a LOT about it.

Seneca: “He is a great man who uses clay dishes as if they were silver; but he is equally great who uses silver as if it were clay.”

In the end, a dish is a dish, and as long as it comes out of the dishwasher without last night’s Kraft® Garfield® Macaroni and Cheese, well, deal with it.

And a car is a car. I went to a stand-up comedian one night with a friend, his wife, and a blind date. (Yes, this is you, Chris – the friend, not the blind date). The comedian was making a joke about cars. The reason, he thought, that we had so many traffic fatalities was that we didn’t make cars out of Nerf® stuff.

He looked, from the stage, down at me.

“You sir, you look like you drive a big-ass truck.”

Me: “No, it’s a Toyota® Tercel™.”

Him, loudly into a microphone with everyone in the room listening: “Well, you must be the world’s BIGGEST pussy.”

Needless to say, the blind date ended right there since I didn’t go and beat him up. And, yes, I probably should have answered “yes” when he asked if I drove a truck. But . . . like Seneca, a car to me is . . . just a car. The first virtue of a thing is in its utility. Does it do the job? Sometimes duct tape is the proper solution.

From the standpoint of a Stoic, even a wickedly rich one like Seneca, taking pride in personal possessions was to be looked down upon. And, yes, his wife had earrings that cost more than a house. And he had solid silver nose hair trimmers. And we know this because he wrote about them. But, did he care? I don’t think so. He bought the stuff because he could, not because the stuff had power over him. I’m certain that he understood that he didn’t own the “stuff” but just had it until he died, so it had no power over him.

But we let stuff have power over us. Does the neighbor have a nicer car? Do they have a better stereo? It’s normal, natural to envy that. It’s totes Stoic if you go, “good for you!” and not want to go and buy an even better car because you’re good with the one you have.

When I was in Houston I would be stopped at a traffic light, surrounded by cars much nicer than my 2006 Ford® Taurusdadcar™. And I would wonder how many of them owned their car. And I wonder how much heartache was caused by that REALLY BADASS Mercedes® next to me when monthly payment time came around. And, truthfully? If it was being driven during work hours by a girl, I wondered how long she’d be with her husband after the money ran out.

So, for me? Being Stoic about the stuff I own is a sanity preserver. If I had to worry that The Mrs. would leave me if I didn’t have an awesome car, or, honestly, cared at all about what my neighbors thought, life would have a stress it doesn’t need at all.

But Seneca went further. He said, get rich all you want, but don’t do it in a way that’s “stained by blood.” My interpretation? You got you money honestly, without forcing it out of other people.

How does this play out? Well, let’s look at . . . Obama phones. Regardless of how you feel about them, the money that comes to purchase them, and to provide monthly service is forcefully taken from others. Don’t think that it’s forceful? Try not paying your taxes and then you’ll learn that the IRS is not your benevolent aunt who bakes cookies. Unless your aunt works for the IRS. In which case, please tell me the rule on deductibility of capital losses from a prior year against current year capital gains. Just kidding, I use TurboTax®, which is probably nicer to me than your aunt.

I digress. But I think Seneca would think it was wrong to take money from one person (me) without their consent to give to another (Obama phone users) and taking a cut in the middle. It’s wrong. Unfortunately, it’s our government’s current business model (LINK) and Elon Musk’s (LINK).

Last? Seneca thought you should be generous. Bill Gates is certainly living up to that, shooting money out like a lawn sprinkler at causes he likes. And I tip well at the restaurant.

But the biggest danger of generosity? It has to be moral. Give a man money and he will take it. But he will resent you, because you didn’t give him more.

Let a man (or, I guess we let women earn money nowadays, and even own property and vote) earn money? That will provide both support for him (or her or it, whatever the cool kids say nowadays) and self-worth. So, generosity is good. Charity is corrosive.

The really cool thing about being a stoic is realizing the beauty you can find in the weird, small bits of life that you often ignore. The smoothness of a straw. The stark sharpness of the edges of the clouds on a crisp winter night. The wear marks on a keyboard you’ve typed a million words on. The ability to take satisfaction out of nearly every experience you have is there.

If you let it. And if Tommy will stop pounding the tin can on the top of your head with a rock for a moment.

Stock Bubbles, Tulips, and Toilet Paper

“There’s only two things I hate in this world: people who are intolerant of other people’s cultures and the Dutch.” – Austin Powers in Goldmember

Read this blog or this man will shoot that car.

People can be stupid.

People in groups are almost always stupid, and they can remain stupid until they do quite a lot of damage.

Let’s take a trip off to Europe (unless you already live in Europe) and back in time to 1636 A.D. (unless you already live in 1636 A.D.) and review the price of . . . flowers???

The Dutch (at least I think that’s what they call the people from the Netherlands, but you can call them Sven or Maria or whatever suits you) in 1636 were a seafaring bunch, who made money trading all over the world and had colonies in North America, South America, South Africa, India and all those islands between Asia and Australia. One thing that a Dutch guy brought back (and I don’t think this one was lost) in addition to the most efficient way to remove hair and lint from your bellybutton was the tulip.

In a parallel development, the Dutch were big on trading stocks in companies, like the Dutch East India Company, or in commodities like sugar or pancake mix. The markets were sophisticated. In 1632, you could buy sugar for delivery in 1633. This was nice if you wanted to guarantee your sweet tooth, but you could also trade that contract to somebody else for a higher price if they decided they needed the sugar to make PEZ® or Fruit Pies. Nowadays we call those “futures” contracts. Yup, the Dutch were doing this 400 years ago.

But a slight change in laws made those contracts different. The buyer could buy the right to buy sugar. The seller had to fulfill the contract, but the buyer had no obligation to buy it. It was his or her (yup, plenty of Dutch female speculators) option to buy the sugar. This is what is now known as “futures options.” And you could buy them on . . . anything.

Even tulips.

In November of 1636 something must have broken in the minds of a batch of silly dead (now, not then) Dutchmen and women. They started bidding up the futures options contracts on . . . tulips. And various colors and varieties became more valuable, especially one that that had a virus that changed and made a tiger-striped pattern. They looked awesome. But one tulip bulb went for the same price as ten years’ worth of a typical laborer’s wages. That’s $250,000 or $300,000 today. For a tulip bulb.

There appears to be little record of people going broke in big numbers when the bubble burst, but certainly there were some people who came out a bit poorer, and the entire reputation of traders was ruined. Not that it was that great in the beginning, but Jan Brueghel the Younger painted the fine painting below, Satire on Tulip Mania, depicting the traders as monkeys. If you look closely you can see the nifty tiger-striped tulip in the left corner. Myself? I’d pay much more for a monkey that traded futures options contracts, even if he did a lousy job.

Yes, it’s public domain, being nearly 400 years old, unless Disney® wants to try to make a movie about it….

This was the first recorded financial insanity of this type, and it was fairly benign.

What other manias occurred during history? Well, lots. But researching them all would take quite a lot of work, and far more wine than I have in the house right now. So, let’s just look at the ones that I want to talk about:

Salem Witch Trials – 1692 to 1693. Twenty people executed when a bunch of kids played a prank. Or there were real witches. This is still a bubble, but it was just teen angst magnified a zillion times. Fortunately, they had awesome wood floors, like in the picture below. Are those oak? I’m so jealous!

The South Sea Bubble – in 1720, the price of shares in the British South Sea Corporation went from £100 to £1,000 (the £ is the funny symbol that British people use for money). Sounds like a great deal, right? Well, the records seem to indicate that the South Sea Corporation spent most of their time issuing stock and very little time on actually, you know, making money. So why did so many people (including Isaac Newton himself) shove all of their spare £ into a company that just made stock? Isaac Newton is reported to have said: “I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men.” Apparently Newton couldn’t manage £1,000-£100=£ Below is a public domain picture by dead artist Godfrey Kneller of Isaac Newton when he was in his “looking like the guitarist from Queen” phase.

Radium – 1920’s to late 1930’s. Everything had radium in it or was named after radium. Drinking water. Watches with glow in the dark faces. My college mathematics classroom (yeah, after I took Calculus I, Calc II, Calc III and Differential Equations in the same room? Enough radioactivity to power all of North Korea and a lot of corpses that are technically nuclear waste. I have a straight razor case from the era. You guessed it: “Radium Straight Razor Company.”
1920’s Stock Bubble – The classic. Fueled by post World War I enthusiasm and the rise of new technology (radio, the automobile, phones, and PEZ®) people went . . . insane. Everybody was investing in the stock market, including a shoeshine boy, who famously gave Joe Kennedy (father of President John F. Kennedy) a stock tip. Kennedy then decided if shoe shine boys were involved in the stock market, too many people were in the stock market. He then proceeded to smuggle a bunch of liquor and manipulate a senator or two, then lunch.
Hula Hoops™ – Watch The Hudsucker Proxy to see exactly how this was invented. Okay, I kid. But the Hula Hoop® hit when Hawaii was just becoming a state, and there was a large mania about the place, even though it had been a part of the US for nearly a century. 100 million were sold within two years, despite the US population being only 180 million at the time. Sales fell off when people were finally told that there wasn’t a limit on the number of times a hoop could be hooped prior to it wearing out.
Johnny Carson’s Toilet Paper Run – in 1973, Johnny Carson (a late night television host back when there were only three channels and who was very popular) noted that there was a toilet paper shortage, but was referencing commercial grade toilet paper. He used that to make a few jokes. (Toilet paper is just plain funny). People took him seriously, and pretty soon there were shortages and rationing of consumer grade TP in several cities. Shortly after the commotion, Carson told his audience he was joking. People in the US could again poop without fear.
Pet Rocks® – A rock. As a pet. For money. Broke sales records, until people figured out that they’d paid $3.95 (plus tax) for a rock.
Cabbage Patch Kids© – A really ugly doll, but middle-aged women jumped out in droves to fight each other in a series of battles that would have made the gladiators of the Colosseum in Rome proud, if they had been middle-aged women with purses the size of four year old children fighting each other for dolls in the aisles of K-Mart®, Montgomery Ward™ and Sears©.
Beanie Babies™ – A really cute doll that spiked in popularity in the late 1990’s. The creator of the company decided to make special “limited runs” of a cheap, plush doll that looks like a dog’s chew toy. Middle-aged women fought each other in the aisles for these as well, but it was the 1990’s so they all had greasy ham-hair like Kurt Cobain. After a brief spike of popularity, most Beanie Babies are worth . . . dog chew-toy value. There are a very few that might be worth some change, but don’t hold your breath.
Dotcom Bubble – The thing I wrote about Beanie Babies™ above? Just replace “Beanie Babies®” with “stocks” and “Middle-aged women” with “greedy but stupid baby boomers.”
Tasers© – At one point in 2004, Taser™ the company would have had to sell three Tasers® to every person in the United States to make the profit the stock $150 stock price implied. We didn’t buy the Tasers®, and neither did you, so you can buy the stock for $20 or so.
Housing Bubble –House prices never go down. It’s a fact! Except when it’s not and imperils the entire economy of the world.

Most of the bubbles or manias I’ve listed above share a similar pattern –

Start – The guy started making Beanie Babies®. They only sold a few.
Spark – A reviewer mention in an article that some are “valuable” and “rare”.
Information Spread – Engage middle-age lady network.
Publicity – News stories show up in newspapers, television.
Mania – Nobody wants to be left behind, so everybody buys all the Beanie Babies®.
Market Collapse – Somebody writes an article questioning paying $10,381 for a dog chew toy. “Bubbles burst when fools run out of money.”
Next Mania – Well, maybe next time I’ll be in first and make all the money…

And financial markets work exactly the same way, but with less dog chew toys. People want to seek a return on their money, and when there’s enough money just lying around, stupid investments get made. And some of those investments pay off in a huge way, especially for those that got out early. The Dotcom crash? Plenty of people sold as it was on its way up, and made huge amounts of money. The housing crash? One guy predicted it and put in place investments so that he made hundreds of millions off of the crash.

But sometimes what looks like a bubble . . . isn’t a bubble. It’s a trend, and a real trend based on sound, rational economics. The guy who was sure that the smart phone was a fad (me), the guy who thought that credit cards would never catch on with a rational public (my dad), and the guy who thought that Europe would be plunged into a horrific war (my great, great grandfather). Oh, wait, the last guy was right.

And sometimes there are bubbles, and sometimes there are trends. One person working to figure out the difference is a geophysicist named Didier Sornette, who has an amazing Wikipedia page (LINK), and looked at the mathematics that surrounded earthquakes and compared it to stocks or other financial assets in a bubble. Turns out that the bubble was analogous to a really stressed mass of rock. He made some predictions after the Dotcom bubble, and was right enough that he got hired to just study financial crises in Zurich (LINK). Tough duty.

When you think a deal is too good to be true, or you see a group of people jumping on a bandwagon, think twice (cough Tesla® cough). You want to avoid the Hula Hoop® Witches™ without Toilet Paper.

This blog is NOT stock advice, I don’t own any positions in anything mentioned, and don’t plan on any for the next month or so.