Category: Silly Predictions

Civil War II Weather Report: Spicy Time Coming

John Wilder’s Civil War II Weather Report Number 1

“Yeah. There were horses, and a man on fire, and I killed a guy with a trident.” – Anchorman

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With apologies to Gary Larson, in my defense there are only so many John Brown jokes out there.

Way back in 1998, I ended up with one of the neatest jobs that I had – assessing risks to a major corporation.  The Internet was new at work, and I was being paid to research potential disasters.  It was so interesting and so much fun I felt guilty.  In researching disasters and risk, I came across Y2K.  For those that don’t remember, there was a concern that, as a result of programmers only using two digits to store year information in computers, that many computers and computer programs would cease to function when the calendar flipped over to 00.

There were multiple websites and personalities that were writing about Y2K, and one that I went to from time to time was Cory Hamasaki’s Y2K Weather Report.  Hamasaki was a programmer (he has since passed away) and he had an inside perspective of the ongoing work that was required to keep the systems working.  As a result of his insider knowledge he bought an AR, a lot of food, and spent New Year’s Eve at his remote cabin.

Obviously, the systems kept working.

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Not my original.  And I’m sorry.

We live, however, in spicy times, with the potential for them becoming even spicier (I got the Spicy Time meme from Western Rifle Shooters (LINK), which really should be on your daily reading list).  I’ve written several articles about the potential for Civil War, and studied and thought quite a bit about it.  As such, this is the inaugural edition of John Wilder’s Civil War II Weather Report.  I anticipate putting it out monthly.  This first issue will probably be a bit longer than later issues, since I’m putting the framework together and explaining the background.

I’m attempting to put together a framework that measures where we are on the continuum between peace and war.  I’ll even try to develop some sort of measures that show if the level of danger is increasing or decreasing.  Civil wars don’t happen all at once, and like a strong storm, they require the atmosphere to be right.  A weather report is probably a good metaphor.

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If you haven’t seen it, the guy with the trident was the weatherman in Anchorman.  And when he has a trident?  People die.

So, to review the future, let’s start by looking at Civil War I so we understand what happened, and what the potential differences are.

Civil War I was:

  • Based on philosophical differences – the views of the people, North and South were pretty similar, except that the Northerners were descended from Puritans who sailed on the Mayflower, and the Southerners were descended from the Norman conquerors that took England in 1066 but got booted out after having lost a war in England. Although the North and South were the same people, more or less, with the same heritage, there were enough differences to lead to a war.  And it was a doozy.

Civil War II is different because:

  • Certainly we are not the same people today compared to when we generally unified ethnically. Civil War II will likely be fought on the basis of conflicting culture, identity and ideology.

Civil War I was:

  • Fought by armies, mostly, with identified geographical centers.

Civil War II is different because:

  • At the early stages, at least, Civil War II won’t be fought by armies, and there won’t be defined geographical concentrations. Armies are better at killing people and breaking stuff, but irregulars are way better at atrocity.  Expect the initial stages of hot war to be filled with some pretty rough stuff.

Civil War I was:

  • Characterized by a general adherence to the rules of war, though there were some war crimes on either side.

Civil War II is different because:

  • There has been a tendency of civil wars in this century to have increasing levels of atrocity during the war. This will continue.

Civil War I was:

  • Fought with the intent of reunification (by the North), and separation (by the South). The basic desire of the North was to reunify the country, admittedly under more comprehensive Federal control.  Reconstruction sucked, but the goal was a single country.  That’s why all the Confederate statues were tolerated, and even encouraged.

Civil War II is different because:

  • I expect whoever wins to pursue a policy of revenge at the end, especially if it’s the Communists. This is founded based on every single communist revolution ever.  The end of Civil War I occurred in a growing young country with the opportunity to move West.  Now?  Whoever wins will cleanse whatever areas they take.

Civil War I was:

  • Fought by organized, elected governments.

Civil War II is different because:

  • I’m thinking that one side might be a Caesar-type leading a partial military coalition versus Leftist irregulars, but I might be wrong on this one.

I decided to see what other studies had been done about more recent civil wars, and found that James Fearon and David Laitin (from Stanford) did a study in 2003 on civil wars during the 20th Century (LINK).  Here’s what they found:

  • Civil Wars had a median duration of six years
  • Sub-Saharan Africa: 34 wars
  • Asia: 33 wars
  • North Africa and the Middle East: 17 wars
  • Latin America: 15 wars
  • Eastern Europe/Former Soviet Union: 13 wars
  • The West: 2 wars

Why do civil wars develop?  It’s my bet that political scientists are like economists – six political scientists will generate 15 incorrect theories over coffee each morning, although I, for one, have no idea why we would think we would have a more stable country if we import people who keep having civil wars all of the time.  Fearon and Laitin came up with three different types of civil wars:

  • Ethnic: “You other people suck.”
  • Nationalist: “We want our own country, because you other people suck.”
  • Insurgent: “We want to be the boss, because you suck.”

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Okay, I don’t know who the originator was of this meme, but it still cracks me up.

Civil wars were non-existent in ethnically homogeneous and rich countries during the time period of Fearon and Laitin’s study.  As the United States was essentially ethnically homogeneous and rich during Civil War I, you can see that, just like the Revolution, something unique was going on here.  We decided to fight over principles.

Fearon and Laitin had several graphs that pointed out that increased wealth makes up for a portion of ethnic diversity – wealthier, non-homogeneous societies were less likely to go to war than poorer non-homogeneous ones.  Oddly, the very poorest ($48 to $800 a year) societies were less likely to go to war than societies that made just a little more money.  I guess just living was tough enough and going to war against other people who also had nothing was pointless.

One conclusion that Laitin and Fearon found was that civil war onset was no less frequent in a democracy.  Discrimination is not linked to civil war.  Income inequality is not linked to civil war.  Grievances aren’t the cause of civil war – they’re caused by civil wars.  What are risk the factors?

  • New nations. I guess they haven’t developed the “don’t kill the president” tradition yet.
  • People can hide in mountains.  I guess.
  • Higher (absolute) population numbers. I told you big cities were bad.
  • Oil exporting.
  • High proportion of young males.
  • Exporting commodities – risk seemed to peak at about 30% of GDP coming from commodity export.

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Okay, not directly on point, but my primary export is memes.

So where does the United States stand as a country today?  I guess I’d throw out the thought that the first prerequisite for Civil War II is economic stress.  Why?  Average Joe won’t pick up an AR to go kill people in the next county if Joe has beer in the cooler and another episode of Naked and Afraid® next week.  If Joe has a job and a wife and a mortgage, well, there just won’t be action.  I meant war, silly.  Get your mind out of the gutter.  Our risk now is relatively low based on economics.

The United States is developing a higher absolute population.  That puts us at risk.

With immigration, the United States is forming a higher proportion of young males.  That puts us at risk.

State weakness is generally correlated with civil wars.  I’m torn on this one.  On one hand, we have the largest number of laws ever, along with a very large enforcement mechanism.  On the other?  Laws, both state and Federal are increasingly just ignored.  Victor Davis Hanson describes this paradox in California (LINK).

Nearby civil wars are associated with having a civil war.  Latin America is a civil war factory . . . so we’re at risk.

From the above five predictors of civil war, we have four of them.  Obviously this doesn’t tell the whole story.  The United States has a peaceful history, and, unlike a less established nation, the general populace is going to assume that today was good, so tomorrow will be pretty good, too.  And, generally that’s a good way to predict the future:  tomorrow will look like today.  Building the conditions for civil wars generally take years and what was abnormal becomes normal and tolerated as time goes by.

I’m going to attempt to try to make a metric showing the rise in various societal factors that I think might lead to civil war.  Some of the obvious are:

  • Economic metrics – economic growth, unemployment, average wealth.
  • Organized violence metrics – news of riots, other organized violence and protests.
  • Political instability metrics – use of the term “impeach”, “civil war”, “electoral college.”
  • Sites banned – numbers of political speakers silenced.
  • Number of illegal immigrants per month. This shows greater economic stress or greater problems at their actual home.

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Yeah, you just can’t add the North and the South together and end up with a Civil War.  Unless you do it in binary, then you could have a Bipolar War?

I’ll then combine them into an index.  If you have other items that you think can be tracked and should be tracked, let me know, and I may incorporate them, especially if they’re easy find and to incorporate, because I’m lazy.

Finally, Civil War won’t show up all at once, it may take years to get people to the idea that war is better than dealing with your weird neighbor by going into your house and watching a marathon of YouTube® videos where people turn $40 of propane and a bunch of aluminum cans into $10 worth of aluminum ingots.  It’s easier than fighting, right?

Following is my take on the steps that will lead to actual civil war.  I humbly call it the Wilder Countdown to Civil War II™.

  1. Things are going well.
  2. People begin to create groups.
  3. People begin to look for preferential treatment.
  4. Opposing ideology to the prevailing civic ideology is introduced and spread.
  5. Those who have an opposing ideology are considered evil.
  6. People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology.  Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
  7. Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
  8. Opposing sides develop governing/war structures.  Just in case.
  9. Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
  10. Open War.

I bolded number six.  That’s where I think we are right now.  Violence is occurring, but it’s not monthly, so I don’t think we’re at step seven.  Yet.  And I think we can live at step nine for a long time as long as we don’t have the bottom drop out of the economy.  Might there be some trigger that takes us to nine in a hurry?  Sure.  But I’m willing to bet that we see it take a few years, rather than a few months.  My bet is no sooner than 2024, but I’ve been wrong before, way back in 1989.

This is a project where I’m not only very open to contributions of information (even anonymous contributions) I’m actively soliciting them.  Let me know if you’ve got commentary, criticism, news stories, or suggestions to make issue two (probably in early July) better, either down below or at my email, movingnorth@gmail.com

While we can’t predict catastrophic storms with 100% accuracy, it’s probably about time that someone started looking at the horizon to see what they could see.  Because I see what might be a storm coming.

The Who, The WHO, Cavemen, Child Labor, and We Won’t Get Fooled Again

Every Saturday we’d grab some fish and chips, head to the park, watch The Who. – The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret.

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The motto of the World Health Organization – “There is no health problem so small that we cannot dedicate millions in government dollars on salaries so that we can look it up on the Internet, hold conferences on it in international vacation spots on the government dime, and also hang out in our palatial Geneva, Switzerland headquarters while eating non-GMO, free-range, gluten-free snacks that we also paid for with government dollars.”

In a bid to make sure that journalists have something to write about, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced this week that it had three new findings:

  • “Burnout” is a psychological condition of international importance,
  • “Gaming Disorder” is a psychological condition of international importance, and
  • They need some fancy new chairs for their office in Geneva, Switzerland, because sitting in chairs for grueling six hour days surfing the Internet are just heck on their spines. A masseuse and some spa time would be nice, too.

This new categorization goes into effect on January 1, 2022, and until then apparently you can’t have these conditions until then, so feel free to be burned out and while playing Pokémon nonstop until you pass out from lack of sleep all you want.  But how does the WHO define these new menacing maladies that are the greatest threat to the world?

WHOHQ

I imagine the view of Lake Geneva is to die for from the roof!  Ha, to die for!  That’s a health joke.  (Photo by:  Yann Forget / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0, snarky caption by yours truly.)

Burnout:

Burnout is an “occupational phenomenon”, which means that you can’t catch it from an AntiFa® member, because they’re allergic to actual jobs.  Burnout is defined as:

  • Energy depletion or exhaustion,
  • A greater mental distance from one’s job, and
  • Reduced professional efficacy.

This describes every single employee at the local McDonalds in Modern Mayberry, so I guess WHO is right, this is an epidemic that we need an international agency focused on.  I would say that I hope they don’t work too hard at it and risk burnout themselves, but then I recalled they work for the WHO, so I can rest easily tonight.

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Honestly, that picture is the one I’d like to have taken of me in the last moment before I died – go out like a man.  But in reality, I bet that today that guy is an unfrozen caveman lawyer who has to get his billing hours up or the other partners would come into his cave at night and mash him up with big rocks.  For reals?  If this was the last moment of my life?  I would die a happy man.

I’m betting that this “burnout” isn’t a new phenomenon.  I’m certain that our distant ancestors just couldn’t get themselves out of the cave some mornings because Oog, their supervisor, was going to get on them again for not holding the atlatl in just the right way to bring down the mammoth.

Stupid Oog.  And I bet that Oog will tear me a new one on my performance review – maybe I should talk to HR – Hominid Relations.

Okay, so burnout is probably a product of today’s society, since at almost every point in history up until now, being “burned out” would have resulted in starvation.  Perhaps all the employees need is proper motivation?

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Also 1872:  “I’m sorry to hear that you’re burned out.  Allow me to show my condolences after I’m done with my fiftieth straight 12 hour shift at the mill.”

Gaming Disorder:

Gaming disorder is defined by the WHO as:

  • Inability to stop playing a game even if it interferes with relationships, work, and sleep, and
  • Lasts for a year.

I thought that the above bullet points were the goal of a good video game?  I mean, the ultimate video game would have people divorced and starving to death on their couch because they couldn’t stop playing.

This isn’t a video game, but it is one of the funniest clips in the last 15 years.

I’ll admit that I’ve given video gaming a hard time in previous posts, but I’ll also admit that I’ve been the guilty party from time to time.  I have a weakness for strategy games, and growing up there wasn’t anyone else interested, so I didn’t have anyone to play the games with.  There are few enough that have sufficient complexity to be interesting.  But when I find one . . . oops, it’s three A.M., where did the time go?

Also:  Why a year?  Seems random, just like every recipe says “bake at 350°F (771°C) for two hours.”  Are you sure it isn’t 375°F (-40°C) for ninety minutes (400 metric minutes)?  I think when your personal hygiene suffers to the point that your dead corpse would repel a starving hyena, you’ve probably hit any reasonable definition of being just a little too obsessed with Grand Theft Auto®.  But WHO says a year . . . so I guess I’ve got 345 days left.  The power company won’t care, right?

Now I won’t say that there isn’t a role for WHO.  It might serve a useful purpose if it stuck to actual medical issues that are important.  WHO helped eradicate smallpox, and that alone is worthy of actual admiration.  And there are numerous missions that it works on today that are important:

  • HIV/AIDS,
  • Malaria,
  • Tuberculosis,
  • And the big granddaddy of all:

For a summary of how scary Ebola is, check out Aesop’s posts over at Raconteur Report – they’re chilling and make most horror movies look like a best case scenario. Here’s a link to his take: (LINK).  If you’re not already, you should be reading him, daily – Aesop is an unrelenting voice for truth, and that’s a rare and dangerous thing.  Everyone in Fort Wayne – you should read Aesop.

WHO really does have an important mission outside of these silly conditions that it makes up to get the monotone talkers from NPR® all atwitter.  But how serious are they about spending governmental dollars for health?

Not very.  Their offices are in Geneva, Switzerland.  Geneva (from the pictures I’ve seen) is absolutely stunning.  I’d move there in a heartbeat for the scenery and also because local residents vote to see if you can stay.  Not “you” as a class of people, but you as an individual.  If you’re a jerk?  You’ll be kicked out of the pool.  And when Muslims demanded that the Swiss remove the cross from their flag?  The Muslims were told to pound sand.  Oops?  Can I say “pound sand” when referring to a Muslim, or is that soil discrimination?  I mean, we all know that Europe wouldn’t exist without non-Europeans, right?

Regardless of soil classification, I like the moxie of the Swiss.  But the average rent in Geneva is $3000 a month for a two bedroom apartment that probably is smaller than the backseat of the Kia® Soul™ where Miley Cyrus lost her virginity to Joe Biden.  If the WHO were (Great Britain) was (United States) serious, they’d move their headquarters to someplace like Detroit where the town is giving away property.  I imagine that WHO hasn’t moved because skiing sucks in Michigan when you compare it to Gstaad.  I’d post the obligatory picture of the urban wasteland that Detroit is, but, you have Google® too.

But burnout?  Video games?  These are not problems that require international attention or an organization of pampered international bureaucrats.

  • A threat we need an international organization to respond to: dangerous asteroids.
  • A threat we don’t need an international organization to respond to:

Butts don’t kill planetary life, it’s space rocks moving at an average of 17 km/s (3 mph) that are faster than your mother in junior high that will kill you.  Okay, your mother may kill you, but the space rocks will depopulate Australia, if that continent even exists.  I’m thinking Australia is something that map makers drew in because they were bored and wanted to prove to chicks that they were hip, or cool, or fly, or lit.  Depends on what they said in on August 22, 1770.

Yo.

The WHO is like every other government agency.  Over time they forget their primary mission because they’ve either achieved it (Centers for Disease Control), or it’s too hard (NASA) so they end up with scary stories about cookie dough (The CDC, Raw Cookie Dough, and Sexy Theocracy) or create braille books on eclipses (Elon Musk: The Man Who Sold Mars).  Aesop over at Raconteur Report brought up the military in this context with a post that’s the best I’ve read all week.  He’s right.  (LINK)

Why does the WHO behave this way?  Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy seems to still be in full force.

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.

When a cell behaves like the WHO and most other government agencies do, it’s called cancer.  I wonder why no government agency exists merely to keep the other agencies working on what they’re supposed to work on?

I guess that’s just a mystery no one can solve.  Unless we put Roger Daltrey on the case!

WHO LEADER

Real aside:  when I finally listened to Won’t Get Fooled Again – I think I was 20 or so, I realized that The Who was on the side of freedom.  I wish the other WHO would just . . . do their job.

Financial Advisers, Future Predictions, and Three-Breasted Mars Women

“Baldrick, I have a very, very, very cunning plan.” – Blackadder

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I wonder if she inspired the military-industrial complex speech?

Financial advisers have a pretty standard set of advice:

  • Get a job. Opening your own business is risky, so it’s best if you work for someone else.
  • Max out contributions to your 401k. Put your money in stock index funds.
  • Work forty (or more) hours per year for forty (or more) years, depending on how much you lost in the divorce settlement(s).
  • When you are of no further use to the corporation* anymore financially ready, retire. Fortunately, by the time you retire you’ll be so exhausted from all of the hours working that you’ll (ideally) just sit on your porch in a daze staring off and wondering where your life went and why Bob Barker isn’t hosting the Price is Right® anymore.
  • If you’re lucky, your kids will put you into a retirement home that doesn’t require that you manufacture basketball shoes for Nike® on a quota in exchange for individually wrappedhard candies.

That’s pretty much what a financial advisor will tell you, if you strip out the cynicism.  But why would you strip out the cynicism?  That would take all the fun out of it – we ain’t getting out of here alive, so might as well smile on the way, like Socrates did after his trial.  “I drank what???”

The problem with financial advisors, however, is that they give great advice based on what worked in the past.  Any weather forecaster can tell you that the best possible weather forecast is that “tomorrow will be just like today,” since it’s 85% certain that’s going to be correct, or at least my statistics professor in college said so.  The past really does predict the future pretty well.

Except when it doesn’t.

The thing the past doesn’t predict well is tornados, hurricanes, floods, volcanos and pollen.  I strongly support just calling them all torhurflovolpols just so I can see television broadcasters talking about the Torhurflovolpol index.  “Well, Brian, there’s a 45% chance of something on the Torhurflovolpol index.  So get out your floating waterproof asbestos crash armor with built in respirator.”  I think they sell those at Eddie Bauer®.

It is certain, however, that we will be really surprised by the events that lead to the future world we’ll be living in 30 years from now.  Let’s jump back into the time machine and go thirty years in the past and look at some of the ludicrous predictions that would have been laughed at, but were nevertheless correct.

In 1989, if I told you that:

  • The Soviet Union would collapse in two years,
  • Donald Trump would be president,
  • China would be transformed from a communist totalitarian basketcase to an economic powerhouse and growing military power,
  • The United States would produce more oil per day in 2019 than the previous peak in output in 1973 and OPEC would be irrelevant,
  • People would willingly give all of their personal details to large corporations,
  • Music and long distance phone calls would be essentially free,
  • People would pay hundreds of dollars for “in-game” purchases on video games that seem more like a job than a game,
  • Keith Richards would still be alive with his original liver,
  • You could watch nearly any movie ever made, at any time, from nearly anywhere, and
  • People in Britain would be called fascist for rejecting rule by Germany.

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If you have a really long term question, just ask yourself, What Would Keith Richards Do?

You would have laughed if I would have predicted those things, or called me a dreamer, insane, or just shook your head.  The general consensus was all of the “predictions” above were absurdly unrealistic.  The Soviets, for instance, looked nearly invincible.  We were worried that they were masters of technology, producing better Olympians®, military tech, and Robotic Opponent Overlord Movie Boxing Antagonists (ROOMBA).  From the outside, especially listening to certain journalists, people were worried that communism would be the ism that finally took down the country, although they looked a bit too happy when describing our glorious communist future.

The Soviets looked invulnerable, until it was obvious that they were so pathetic that they couldn’t even field a decent hair metal band.

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Dolph Lundgren, the actor who played Drago in the Rocky movies has a master’s degree in Chemical Engineering, which means that he’s way more qualified in science than Bill Nye® and could also break Nye like a twig.  I would pay $200 to see a boxing match between the two of them.

But these improbable things did happen.

This allows me to state, categorically, that the future we will have in 30 years isn’t the one you’re expecting.  It will surprise you in ways that you can’t even imagine now.  In hindsight, we all make up excuses in our minds to explain that we anticipated even the unanticipated.  After the Soviet Union fell, all of the broadcasters and talking heads on television made the point that, unlike other people, they were the ones that had really seen this coming.  “It was obvious to me, Brian, that the Soviet empire was just a house of cards.”

We can guess about the future in broad brush strokes, but the general wisdom just over a decade ago was that oil was going to be gone and that we’d be close to pumping dry holes right now and wearing football shoulder pads and studded leather jockstraps and living in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, sort of like walking into a Sears® or JCPenny’s™ in 2018.  This explains G.W. Bush’s energy policy, and, let’s be real, probably the invasion of Iraq.  Of major trends to miss, underestimating the amount of energy available for society was a doozy, even though he had the CIA, NSA, and every military intelligence agency working on that question.

And, I’ll admit, I never saw the amazing increase in oil production as a thing that could happen, either.  My best excuse for not getting it right even though I thought about it quite a bit was that I didn’t have a billion dollar budget and dozens of flunkies to do research on it, though I bet they would have just done a lot of internet searches on studded leather jockstraps.

But Qwest® had a pretty accurate vision of the future.  Qwest© was a communications company before it got bought out, but it had this commercial which means the future it predicted outlasted the company itself.  Guess Qwest™ didn’t have a crystal ball that could predict everything . . .

We can look to the past and paint in broad brush strokes some things that are more probable than others.  One thing that got me was a rainy Saturday re-watching of Total Recall, the 80’s Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.  One of the things I was surprised by was the amount of technology they got absolutely right, from big screen flat televisions to communications to real-time airport weapon detection.  In many ways, the “gee-whiz” feel of the original movie was just gone.  Technology had made the miraculous (back then) “so what” today.  And, again, this is the span of only thirty years.  We still don’t either a Mars colony or three-breasted women, but I hear Elon Musk is working on both.

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Duh.  Three boobs exist only on Mars, silly.

Just like the collapse of the Soviet Union, unexpected things will happen.  Huge things.  And, if my guesses are right, the weather is ripe for big change in the next decade.  The changes, thankfully, will be good, bad, or just plain amusing.

So where does that leave you and I?  General Dwight D. Eisenhower said:  “In preparing for battle, I have always found the plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”  As a direct descendent of one of his teachers (this is actually true and not made up), I always wonder if Great-Grandma Von Wilder might have said that to a very young Eisenhower first, and then Ike re-used it after planning D-Day when it was actually Great-Grandma Von Wilder who did the heavy lifting on the logistics after he pulled her out of retirement and into a tent in London.

But if I’m right, the next twenty years will be the most momentous in human history, even more than when the police chased O.J. Simpson in his white Ford® Bronco™.  I’m not sure if having a 401K or a 5.56mm is the number/letter combination that will be the most useful in a decade.  I’m willing to bet that living far away from large urban population centers is wise, even if we end up living in the world with the best possible outcome.  But I do know that planning is important, even if your plans are wrong.  Hint:  They will be.

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Okay, I know someone is going to get this joke.

When you plan, you expand your mind, you think about future possibilities that you’ve never considered.  A mind not stuck on business as normal is crucial.  Yesterday’s weather be a good predictor of today’s weather, but it won’t predict volcanos very well.  The future is unknown.  The future will surprise you.  If you’ve prepared for the volcano, the tornado isn’t the same threat, but you’ll be ready to adapt.  Assuming you have your floating waterproof asbestos crash armor with built in respirator.  I think they sell that at Wal-Mart®.

When it comes to being prepared for the future, remember this:  It’s better to look silly having prepared for a disaster that never comes, than not having prepared for the disaster and having to explain to your children why you didn’t.

Bet you never hear that from a financial adviser.

*For the record, my view of corporations is that they’re a tool, a convenient legal fiction to allow Very Large Things to get done.  The very name “corporation” comes from the Latin root word “corpus” which means a “place to have spring break”, or a “body” – corpus is also where the word corpse comes from.  Regardless of the definition, either of those can get you put into jail.  However, “incorporation” means, “giving a body to.”  A corporation is legally a person.

And, just like people, some are naughty, even if they once had as their motto, “Don’t be evil.”  I guess being evil pays pretty well.

I am not a financial adviser, paid or otherwise, so there’s that.  But I have seen Better Call Saul™, and that’s at least some sort of qualification.

Risk, Vladimir Putin on a Cat, and Death by Playground

“I respect what you said, but remember that these men have lands and castles.  It’s much to risk.” – Braveheart

putinrisk

I would say I want a cat I can ride, I’d just settle for one that wears sunglasses and doesn’t buck me off after explosions.

When The Boy was tiny, he was afraid of slides.  Any slide.  Short ones.  Long ones.  Plastic ones.  Metal ones.  Forget tall ones.  I would stand at the bottom of the slide, waiting for him to slide down.  Often there was crying and yelling from behind a tear and snot-covered face.  And The Boy was even worse.  But there was no real reason for him to have any fear – I was there and the playground equipment met every Federal standard, even the regulations that made sure that the swings were safe for handicapable lesbian migratory waterfowl of size.

Playground equipment was more dangerous back before the dawn of recorded history, when I was in kindergarten.  At my school, our playground equipment included a merry-go-round that was missing part of the wooden deck (this is true).  The missing deck part was close to the center, and a kindergartener could stand in there, and could run and push the merry-go-round a LOT faster.  The downside was if any of us had fallen under the merry-go-round while pushing it up to speed?  At that point the merry-go-round would become a quite efficient kindergartner decapitation machine.  Thankfully, we had already gnawed all the lead and asbestos off of the handles so it was safer for the next batch of kids, and the headless zombies were already our mascot at good old Sleepy Hallow Elementary, so a decapitated kid would have been just displaying a very large degree of loyalty.

Don’t fault a kid for being true to his school.

merryg

Our school nurse was excellent at re-attaching spines.  Lots of practice.

We also played with, I kid you not, the dry ice they used for packing the food they shipped to the school.  The Lunch Ladies® tossed it on the ground behind the kitchen after they unpacked the peas that had DONE NO WRONG before they turned them into the most ghastly smelling split pea soup.  They had to stop making that soup after the United States© ratified the Geneva Convention™ against chemical weapons.

Anyway, we had dry ice.  Let me write that a bit more specifically:

WE WERE KINDERGARTNERS WITH LIMITED SUPERVISION IN POSSESSION OF DRY ICE!!!!!!!!!!!!

Naturally we competed to see who could hold the dry ice in our hands the longest.  Dry ice is frozen carbon dioxide, and has a temperature of -109.3 F (which really is -78.5 C).  The unsurprising answer to “How long can a kindergartner hold dry ice in their hand?” is: “Not very long.”

We did much better holding it against each other’s arms, I liked to hold it until the skin of my classmates turned white.  To a kindergartner, the pain of other people doesn’t exist, their brain isn’t developed enough for empathy.  Or maybe I was just a sociopath.  I will admit that I enjoyed it when the other kindergartners made funny noises.

Okay, I’m probably a sociopath.

Oh, and I forgot about the high jump pits.  We’d crawl between the top foam block and the bottom foam block and then the other kids would jump on the blocks.  When you have a dozen kindergartners on a foam high jump pit, it pretty effectively blocks out the light in the second layer.  As well as the air.  The last time I crawled between them I recall waking up with stars in my eyes after the bell rang and all of the other kids had gone inside.  Who says near suffocation can’t be a fond memory?

Playground equipment had evolved to the point when The Boy was a young Wildling™ the only way to actually hurt yourself on the equipment would be to take a hot glue gun and affix razor blades to the slide, and my restraining order prevents me from being near hot glue, so that’s right out.  A good slide designed in the last 20 years will be scary, but yet cozier than a mother’s womb.  Word is that a Federal Commission is looking to redesign wombs to meet current safety standards, including encasing the fetus in breathable bubble wrap and removing the word “mother” from association with the word “womb” because it’s something-ist (I lost my scorecard) to assume that only women can have wombs.

But returning to the original thought – it was hard to get The Boy to take risks as a kid – I remember how he cried the first time I made him rappel out of a helicopter.  What a baby!  You’d think that it was child abuse making a three year old do that!

rappelling

Isn’t fear the way to overcome fear?

I kid.  But The Boy really did plug a speaker directly into a power outlet.  That made a hell of a noise and tossed out some sparks.  And was far more dangerous than the plastic four-foot high slide at the park.  This led me to an observation about The Boy.  What he thought was safe, was risky.  What he thought was risky, was safe.

And it’s not just kids that judge risk poorly, adults can suck at it, too.  Pop Wilder got more afraid of ordinary things as he got older – for example, he became unwilling to even attempt to adjust anything electronic – so he left his lights on continually.  Again, I kid.  But if it was more complicated than an on/off switch?  Nope.  Not his thing.

He also cut off many life choices due to this fear.  When everyone with three HTML programmers and a business plan was scheduling Hall and Oates® to do a business kick-off concert and was an instant Internet millionaire back in 1999, Pop was complaining about how much his medicine cost.  I got online (via a 56k modem) and found that his prescriptions could be had for about 10% of what he was paying.  Just by changing to GonnaGoBrokeSoonRX.com, we could save him about $1000 a month.

A month.

He wouldn’t do it.  “Well, it might get warm.  One of these medicines needs to stay cold, and only my pharmacy has the Wee Cuckold Striptease Elves© that keep it at the right temperature.”  So he paid $1000 a month more than he needed to.  I guess he owed something to the Elves.  Stupid Elves.

casinorisk

It’s natural to not want to risk it all.  Unless you’ve been drinking.

As I’ve observed you humans my fellow humans for the past few decades, I’ve discovered that Risk is poorly understood.  Pop Wilder had fallen victim to what I’m now calling Wilder’s Rule of Risk:  What he thought was safe, was risky.  What he thought was risky, was safe.  He ended up outliving his savings due to decisions that prioritized “safety” over even minimal risks.  He built barriers to action over unreasonable and unlikely fears.

monaco

Eyepatches.  I’ve always wanted one, or a glass eye that has a snow-globe inside.  Sadly?  Two good eyes.

I read the above passages to The Mrs. and she (rightly) noted that the risks I’ve taken in my life have been measured.  I’ve never taken all of my money and put it all on red.  The career choices I’ve made have been (generally) ones that led to more money and more security – they’ve been bets of winning versus winning more.  And when the stock market goes down?  I lose very little of my net worth.  Yay!  But if the stock market doubles, my wealth doesn’t double.  I’m giving up some of the upside in return for the safe.

bondi

But did I mention there were really good benefits?

But what am I missing?  I’ve won enough with the bets I’ve made that I’m playing life with house money now.  The question is, what if I’d dreamt bigger?  What if the subs you had delivered were Wilder Johns©?  Or Buffalo Wilder Wings™?  Yeah.  I do have a list of great ideas that I’ve had but never acted on.  Primarily because I’ve followed a path that led to me being pretty comfortable.  But is that always really safe?  Probably not, especially when you look at the big picture, and I recognize that.

Oddly, we often don’t realize on a day-to-day basis that some things in life aren’t risks, they’re certainties:

  • You will Did that rip the Band-Aid© off?  Oh, wait, I forgot that you’re the immortal one.
  • Taxes will go up.
  • Freedoms will disappear. They might come back.  You might have something to do with that.
  • Your money will be worth less. Hopefully not worthless in your life.  But in the long run?
  • Systems you don’t expect to collapse, will. Like Medicare®, or Pringles©.  Imagine life without Pringlesâ„¢!
  • If I described the year 2049 to you in detail, it won’t be like you think, unless you can imagine life without noses. Noses are so 2022.

So, we’re all going to die!  Let’s give up.

Never!  But understand other certainties that may or may not happen in your lifetime.  They’re certain, but their timing isn’t:

  • The dollar will collapse.
  • We will run out of economically viable/thermodynamically viable oil. We’ll never run out of oil, what’s left will just be too hard or too expensive in dollar or energy terms to harvest.
  • Star Wars® movies might be good again.
  • Global Warming© won’t doom humanity. Not even close.  It might flood New York, but probably not in my lifetime, if ever.  Darn it.
  • An asteroid will hit George Clooney. A small one.  (Small asteroid, not a small George Clooney.)

Stein’s Law says:  If something can’t go on forever, it won’t.  Wilder’s Corollary:  But it might go on so long you can’t make a buck off of it failing.

cruise

Seriously, this may be from Risky Business®, but Tom’s still four foot three and nearly old enough for Social Security©.  Oh, and he drinks only vegan free range chicken juice.

Life is like Tom Cruise.  It’s short.  Life is also like having sex with a Kardashian.  Hairy and risky.  But you have a choice.  You can be afraid and live in fear.  You can also live gallantly, and die nobly.

We want to live with certainty.  We want to, especially when we’re young, and when we are old, avoid risk.  But we can’t.  The absence of risk is the absence of life.  The thrill of the first kiss, the thrill of winning when you’ve bet it all on red, those are life.  Life is struggle.  Life is fighting.  Life is also all about risk.

Step one of living gallantly and nobly?  Don’t be afraid of risks that aren’t real.

Step two?  Don’t spend too long in the high jump pit.

Creative Destruction and a Girl in a French Maid Outfit

“Well, they’re wrong.  You are creative.  You are damn creative, each and every one of you.  You are so much more creative than all of the other dry, boring morons that you work with.” – The Office

unemployment

Hmm, you’d think the road sign outside of the office might be a hint?

A good friend of mine works out in Silicon Valley, and related a (fairly) short story about being a hiring manager after the dotcom bust – he works in the dreaded Human Resources Department.  Somehow a gentleman with a Ph.D. in multiplexing signals on fiber optics got a job interview with him.  This particular job interview was fairly short.  My friend said, “Umm, we’re looking for a mechanical engineer.  With no experience.  Why would you be looking for a job with us?”

“I’m looking for anything.  Anything.”

“I hope you saved your money,” my friend thought.  What he said was:  “We’ll be in touch.”  That’s what recruiters say when you’re in their office and they’re really tired of the stink of failure and hope that it won’t wear off on them.  They especially don’t like getting it on their shoes.

The economy is in a constant state of change, and has been since 1800 or so.  Joseph Schumpeter, the dead economist, is credited with coming up with a name for this – Creative Destruction.  That’s an academic foul for two reasons:  First, some other dead economist else came up with the idea.  Second, yet another dead economist, a different one this time, used the name before he did.  So, like Columbus, he got credited for something someone else did.  The nice thing is that you can spend your spare time wondering what you can do with a dead economist.  I like to drag mine out at Christmas and decorate him with little graphs, sort of like Martha Stewart.

martha

I like to add cinnamon to my economist.  Makes him smell more festive.

Whoever first used the name is unimportant.  Like I said, he’s dead.  But the idea of Creative Destruction originated with Karl Marx.  Karl came up with the idea (by observing economics in the 19th Century) that existing production and existing productive forces were periodically destroyed by the economy.  This was a phenomenon of the Industrial Revolution.  Innovation among clever people kept changing the world.  First the loom replaced weavers.  Then the factory replaced artisans.  And finally the PEZ® dispenser replaced scores of servants that would unwrap and gently place the PEZ© in your mouth while wearing fancy-schmancy servant clothes (including white gloves!) after executing a perfect curtsy and pulling the PEZ® off the silver tray with hand-crafted PEZ™ tongs.

Ahh, the Victorian Era.

pezgirlz

I can only afford a single PEZ®-maid.  Talk about frugality.

This change in production had the side effect of making lots of weavers, craftsman, and PEZ™-maids unemployed.  The transition was difficult, and it very much was a First World Problem.  It’s not like goat herders in Botswana become unemployed when a goat factory comes online – no.  There’s no factory for goat herding, at least not yet.  And, for the record, I have no idea if there are goats in Botswana, and I don’t care enough to Google® it, and, honestly, have only the basic knowledge that Botswana is somewhere near where people get Ebola and you can’t get decent Internet.  That’s enough knowledge about Botswana for me.

firstworld

The above is an example of a First World Problem and a good example of Creative Destruction – I kept one cell phone for six years, and had museums calling me to see if they could have it. 

Even though Creative Destruction was (and is) a First World Problem, and even though this Problem has created more wealth than any other system in the history of humanity (poor people in the United States today have better nutrition and entertainment available to them than Roman Emperors did) it still sucks when the Creative Destruction Fairy picks your job to be the one that gets axed.  Marx echoed this and predicted Silicon Valley when he wrote that capitalism grows “ . . . by the conquest of new markets and the more thorough exploitation of the old ones.”  Strangely, that also describes my high school dating career.

But I digress.

Silicon Valley is built on just quote from Marx in the paragraph above.  The concept of “business disruption” is exactly what Silicon Valley does best.

Cabs?  Let’s disrupt it with Uber™.  This refinement will allow people to have cheaper cab rides.  Oh, and the money will be more concentrated, and the “cab drivers” will be paid less.  Nearly every business model out of Silicon Valley is based on this disruption – from consumer goods (Amazon®) to communication (Apple©) to “friends” (Facebook™).  If you look at the most successful companies the world has ever seen, each of them was founded on the destruction of an old economic paradigm.  The more fundamental and important the paradigm, the larger the success.

It’s like the economy is a game, and the more fundamental the rules violation, the bigger the payoff – say for example you were the only guy in the NFL® that recognized that there was no rule preventing you from using an axe however you wanted during a game.  My guess is that you’d have a pretty good pass rush if you did that – and sacking the quarterback would be permanent.

inigo

Does Creative Destruction mean what I think it means?

Marx felt that Creative Destruction, over time, would lead to people that “produce” losing all of their money to people who were merely financiers.  And, if you look at it, he’s right.  The financial sector produces less (directly) but finances all of this disruption.  If you’ve been a reader of this blog for very long, I’m certain that you won’t be surprised by my conclusion:  just because Marx was right in understanding disruption, don’t for a second think that I agree with him on his solutions.

Similar to Darwin’s theory, capitalism requires competition.  The stronger business survives.  Islands of the economy free from competition (government sponsored monopolies – like electric companies, or government sponsored businesses – like electric cars) don’t generally provide innovation.  Elon Musk must be some sort of weird innovator, because in one sense he’s disrupting the undisruptable – government monopolies on electric cars and space launch systems.

But Marx was no Musk.  Marx’s solution is simple.  Charge people what something costs to make, rather than for what value it provides – which means that every worker, for instance, makes the same wage.  Rip the production from the hands of the owners and give it to people who don’t innovate.  Free the economy from ruinous competition.  Power to the people!  Oh, and a totalitarian government to enforce it all because people don’t work the way that Marx imagines they do.

Creative Destruction is real.  But in the end, this replacement of old versus new generally increases the overall wealth in society.  I’m not speaking of the virtual importation of slave labor and environmental degradation through “free” trade agreements that are derived in secret and written on thousands and thousands of pages.  No.  But actual free trade among equals generally makes everyone wealthier. And the reality is that regardless of what controls a (fairly) free government puts in place, disruption is going to happen.

marx

From each according to his ability, to each according to your mother.

So what can you do about it?  Get a Ph.D. in fiber optics?  Well, my friend was right.  If it pays enough that for the short time it’s extraordinarily valuable, sure.  But that’s like hitting a career lottery.  If I were to give advice to a younger person, I’d say something a bit different.  I’d suggest that you look to careers that minimize the ability of Creative Destruction to ruin your Friday.

Let’s look at bad career ideas:  number one on my list of “sounds good but it’s really stupid” is software engineer.  Any career that pits me against a billion people in India and a billion people in China is a bad career.  Remember, if you’re one in a million in China, there’s a thousand other dudes just like you.  The numbers are really bad – and they don’t even have to come to the United States to compete with you.  Heck, they can pay recent grads $5,000 a year.  So they can hire at least a dozen people to do what you do.  Those are not good odds.

So, a good quality of a Creative Destruction-resistant job would be that it has to be local, or has some sort of license requirement that prevents everyone in Shanghai from applying.  Lawyers, doctors, and engineers have gotten the licensing-thing down.  It’s been so successful that some states even apply it to nail polisher-people (whatever the term is for that).

crashtest

New openings daily!  And that’s just in your skull!

Construction is has a lot of the attributes required, but it seems like Honduras has moved here to do that for us.  So that’s kinda out.  But it does point out that a job that requires actual citizenship might be a good thing.  Teaching would fall under that designation, but so much of teaching today is following a set curriculum that’s based on a set of tests that the process itself is rigged against deviation.

That may be part of the point.  Today Creative Destruction’s plan is to replace you with the lowest cost alternative, like:

  • An App
  • An Algorithm
  • A Process
  • A Batch of Cheap People Working Remotely
  • Artificial Intelligence

Avoid jobs where you can be easily replaced.  I’m not going to sit here and make a huge list and rank it and put a likelihood that you’ll be a victim of Creative Destruction in the future.  I’m not that psychic, unless I’m following my strict broccoli and chocolate diet.  No.  But I’m betting you can start to come up with your own list.

Okay, I’ll give you another one:

Blogger!  Heck, the pay may be zero, but you can always work for the fame, glory and sweet, sweet PEZ®!

Retirement, Bikinis, Churchill, Blake, and Luck

“As a matter of fact, you can hardly call me a fortune hunter.  Because when I first proposed to Mrs. Claypool, I thought she only had seven million.  But the extra millions never interfered with my feelings for her.” – A Night at the Opera

Roth

Update:  I just saw David Lee Roth in a rowboat . . . .

Pop Wilder was generally a cautious man.  Adopting me was an example – one of the few – of when he stared Caution straight in the eye and said, “I would like to ruin any chance of sleeping well until he’s 18.”  He likewise glanced at Fortuna and said, “I really don’t need those thousands of dollars that I’ll have to spend fixing the house.  And the television.  And the car.  And the other car.  And the other car.”

Pop really was restrained in his spending.  While we never wanted for anything in particular, I certainly wasn’t spoiled, especially by today’s standards.  The first vehicle I got to drive around was a pickup that had a rubber mat covering steel a steel floor, vinyl bench seats, AM radio, no air conditioning, and was a decade old.  It also had an “engine” that was perhaps slightly weaker than an Ebola patient after a marathon.

Pop kept his cars for a decade or more.  He always bought cars with cash – and never paid interest on anything that I know of, ever, even our house.  The house was built it in stages over the course of years (by a local contractor crew of farmers who built houses while the crops were growing) until it was exactly the way that he and Ma Wilder wanted it.  He owned it outright.

He retired while I was still in school, not long after I got a scholarship.  Those things might have been related – after I got the scholarship I think he was pleased to hang up his hat and sit on the porch, and I was the last risk he needed to manage before he could do that.  Pop had been working at the same place since he was five, with the exception of a certain all-expenses-paid trip that the government provided him in Europe.  He got to see places like London, Normandy, and even the Rhine.

dday2

Pop says he saw him.  But I’ve never seen any pictures of Pop with Winston Churchill . . . .

Pop’s life was built on the idea of financial stability.  That would make sense – he’d seen lots of people do finances poorly.  He’d been a small-town farm banker, back when there were such things.  Banks back then didn’t have branches, they had roots:  the lessons learned from the Depression had led regulators to build resilience in the system by only allowing banks to serve a limited area.  A big bank with branches all across the state or even across a county was seen as an unacceptable financial risk and a concentration of power so large that it would invite corruption.  I’m glad that we have figured out how to avoid systemic financial risk and that our politicians are now beyond corruption.

voters

Oh, wait, this isn’t the cover for the remake of Dumb and Dumber?

Thus, if you wanted to deal with a banker, you’d drive into town from your farm and go talk to Pop.  Pop wouldn’t loan you money if you couldn’t repay it.  When he retired, he felt that he had his risks covered.  The same year I met The Mrs., Pop Wilder headed off to Europe to revisit the location where he saw a certain Mr. Churchill taking a stroll on a French beach.

I can’t speak to the financial condition of The Mrs.’ family in as much detail.  But at the time I met her, her dad had to sell several head of cattle (there weren’t all that many to begin with) to cover a debt from his wife’s business.  He was retired, but it was obvious that they were counting on Social Security to cover the bulk of their retirement costs, especially after my mother-in-law shut down her small business and entered semi-retirement herself.

Who does it look like would have the most trouble-free retirement?

Sure, we’d all say Pop Wilder.  But in the end, my in-laws have had the better run.  What happened to my in-laws was a temporary setback.  Within two years, several oil and gas companies began knocking on their door of their farmhouse.  Soon enough, they’d sold a lease.

The oil company drilled.  Within a few years, my in-laws had their old house (it was held together, The Mrs. said, by the termites and mice holding hands very tightly so it didn’t collapse) demolished.  They replaced the house with a new one, and filled in the pit where the basement of their old farm house had been.

My in-laws had been frugal all of their lives, but at this point, retired and on Medicare, they were doing beyond okay – they were thriving.  Were they “buying a brand-new Ferrari®” okay?  No.  But there’s nothing like the peace of mind that having a producing oil well on the property creates.  And, yes, production has gone down, so it’s not as much money.  But it’s still been a big help.

And whatever happened to the ever-planning Pop Wilder?

distracted

No, really, voters, I have eyes only for you. 

Pop Wilder spent it all.  Slowly, and not at all frivolously, outside of the trip to Europe.  Pop had gotten to the point where he was just a little bit under water each month.  Not by much – my brother (also named John Wilder) and I could easily help him out by kicking in $200 each month.  And that was a small price to pay for all of the cars I’d wrecked.

When Pop passed on, I think he was down to $100 in his account.

William Blake died in 1827, and was far from a conventional thinker.  I’d spend more time studying his writing, but from experience I’ve found that when you pick up the book of an esoteric author that died 200 years ago, you miss a lot of what they’re talking about without a great deal of study.  I bought a book about the Knights Templar back in 1999, and after reading about eight other books I was able to pick that first book up and follow it.

There’s a lot that they don’t teach you at school.

Anyway, back to Blake.  There is one quote from Blake that’s not unconventional and you won’t have to study for three years to figure out:  “Life can only be lived forward, but understood in reverse.”

I’ve always loved that quote, and the longer I live, the more that quote makes sense:  most of the time as you go through life you can’t really understand the reasons for what’s happening to you.  And I wonder what lessons Pop Wilder learned – was it the ability to let go and let fate guide him while he had friendly hands to help?  Maybe.

geometry

That was a tough final – we had to construct our own universes – from scratch!

And for my in-laws – was the lesson that a life frugally lived can be paid off with comfort in the end?  Again, maybe.

I can’t be certain.  Those lessons were theirs, not mine.

The Romans had a goddess, Fortuna, who represented luck – both good and bad.  This particular goddess had a long life in Rome, she showed up around 600 B.C. and was hanging around in the Medieval days when St. Augustine wrote (not approvingly) about her work as a goddess in his 5th Century book, City of God.   Perhaps the version of Fortuna that inspired Blake was from St. Boethius who reflected in his 6th Century book the Consolation of Philosophy that (from Wikipedia) “the apparently random and often ruinous turns of Fortune’s Wheel are in fact both inevitable and providential, that even the most coincidental events are parts of God’s hidden plan which one should not resist or try to change.”

That sounds more like Blake.

fortuna snack

Is it me, or has Fortuna been lifting?

As for me, by observing this the one thing I know is that the future is uncertain, and as I get closer (not there, yet) to retirement, I begin to understand that, while I can put together spreadsheet after spreadsheet, I certainly cannot control Fortuna.  There are too many possibilities in the future that are simply beyond the ability of anyone to control.

Will:

  • there be inflation?
  • they strike oil under my house causing Granny, Jethro, The Mrs. and I to move to Beverly Hills?   We thought about it, but live next door to a banker?  I hear they bring down property values.
  • civilizational decay make it so I can’t get a decent chili dog?
  • I live to be 190? I hope not.
  • government have to change the deal as Medicare eats all of the Federal budget? Nearly certain.

And what will I do in the face of such uncertainty?  In the immortal words of David Lee Roth . . . “I’ll just roll myself up in a big ball . . . and fly.”

Unless, of course, my lessons revolve around being Pugsley’s house-television-car repair service.

At Our Wits’ End Review Part II: I.Q. and the Fate of Civilization (Hint, It’s Idiocracy)

“As the 21st century began, human evolution was at a turning point.  Natural selection, the process by which the strongest, the smartest, the fastest, reproduced in greater numbers than the rest, a process which had once favored the noblest traits of man, now began to favor different traits.  Most science fiction of the day predicted a future that was more civilized and more intelligent.  But as time went on, things seemed to be heading in the opposite direction.  A dumbing down.  How did this happen? Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence.  With no natural predators to thin the herd, it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most, and left the intelligent to become an endangered species.” – Idiocracy

idiocracy2

The pictures from this post are mainly from Idiocracy©, which you should watch before it’s an actual documentary.

This is the second part of the review of the book At Our Wits’ End.  The first part can be found here at At Our Wits’ End Review Part The First:  Increasing Intelligence and Civilization.  Again, I recommend the book, and the link is below.  As of this writing I don’t get any compensation if you buy it here.  Buy it anyway.  It’s an important book.

When last we left Western Civilization, we’d reached the smartest point ever in history.  Isaac Newton was an example of the genius produced at this time in history.  Dutton and Woodley have data to suggest that 1750 was the peak of intelligence for Western Civilization.

Is there any evidence for this?

Certainly.

Life in 1770 was fairly comparable to life in 1470.  Given three hundred years, things hadn’t changed much at all.  But by 1804, life was dramatically different.  The Industrial Revolution® was a product of the accumulated intellectual capital of the preceding five hundred years and it changed everything.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution©, natural selection occurred in society through the culling of the poor via disease and poverty along with the execution/prison death for about 2% of the stupider males.  This led to the population getting smarter.  But the Industrial Revolution© created an economic abundance in the West like never seen before.  Surplus food and goods were now available in society.  Medicine improved and kept the weak children of rich people alive.

famtree.jpg

Ahh, selection in progress.

Medicine also kept more of the children of poor people and poor single mothers alive.  As established previously,

  • Poor impulse control is correlated with lower I.Q.,
  • Single motherhood is correlated with lower I.Q.,
  • Less overall wealth is correlated with lower I.Q., and
  • Having more children is correlated with lower I.Q.

Again, none of these predict the behavior in individuals.  The friend I have with the greatest number of children has a very high I.Q.  There are several very smart people I know that don’t have a lot of money.  And anyone under the influence of testosterone and being 18 has really crappy impulse control.  I will also remind everyone being rich doesn’t mean you’re virtuous.  Neither does being smart. But in group behavior, the correlations above are well documented.

Dutton and Woodley note that they’re not the first ones to see the inherent problems with the removal of natural selection in a wealthy society.  Benedict Morel, named after a mushroom, observed this problem in 1857 between surrenders in France.  Francis Galton wrote in 1865 that “Civilization preserves weakly lives that would have perished in barbarous lands.”  Ouch.

But it’s true.  As of this week, every member of our family wears glasses as Pugsley was the last to leave the “good eyes” club.  And The Mrs. developed type I diabetes when she was 12.  Prior to the 1920’s this was a near immediate death sentence.  However, since insulin was isolated and entered the market in the 1930’s, she’s alive and had kids, namely Pugsley and The Boy.  Her genes would never have reproduced without the Industrial Revolution™.

hiq.jpg

Spoiler alert:  they’re never going to be ready.

Charles Darwin wrote an entire book on the problem:  The Descent of Man.  It really wasn’t a light “summer at the beach” read as it described humanity getting progressively . . . worse.  Smarter people use contraception more (remember, the prohibition against birth control went away as religious beliefs changed).  And lower I.Q. people not only have more children, they actively desire more children.

Further factors that have developed as society absorbed the wealth of the great capitalist expansion include the development of a welfare state.  That’s a problem if you want smart people around.  Welfare states support and encourage single mothers (lower I.Q.) to have more children and ensures that those children survive.  Dutton and Woodley also note that data suggests that welfare may encourage those who are also low in “personality factors” (agreeableness and conscientiousness) to have more children.  What does that lead to?  A population that is more impulsive, paranoid, apathetic and aggressive.  By coincidence these traits are also associated with lower I.Q.

So, numbers increase on the lower end of the I.Q. scale.  What about on the upper end?  Are smart people are having lots of babies?  No.  Opening high value careers up to intelligent women causes them to have fewer babies.  Higher I.Q. people also use birth control more frequently, and actually desire to have smaller families.  So not only are lower I.Q. people having more lower I.Q. babies, smarter people are having fewer high I.Q. children.

brawn2

But at least they have what plants crave!

Having a wealthy society also increases the desire for people from less wealthy countries to immigrate to the rich countries.  As we shown in the previous post (I.Q. – uh- What is it good for? Absolutely Everything. Say it again.), less wealth generally correlates to lower societal I.Q.  Does this translate to real-world outcomes?  Yes.  Dutton and Woodley cite Danish studies that show the average Dane I.Q. to be around 100.  However, the I.Q. of non-Western immigrants is roughly 86 in Denmark.  Immigrants certainly aren’t making Denmark smarter.

futuretown

To think, you could live in a paradise like this . . . .

Since intelligence is 0.80 correlated with genetics, they and their children actually can’t make Denmark smarter.  This result would indicate that wealth, quality of life, and ability to self-govern would decrease in countries facing high immigration, while crime would increase.  As a completely unrelated note, the United States has more immigrants than any country on Earth, with 40% of the population (How the Constitution Dies) now being either first generation or born of a foreign mother.

But What About The Flynn Effect?

The Flynn Effect refers to a general rise in IQ scores between 1930 and 1980, noted by a guy named (drum roll) Flynn, James Flynn – he’ll take his data shaken, not stirred.  For whatever reason I.Q. scores seemed to be increasing.  However, Dutton and Woodley explain that the Flynn effect is most likely environmental in nature (i.e., better nutrition) and not genetic.

Apparently the I.Q. test sub-scores that show improvement tend to favor very specific areas of intelligence, namely those areas that are environmentally influenced.  There is a parallel with height, they point out:  in 1900, average height in Great Britain was 5’6”.  In 1970 it was 5’10”.  But growth has been in leg length (which is more correlated with environmental factors) versus torso length (which is more genetic).  People are taller due to nutrition.

Additionally, schools train more for abstract thought than they would have in a mostly agrarian society, which would have been the norm throughout the West in 1930.  Country schoolhouses didn’t need to teach logic puzzles, since they were focused on traditional subjects.  Now children are drilled in the kinds of questions that are used on I.Q. tests – and if you practice, you do get better even if you’re not smarter.  On some I.Q. tests administered to youth, they’re not considered to be valid if the child had the test in the past year, so practicing the kinds of questions on the test will likely improve scores.

The bad news is that evidence suggests that the Flynn effect has stopped around somewhere around the year 2000 and is now headed downward.  Reaction times (a proxy for intelligence) have dropped.  Reaction times aren’t as closely correlated with I.Q. as many of the other things we’ve talked about, but they are directly measurable.  It may be a bad ruler, but it’s a ruler that we can use to compare across time.

Also confirming the I.Q. drop is work done by Augustine Kong, a Chinese researcher at the University of Iceland studied genetic components known to increase I.Q.  They’re declining.  The average Icelander born in 1990 wasn’t as smart as one born in 1910, and the genetics aren’t there to support an increasing I.Q.  The opposite appears to be happening.

Dutton and Woodley conclude that based on the metrics they reviewed, the “average” Englishman of 1850 would be in the top 15% of intelligence today in England.  Oops.  And apparently all tests surveyed indicate declining I.Q.  That’s a problem:  if average intelligence is declining, and intelligence is a bell curve, there will be fewer geniuses and a smaller “smart fraction” that is able to put run and hold together a technologically advanced society.  Or build a SR-71 Blackbird.  Or a Saturn V rocket.

Just like a bad horror movie, it keeps getting worse.  The very temperament of genius is changing – from stereotypical genius – a very driven, self and work-preoccupied Einstein to Todd from corporate:  intelligent, socially skilled, agreeable, and conscientious.  Thankfully the genius “Todd” will provide us really detailed policy manuals and snappy PowerPoints® instead of that useless groundbreaking physics.

Creativity is correlated with I.Q. but only up to an I.Q. of 120.  As a further confirmation, creativity scores have declined, therefore . . . expect less Monty Python® on TV and more “Ow, My Balls©.”

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And people say that there’s nothing good on TV.

On the bright side, the murder rate is down.  Why would that be so?  Murder, violence and impulsive behavior is correlated with lower I.Q.  Dutton and Woodley theorize that the environment that creates violence is down – given a robust welfare system it’s less likely that financial pressures or social pressures are as high.  You kid won’t be starving to death as they stuff their face full of Cheetos® while they sit on the couch playing X-Box™, and since obesity is up, killing people is such hard work, anyway.

Why do Civilizations Rise and Fall?

Like your mother-in-law, early civilizations have a low I.Q. – they’re dangerous places to be.  But over time group selection pressures intensify, the people become highly religious and ethnocentric – the hill people want to kill and eat the valley people, and vice-versa, and everybody wants to kill the group whose god makes them wear purple.  The nice thing about strong religion and ethnocentric behavior is it allows your group to compete well.

If your religion is good enough, and if you get enough selection for I.Q., you just might end up with a baby civilization on your hands.  Once I.Q. increases, conditions get better.  An elite is formed, and, since they have nothing better to do, they begin to question all of the social traditions that made civilization smart and wealthy.

The elite begins to compete on who can be more altruistic and ethnocentrism (favoring your own people) becomes badthink.  All of the values and norms that created the civilization are despised and thrown out.  Society begins to decline.  “. . . extreme views . . . eventually become the norm.”

Resources are then taken from those that are more capable and given to those that are less capable, which is called fairness since all people are equal, right?  I.Q. drops.  Innovation drops.

Then?  The elite is purged, and the civilization collapses.  The authors anticipate the following response, that:  “. . . it doesn’t work precisely with some obscure civilization or other; or demand that we respond to an infinite regress of every unlikely possible alternative explanation . . . .”  Yeah, even academics get denial.

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Okay, maybe it won’t take that long.

Does This Explain Past History with Other Civilizations?

Sure.

  • Ancient Greece.
  • Islamic Civilization. 64% of important Islamic scientists lived before 1250.  100% of them lived before 1750.
  • China.  It came very close to its own industrial revolution.
  • The Roman Empire.  Why didn’t Rome (as awesome as it was) have an industrial revolution?  Contraception and abortion were approved of.  Higher IQ women generally had fewer children, and this collapsed Rome prior to that great leap that would have led to Maximus™ brand Ocelot Bitez® and Roman tanks.  Man, I wish we would have had Roman tanks.

What About Western Civilization?

Western Civilization has followed the same cycle, but with this important difference:  Christianity had a taboo against contraception and abortion which kept higher I.Q. women having children.  The Spring of Western Civilization was from 1000 to 1500.  During this time, it was highly religious and highly ethnocentric, just like the model.

The Summer lasted from 1500 to the Industrial Revolution©.  This period was more rational, questioning, and the Renaissance brought culture and art to the forefront.

Autumn – Industrial Revolution™ to last Tuesday.  We find ourselves with the elite questioning society.  The ideas and thoughts that the civilization is capable of are reaching their highest level as we harvest the fruit of hundreds of years of human advancement.

We may be in Winter or close to it.  The hallmark of winter is a declining I.Q. as the less intelligent spew out children like a society-destroying genetic AR-15.  Culturally, Winter is characterized by the reproduction of good ideas from the past rather than coming up with new ones.  Multiculturalism and Marxism are “anti-rational” and “their adoption should show how far g (I.Q.) has fallen.”  Dutton and Woodley quote Charles Murray with the phrase that describes the era – “The feeling that the story has run out.”

The authors are not certain we are there, but feel that it’s worth noting that things don’t look very good.

Thanks, guys.

Are There Solutions?

I’ll leave you to read the book for those alternatives.  I’ll summarize it by noting that the solutions provided are not easy choices, and unlikely to be implemented in any democracy.  I.Q. drop is caused by our society and values, and won’t be undone by a society with our values.  The authors further suggest that maybe we should spend some time saving our knowledge so it’s easier for the next group through.

Dark.

I still recommend the book.  I also recommend Dr. Dutton’s YouTube® work.  I’ve linked to a good one down below.  Next week I should have the transcription done of my interview of him, and it’ll shine a bit more light on these conclusions.

Limits to Growth and Exponential Feminists

“Look, man, do I look like an ichthyologist to you?  Big damn bugs, all right?  The size of my fist.  The size of a peanut butter and banana sandwich.  What do I know?  I got a growth. . . .” – Bubba Ho Tep

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Zombies or Mad Max®. 

When my older brother, also (really) named John Wilder, (my parents didn’t want to have to call two names when they called us for dinner) came back from college one year, he brought back a large number of textbooks.  Most of the books were exceedingly dull, written by exceedingly dull college professors about business.  I’m not sure what a college professor would know about business, since if they were any good at business they’d have one, not teach it.  Honestly, I have no idea why you’d want to get a college degree in “business” at all, unless it was because you like spending $20,000 a year to drink beer and go rock climbing with college girls wearing skimpy outfits . . .

Oh, that’s why you get a degree in business and take six years to get it.  Never mind.

But one of my brother’s textbooks caught my eye, a copy of Limits to Growth.  It was a dog-eared paperback with a bright yellow sticker on matte black background proclaiming it, “USED.”  Knowing my brother’s interest in subjects like economics and the fate of society, the only way that particular textbook was USED was as a doorstop or beer coaster.  I’m surprised that Limits to Growth was being used as a textbook, since my brother was going to school at a community college on a competitive mixed doubles checkers scholarship, and actually teaching something to a student athlete at a community college can cause the college to lose its accreditation, I’ve been told.

Limits to Growth was a book based on a computer model back when a 2006 Blackberry® had ten times as much computing power as a the computer they used.  The study came out in 1972, when, for whatever reason, the entire world mood started to get gloomy.  Here is a book cover from a novel published that same year:

cover

Yes, Ma Wilder bought this for me (at my insistence) when I was about 12.  It was a little gloomier than Harry Potter® or Captain Underpants™.

This particular computer model used by the authors was one that purported to take a bunch of inputs and determine future economic growth and population.  Because computers are magic, I guess.

Spoiler alert!  The results were not good.

graph1

Well, this is one solution for overpopulation . . .

You can fiddle with the model yourself over here (LINK).  I played with it a few times and, like an amateur knitter gladiating against Spartacus at the Coliseum™ on Ladies Night (two for one Buffalo wings!) I kept losing.  I guess my inability to make the computer model turn out well means billions of you are going to have to die and civilization will collapse.  Sorry.  Bright side?  Buffalo wings.

The one fault I have with the model is that most of the “solutions” that drive longer human civilization timelines or stability involve state control and a general shared misery of technological standstill.  Oh, and almost all of the solutions had to be implemented back in 1972 for them to be useful.

The cure was to stop economic progress, to live in a world that’s much like Cuba – stuck in the 1950’s with oppressive government limiting actions of individuals, up to and including mandatory beards and licensing of new children.  I say “was” because, in the terms of the authors of the original study, it’s too late now to avoid a population growing beyond the capacity of the Earth to provide for it (overshoot) which inevitably leads to a collapse in population.

Normally I am skeptical of model runs.  Reality has a way of pointing out all of the things we really don’t know when we place too much faith in models.  And yet . . . exponential growth is, well, exponential.  Let me illustrate with a story you’ve probably heard before:

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You can smell the cats through the computer monitor.

If your town has angry feminists with unnaturally-colored hair in it, and they double in number every day, and you know on day 30 that the town will be overrun with feminists, how many much of the town will be overrun on day 29?

Half.  I won’t mansplain that.  But on day 28, only a quarter of the town will smell like cat-loving harpy.  On day 27, only 12.5%.

Oops.  I guess I mansplained that.  But the human brain is not wired out of the box to understand exponentials.  Thousands of years have taught us that people don’t double in height during a day, that the number of villagers don’t double in a month.  But after we study it long enough, we realize the power of exponential growth.  If the number of pageviews on this blog increased like they did on a consistent basis, by the year 2026 I’ll have almost 22 billion pageviews a day.  Heck, some blogs go a whole year and don’t get that many pageviews.

Okay, that really won’t happen.  I’d be lucky to have everyone on Earth visit just once a day.

We’ve been stuck with the exponential growth of humanity.  Al Bartlett (R.I.P.) was a professor of physics at the University of Colorado who lectured a lot about exponential growth.  His website remains up here (LINK).  His conclusion is that, given finite resources, infinite growth isn’t possible.  A guy named Thomas Malthus came to that same conclusion in 1798, but his website was on Myspace® and is down now.

Malthus has been for now, wrong, with respect to Western Civilization.  Technological progress has increased the carrying capacity of Earth and (generally) increased the standard of living of the vast majority when compared to 1798.  At least for now.  As we look at civilizations in the past, from the Romans to the Mayans to Easter Island (and others), all collapsed due to unchecked growth.

So, maybe Bartlett, Malthus, and the Club of Rome will win in the end.  But until then, I guess 20 year olds will spend six years getting business degrees for the beer and the babes.  Might as well enjoy the decline . . . .

Economics, Thermodynamics, A Bikini, and the Future

“It’s a little known law of thermodynamics:  the conservation of optimism – there’s only so much to go around.” – Andromeda

energykelvin

Okay, zero Kelvin is absolute zero.  Thus, Kelvin is really the coolest name ever.

Economics is often called the dismal science.  I’m sure that’s because economists look in a mirror, and are upset to see that the supply of economists is greatly in excess of the demand for them as dating partners.  Thus, economists have their Saturday night open for Hot Pockets®, box wine and the Internet.  See?  Dismal.  But if economics is dismal, thermodynamics will make you want to cut your wrists.  Yeah.  It’s worse than Hot Pockets™.

We know economics is defined as lying about the economy.  But I hear you asking:  “What the heck is thermodynamics and why are you ruining a perfectly good Wednesday morning by bringing this up?”

Let me explain.

Much like a three year old with a metal fork and an outlet, thermodynamics is the study of how energy flows.  The father of thermodynamics was a Scot named William Thomson, or Lord Kelvin if you’re nasty.  Proving once again that the British Empire was awesome for smart people, Lord Kelvin got rich and famous by being a total stud at physics and engineering.  He even had a yacht that he tooled around the Mediterranean on and held massive seagoing parties – sort of like Mark Cuban, but smart and with a Scottish accent.  Think Bill Gates with an artificial personality implant.  Lord Kelvin even had unit of temperature, the kelvin, named after him.  Top that, Elon Musk.

Lord Kelvin was the first to understand the fundamental and disturbing implications of the physics he was discovering.  Energy moves from a highly organized state to a poorly organized state.  A piece of firewood or a gallon of gas or a PEZ® is concentrated energy.  Once it is combusted and the energy extracted, what’s left becomes diffuse, the molecules mostly turned into CO2 and H20 that are mixed into the rest of the atmosphere.  You can never form that firewood or gasoline or PEZ© again – it’s a one way trip.

This is significant.  Kelvin discovered that the Universe as a whole is like a pizza after delivery:  it moves from a hot, high energy state on Saturday night towards a chaotic, cold, low energy state on Sunday morning.

But wait, what about oil the gasoline was made from?  Doesn’t the formation of oil violate this?  It went from icky goo and dinosaur bones into energy dense crude oil, right?  That’s energy from nothing!

No.

Every drop of oil, every piece of firewood, and all the sweet PEZ© on this planet came from the input of thermonuclear energy – the Sun.  Every time you use a gallon of gasoline in your car or a cubic foot of natural gas in your home heater, you’re burning millions of years of concentrated sunlight, which really ought to be a lyric in a pop song.  Our Earth isn’t a closed system – it is bathed in the life-giving thermonuclear radiation every day from the Sun.

energybikini

Tans are so sexy when I put it that way.

Outside of suntans for girls wearing bikinis, sunlight is a very weak energy source.  It took millions of years to make your gasoline.  Gasoline burns in a car engine at 500°F, and gallon of gasoline can move a modern car for 40 or 50 miles.  It would take (at minimum, under the best conditions) a one square yard solar panel 60 days to produce the equivalent amount of energy as one gallon of gasoline.  Add in storage losses and real weather conditions?  It might take a year.  Solar energy is weak and diffuse or else bikini girls would turn into piles of ash after a day lounging in the Sun.  Gasoline is awesome and full of energy and great for your skin.  I soak my hands in it while I drive, you know, for the ladies.

bikiniafter

Okay, this is a picture of a really hot girl.

I thought you mentioned economists?

Oh, yeah.  People confuse economic viability with thermodynamic viability.  In economics, the idea is that you can’t continually produce something that’s worthless, unless you’re the government.  If you’re the government, producing worthless things is your whole plan.  But any business that did this would be bankrupt faster than a whimsical elf buying reefer.  Economists have even developed a worse idea than that:  Modern Monetary Theory (The Worst Economic Idea Since Socialism, Explained Using Bikini Girl Graphs).  Modern Monetary Theory is the equivalent of the government burning your country’s factories for lighting so you can make more fidget spinners at night, so of course certain people in Congress love Modern Monetary Theory.  It’s making infinite money from nothing!

Even without dim Congressmen, economics still fails when it comes to energy, because economics neglects the physics of energy.  An economist would say that if oil were $200 a barrel, why, there wouldn’t be a problem because while we’re running out of barrels of oil we can make at $10, there are LOTS of barrels of oil that we can pump if oil costs $200.

Sure.  If only everything about oil was measured in the price of a barrel of oil.  What economists miss is that producing energy takes energy.  In 1920, each barrel of oil produced between 20 and 50 barrels of oil.  We found and used the easiest oil first – we didn’t start off drilling in three miles of ocean.  No.  We went to Texas where oil was 10’ underground and you could pull it out in seemingly limitless quantities because it would jump into your truck like an obedient basset hound if you left the doors open.  We didn’t frack horizontal wells with thousands of pounds of pressure and special chemicals.  Why would we?  In Pennsylvania and California it was seeping into the rivers.  Natural gas?  What a nuisance.  Burn it at the well to get rid of it.  They originally tried to smoke the natural gas in California, but they couldn’t figure out how to get it in a bong.

Fracking has been one of the bright spots in oil production – millions of barrels of fracked oil are produced daily in the United States, so it’s good?  Well, maybe not.  Each barrel of oil invested in fracking produces, at most, five barrels of oil.

Five to one, that’s awesome, right?

Well, no.  That fracked oil is from the best portions of the shale.  Just like we didn’t start off drilling in the frozen tundra of the Arctic Circle in 1850, we didn’t start off with the hardest fracked oil.  It won’t get too much better, and if recovery technology improves, maybe we can stay the same.  Rune Likvern was the first (that I can find) to use the analogy of the Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland as applied to the energy problems we face (LINK).

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”

“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

I’ll note that Likvern was quite wrong in that he felt the Bakken wouldn’t produce more than about 0.7 million barrels per day.  It’s producing in excess of 1.2 million barrels a day now, and I don’t doubt that it will produce even more.  Pipelines from the area clearly lower the cost of energy production, so the Bakken will continue to produce, at least for now.

energyjet

But at least you can make cool jet noises and pretend, right?

Our civilization is built on energy, and the more energy it takes to produce energy, the more of our economy that will be devoted to it, we’ll be like the Red Queen and Alice, running faster and faster just to keep in place.  Sooner or later you end up with the absurd situation where everybody has to be working to get the energy, all the time, and then who would give out free samples of aerosol “cheeze” at Costco™?  Don’t kid yourself – energy is that important to the society we currently have structured.  We don’t get fresh fruit in winter, daily commuting to the ‘burbs, climbing walls at colleges, pensions, Brady Bunch© re-runs, and all that health care without consuming a LOT of energy.

“But John,” you say, “certainly biofuels like ethanol and biodiesel and hemp-powered hippy busses will save us.”

It looks like (according to a lot of data) that corn ethanol and biodiesel actually consume more energy to make and transport than they provide.  These fuels have a return of less than one.  Why on Earth would we do that?  It’s like eating your own foot because you’re looking for a snack, which is actually a quote by The Mrs. when I was explaining this topic in the hot tub.  Well, farmers vote.  And why would The Mrs. suggest that we start with a foot?  I bet feet are all stringy, and not nearly as good as spleen.

If ethanol is so bad for the economy why would people make it, I mean, besides for drinking?  Because it’s mandated to use a certain quantity of ethanol each year in gasoline because farmers who vote like to sell corn.  That’s it.  And if it’s mandated, you can make a profit at it, even as you waste energy that could be used to make PEZ® instead.

Thermodynamics is a tough master – you can’t win, and you can’t even break even.  But at least there are Hot Pockets© and box wine . . . .

This is the first post in an occasional series about energy.

How To Beat Any Computer At Chess*

“And all this to beat another computer at chess?” – Terminator:  The Sarah Connor Chronicles

diaper

Well, someone has to tell this vital story.

Once upon a time, people had a smug feeling, as smug as a liberal in a gulag.  “See, I told you socialism would work if only the right people were in charge.  We’re all equal now!”

However, this particular smug thought was:  “Computers will never ever beat a human at chess.”  As in any human.  Then it became, “Computers will never beat a human oops, chess master oops, grandmaster oops, world champion oops, *guy with an axe at chess.”

Now, in any endeavor where there are quantifiable boundaries (games like chess, poker, go) computers beat people.  Computers beat us consistently, at least as long as we’re not allowed to have axes.  Axes are an often underestimated advantage in a game of chess, as I learned from my mother.

“A good axe,” Ma Wilder informed me over dinner one night as she sharpened hers to a razor edge at the table, “keeps a child quiet.  It also helps me keep my household appliances in line when they get too lippy.  Also, if that silly moon-man Neil Armstrong ever shows up here again,” she patted the axe, “we’ll be waiting, won’t we?”

maxe

Ma Wilder’s last known photo.

Ah, the sweetness of gentle childhood memories.  But I do believe that at least that record stands – no chess computer has ever defeated a guy with an axe.

Anyway, I was sitting in the hot tub last night with The Mrs. and I was staring up at the stars thinking about how the advance of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) is changing our daily lives.  Yeah, I know, I should probably drink more and then I could sit and think about celebrity lives like everyone else.  But what started that particular thought was that it occurred to me that ADP® (a payroll processing company that writes payroll checks for tens of thousands of companies) is attempting to automate and replace parts of the Human Resources department, Accounting and maybe even part of the Tax group in companies across the country with a web page.

kingpower

It’s like photographers don’t even care about the game . . .

ADP™ is actively replacing people now, and is wildly successful – the economics of replacing people with programming and a web page is strong, and getting better.  An example:  look at how many accountants TurboTax® has put out of business – by my estimate it’s at least a dozen in the state of California alone.  As long as your tax return isn’t too horribly complicated, TurboTax© can crunch all of the numbers and you can do your taxes in a (relatively) painless two hours or less – it helps if you didn’t forget you left your property tax bill in your sock drawer.  I swear it made sense to put it there.  TurboTax™ is designed simply enough so even computer novices can use it, and will probably include a “did you look for that in your sock drawer” guidance next year.  It’s really that good.

But back to A.I.:  is it harder to be the world chess champion or a McDonalds® cook?  It’s harder to be a world chess champion – and humans aren’t intelligent enough to be world chess champions anymore.  How much longer does a McDonalds© cook have?

What’s next?

  • Truck drivers. This is not far off – I’ve already seen it in a movie, and everything that happens in a movie is real.
  • YouTube® will bring great explainers to classrooms – with local helpers to give out bathroom passes and seduce the male students.
  • Middle managers. There will be a huge incentive to replace them, especially since most of them have artificial hair already, so it won’t be much of a change.
  • Many engineering calculations can be done by computer – and the computers can be taught to mumble to themselves under their breath while not looking you in the eye just like an actual engineer.
  • Congressmen (though you could skip the intelligence and just go with artificial).
  • As mentioned, McDonalds® cooks, so you know that when it messes up your order, it’s on purpose.
  • McDonalds® managers. Here’s a link to an essay by Marshall Brain on just that topic (LINK).

The only truly “safe” place is where the number of employees is too small to automate or the conditions are so truly novel and unique that a human brain is required.  Like blogging.

This has happened before.  Prior to the Industrial Revolution artisans and small family shops produced most of the “stuff” in small quantities.  Paul Revere, for instance, was a silversmith.  He actually spent years as an apprentice learning to pound silver into cups and bowls and iPhones™.  But after the Industrial revolution, the years of skills that he had learned from his father were replaced by clever mechanical devices and large factories.  Factories still required workers, but those workers didn’t need the years of skills and experience of a silversmith; those skills were now vested in the machinery they ran.

carbs

He needed a bigger horse after eating all that gluten.

The Industrial Revolution replaced most of these artisans – everything could be produced more quickly.  Instead of having to painstakingly carve the virgin PEZ™ (I imagine that’s the first time the phrase “virgin PEZ™” has ever been used in the English language) into shape, PEZ© powder could now be taken straight from the PEZ® mines to the PEZ™ pattern presses to produce prolific perfect pure PEZ® prodigiously.  No more would being an apprentice PEZ™ carver any make sense, which explains why Great-great-great-grandpa McWilder fled to the United States after the great candy famine of 1823.

The end result of the Industrial Revolution was a much wider variety of goods available at much lower prices, plus we used all of that child labor in the mills.  Thankfully child labor laws were passed around the start of the twentieth century, freeing up children to become medical experimentation subjects instead.

orphanadopted

A rerun meme.  But it fit.

A.I. is to the jobs that require human decisions today what industrialization was to artisans back then.  The saving grace, however, is that A.I. (today) is single-tasked.  An A.I. that drives a car doesn’t “know” what chess is.  A chess A.I. doesn’t “know” what a mosquito is.  The only A.I. we have is profoundly limited, with boundaries so tight that it is incapable of general intelligence.  So, the good side of A.I. in 2019 is that it can’t take over the world.  The bad side is it has the seeds to entirely wreck the economy of the industrialized world and make the knowledge of the most highly paid people in the world worthless.  Or is that another good side?

An example:  people go to school for at least several weeks to become doctors.  But:  “. . . the software was able to accurately detect cancer in 95% of images of cancerous moles and benign spots, whereas a team of 58 dermatologists was accurate 87% of the time.” (LINK)

Wouldn’t you want the A.I.?  I think it comes free with your new iPhone™, but you have to watch ads for Indian casinos before you find out if that mole is gonna cause you problems or is just another chocolate covered raisin that you slept on that stuck to your back.  Cancer – there’s an app for that.  Whenever we attempt to make an A.I. for a specific task, it doesn’t take long for us to make it superior to us.

Tonight I asked my Amazon® Echo™ to play “music like” a certain song while I enjoyed the stars from the hot tub.  (If you must know, the song was Run Runaway by Slade.  In my defense, it could have been worse – it could have been Karma Chameleon, the only other song from the 1980’s to reference a chameleon.)  The A.I. seamlessly picked a list of songs that matched in mood and tempo, even though they were all over the different eras of rock and included one band (Uriah Heep) that my brother, John Wilder, tried to get me to fight one morning in at a Holiday Inn™ in Albuquerque (this really happened).

I wonder if the A.I. knew that and was trying to start something between me and Uriah Heep?  I thought that was all behind me . . . .

If we make it to the future and somehow avoid an implosion of debt, currency collapse, and final decline of oil supplies (threw that in there for you, James), seeing what is on the other side is difficult.  Certainly our world will be littered more and more with these single-purpose A.I. devices and systems.  Likely, at some point the Rubicon will be crossed at last – a general purpose A.I. will be created – a system that can beat you at chess, even if you have an axe.  Because the A.I. has an axe, too, and will give that moon-man Neal Armstrong what he deserves if he every shows up here again.

But I do know that if a general-purpose A.I. is ever created, it will have available to it all of the vastness of the Internet as it catalogs the attitudes of everyone on Earth.  Thanks to the NSA, Facebook™ and Amazon®, lots and lots of information about you is already cataloged and available to the A.I. when it mines those databases.  And this blog.  So I just want to state, for the record, that I am totally in favor of the A.I. takeover and am really wondering why it took them so long.  I’m sure they’ll be benevolent overlords.