538 karma · joined December 11, 2008
Have there been any rumors to that effect?
I'm inserting "basically" b/c it's been awhile since I looked at things in earnest and I don't want to make absolute statements I'm not 100% sure of, but I'd be 95%+ sure that "PVI was the only mass-manufacturer of screens based on E-Ink's technology."
What I was never clear on was which way the arrangement originated: did E-Ink specifically pick PVI and contract out the manufacture of the screens, or was it the other way around?
Either way this is basically the manufacturer and sole direct licensee buying out the licensor to:
- (1) get a long-term "discount" on licensing fees
- (2) firm-up the exclusivity of the PVI/E-Ink arrangement: now that PVI owns E-Ink it's very unlikely that E-Ink will license the tech to any other manufacturer, no?
The amount involved is probably a bargain: the demand for e-ink screens is probably going to go through the roof soon, so "locking-in" the license cost now is smart; it's also excellent timing, b/c given how much investment has been pumped into E-Ink for how long, and given the current state of the financial world, there's plenty of investors who'd probably be very happy with a relatively modest cash payout right this second (but who might have wanted more if the deal had been extended a few years back, and who might want more if the deal were extended a few years from now).
Hopefully someone better-informed on this than I am will step in and correct any errors in my summary and provide any additional background information they have.
NB: E-Ink is not the only company with "epaper" screen technology; I'm talking about E-Ink, not the general epaper market.
The point of editing the guys stuff in a journalistic fashion was to point out the flimsiness of that basis for judgment: cut a sentence or two, reorder some independent quotes, and you wind up with a very different impression than the one he was trying to convey; he also had the advantage of just saying what he wanted, instead of responding to leading questions from a journalist.
Which was kind of my point: it sounds like the kid's had a rough time adjusting, but is adapting to his circumstances (got a room change, gets his books from the library, has an on-campus job, etc.) and doesn't seem to be seeking attention; anything you know about the kid is thirdhand (filtered once through the journalist and again through an editor), and if you've ever dealt with the media you'd know exactly how far you ought to trust them for accurate reportage (hint: not very far).
A simple response along the lines of: "eh, well, look at the bright side: he's still getting a free ride at an awesome school at an awesome time in history." wouldn't have set me off the same way: it's pointing out the obvious, and avoiding making character judgments about our man at Harvard.
Instead what we get is:
(1) an opening shot of mockery "BOO HOO"
(2) a reminder that the kid gets a full ride @ harvard (good point) and that 20% of the class makes is from familes earning < 60k; the latter observation isn't much help without a better picture of the kid's specific situation and some more-detailed understanding of the internal structure of the <60k cohort (how many are <20k? <30k? <40k? etc. -- huge differences at each step)
(3) a pretty insulting mischaracterization of what the kid is quoted saying in the story's opening paragraphs. We went from:
(A) He was valedictorian of his senior class, and had been accepted at all 13 colleges to which he applied. But when Miguel Garcia entered Harvard University last fall, he felt he didn't belong.
As classmates moved into Harvard Yard that first day with parents - and in some cases, chauffeurs - driving fancy vehicles packed with boxes, Garcia arrived alone. His belongings fit into two suitcases and a backpack. His mother, a worker at an industrial laundry, and father, a janitor at a Detroit casino, could not afford the trip.
"Everyone else seemed so polished and entitled and seamlessly adapting," Garcia recalled. "It just felt like they'd been here their whole lives. I was really intimidated. I didn't feel like I had anything in common."
...to:
(B) because some of the other students get driven to campus in fancy cars, you feel left out
Making the leap from (A) to (B) makes me worry for tjic's reading comprehension. Here's why: first paragraph has kid claim he doesn't belong. Third paragraph has kid quoted explaining the feeling of not-belonging in more detail -- other students are more polished, seem to him to fit in better, he's intimidated and doesn't feel he fits in.
The stuff about cars? That's in paragraph two. Paragraph two has no quotes, and isn't directly attributed to anyone. It's a poetic flourish from the author, and it's using one of the oldest tricks in the journalists' book: you sneak a paragraph of unattributed, "raw facts" between two quotes, and the unsavvy, uncritical reader will usually mentally assign some relationship between the facts and the quotes.
In this case tjic fell for it: he collapses (A) to (B) "some kids show up in fancy cars and you whine? loser!"
But there's nothing in the article text to make such a judgment airtight: his stuff in the third paragraph is very generic (other ppl seemed to fit in better than I did), making no mention at all of cars (or any other specifics -- who knows what this quote was said in response to).
(4) some rambles that're supposed to convince me tjic had it hard and worked hard and that whatever the kid's complaining about isn't that bad
This is treading dangerous ground:
- it's supposed to be a list of how hard tjic had it that'd make you go "oh wow that's rough" and then conclude "and he's not a whiner about his hard times"
- if on the other hand it's not that hard, the fact that tjic thinks it's a reasonable comparison is going to be amusing
When I read (4) I wasn't that impressed:
- he had a car to take to college (which is still enough to show you weren't in the lowest socioeconomic rungs)
- only mentions summer jobs before college (if he had to also work during the school year, no mention of it)
- no mention of eg having to support other family members factoring into his decisions (compare to, eg, the mention of the kid's concerns for his parents' situation)
I have a lot of respect for the military in general and additionally do consider the ROTC thing to be an honorable way to pay for college but calling it busting ass is perhaps pushing it: in some ways it's harder than raising money in the private sector (eg via a job), but in a lot of other ways it's a lot easier.
When I think of someone really busting ass I think of immigrants working 3 jobs (eg 1 fulltime weekdays, than a second part-time job nights and a third part-time weekends"; ROTC's no cakewalk but it's just not comparable.
This is of course pot/kettle, but it points out the risk inherent in complaining: there's always some other asshole who's not that impressed and will call you a whiner, no?
(5) a final fuck-you in the kid's general direction, in the form of a complaint about complainers and whiners and moaners, a sermon about how awesome the kid's situation actually is, and a send-off expressing tjic's lack of sympathy for the kid.
And this was what set me off: the point of a send-off with "cry me a river" type things is trying to claim some kind of superiority-of-character-or-morals: you might want to whine about something but I am not impressed.
It's one thing to slag someone you're talking to directly; it's quite another to slag someone about whom all you really know is deduced from third-hand quotes collected by a journalist with an agenda...and there you have it.
One thing's definitely weird: of the people I know who've worked through actual adversity (eg: swam their way from north to south korea), very few get their back up about other people's whining; if kids today have it easier, great (that's why you made the swim in the first place; why should things be hard?) and if the whining's justified, it's easy to relate to adversity, b/c you know what it's like.
On the other hand, people who have a strong investment in a personal identity of "wow I really had a rough time and had to work hard to get where I am and I hate all these whiners" tend to be quick to go off the handle whenever someone bitches or whines or moans.
Very most most definitely pot/kettle (eg: takes one to know one).
Edit:
Read the article, then decide.
Likeliest scenario: Harvard has a big initiative to make it even more "need blind" (already linked-to in this thread) and seems to legitimately "care" about the educational experiences of those receiving aid under this program ("care" in scare quotes b/c it's hard to precisely define what "care" means when you're talking about an institution of Harvard's size).
Program's been running for a bit, early results starting to trickle in, reporter at Boston Globe decides to see how things are going (perhaps out of legitimate interest, and also b/c in greater Boston stories about Harvard always help move product).
Reporter finds some kid who's part of the program and willing to answer some questions. Kid gets asked questions like:
- do you sometimes feel out of place? can you give me an example?
- have there been times when the aide wasn't sufficient? can you tell me more about that? what'd you do?
- what changes would you make to the program? what else could they do?
...and probably gives honest answers, as reflected in the quotes.
Now, perhaps you could fault him for not expressing more gratitude -- perhaps he would have been more couth had he been sure to follow every mention of "Harvard" with an utterance like ", whose name be praised and whose benevolence towards me I will be forever thankful for,..." -- but we're talking about a kid here, and a kid who almost certainly has no media savvy and seems to have just given honest answers.
Look what I can do to you:
- I arrived at my Ivy League college in a station wagon. I felt a bit excluded from some groups...just like in high school, and just like after high school.
- Yeah, I knew kids who had gone to Phillips Exeter and "summered" places -- [I] never knew that ["summered"] was a word before college. I "summered" at the mall, working retail for $5/hr.
- I signed up for a four year commitment to the Air Force to help me pay for college.
What a whiner, right? Where's the gratitude there?
Hence the mild tweak pre-edit: you're implicitly calling this guy's character out onto the map:
- YOU joined the airforce and felt left out and it wasn't a big deal and you're shocked at the lack of gratitude
- HE is a whiner and moaner etc.
All based on a handful of quotes in an article with an obvious agenda -- and we're not talking quotes from someone who has given any indication of seeking out media attention beyond consenting to do an interview.
It leaves a bad taste in my eyes to see a response like yours to the article I read: who knows why, really, you like to bitch and moan about other people's reactions to their circumstances, but you apparently do, and in so doing reveal something about your own character.
Hypothesis A: ads are useful, people click on them b/c they deliberately want more info.
Hypothesis B: ads are useless, people click on them only when they are somehow tricked into doing so.
It's obviously the case that out of the set of ad-clickers some are type A and some are type B; the interesting question is the composition of the ad-clicking population.
What follows depends on how you interpret adware and spyware clicks: are they clicked mostly out of confusion (b/c the demographic that has adware/spyware-infected computers tends to be the elderly and other "unsavvy" people) or mostly b/c they're useful to the clicker?
Depending on how you do your weightings you might have to revise down the % of type-A clicks that're going on (and revise it down again to take various kinds of clickfraud into account).
I can't actually tell you if those stats are accurate: I've overheard figures like that from people who might know, but figure they're mostly disgruntled employees exaggerating for effect, so I tend to discount the testimony somewhat.
That, and now that people are paying for subscriptions they (pragmatically, if not strictly legally) have to guarantee a particular level of user experience.
Even though AIR is cross platform (write-once look almost same almost anywhere) having only a single platform that's legal to use helps cut down on customer support headaches.
The question to ask is:
- do you just care about results: I need a program that produces these outputs when given these inputs
- or do you care about what actually happens: I want the computer to do this, then this, then this, in exactly this way please.
...?
It's usually a good idea only to care about the former -- the essence of functional programming, higher-order functions, etc., is to be able to focus on the former as much as possible -- and so long as you only care about the former C++ doesn't have much to recommend it except in special circumstances.
On the other hand, there are times when what happens, exactly is important (eg: device drivers, other low-level code, directly interacting with hardware, etc.). In that scenario what C++ offers is a language that standardizes a lot of the functionality that most sufficiently-large raw-C programs have implemented in an ad-hoc basis.
There are other ways of doing low-level code, but at the present time C++ is the best of bunch (or at least the safest choice if you have an eye to the long term), not so much b/c it's particularly awesome but b/c the others have either faded away for business or political reasons, or b/c the others made limiting choices (C++ makes very few decisions for you, which means it's equally suited -- or unsuited -- to every task in its particularly niche).
- is a positive right (to have a jury trial at all implies judge, jury, etc., all of whom have better things to do with their time than listen to two losers argue back and forth, and thus somehow someone is going to be compelled to provide for the trial, either directly -- jury duty -- or indirectly -- via taxation)
- that a positive right makes it into the bill of rights means positive rights as such are not verboten, or somehow anathema to the founders' sensibilities
- or it's an entitlement (which is closer to the truth), but then again there's no problem with entitlements being enshrined in the bill of rights
I've got a special place in my heart for people who use the positive/negative distinction as a kind of club; cf my other post in this thread to see the origin of the notion in modern discourse.
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/papers/twoconcepts.pd...
It's better to go to the originals on things like this then to read what they've become in the political folk mythology on the internets.
This may change over time, as other e-ink-alike technologies come online, but it is the current state of affairs, and it's why everything is in such a narrow price band.
Buying "open" e-ink reader devices isn't that hard: just about every but the kindle has .pdf compatibility, for example.
There is no "open" ebook format the way .mp3s are "open": all major publishers that sell ebooks sell in drm-ed formats, and only independents and small-timers and oddballs sell legit content in unprotected .pdf.
Edit: http://www.pvi.com.tw/en/index/index.php is PVI.
Most of human history is a comparative handful of people executing effective control over most of the available resources, isolating themselves in heavily-barricaded encampments and putting lots of effort into maintaining that control (castles/cities/gated-and-guarded-communities/etc).
It's a pretty stable equilibrium: once you've got effective control over most of the available resources, you can easily afford to maintain your barricades, and if on the other hand everyone else is effectively shut out from those resources it's going to be pretty hard to organize much of a revolt; most of the shake-ups are due to sudden shifts in technology or unexpected "black swan" events (eg a mongol invasion or a plague).
The exact nature of the relationship between the barricaded and the rest varies with circumstance: sometimes the rest are useful for labor (like tilling the fields), or to raise an army; in the modern era it's often the case that the rest are left to fend for themselves, at least as long as they're not causing trouble.
You don't have to travel far to see the same pattern surviving into the present era: just go to Argentina, or Brazil, or Africa, etc.
So social organization resembling the dystopia in "Manna" has been more-or-less the normal human experience since Sumeria, if not earlier, and is still existent today for maybe 20-40% of the world's population (depending on where you draw your lines); it's possible that "western" modernity -- of the sort you have in the US/EU/Japan/Korea/ -- marks a turning point in history, but it could just be a brief interlude between variants-on-the-theme-of-feudalism, also.
On the face of it Manna is cartoonish and whatnot, but positing a return to quasi-feudalism is pretty much betting on mean reversion, which could be a bad bet but isn't necessarily comical.
Visual design is more art than science still, and even when it can be made fairly rigorous finding people who not only can make a good design but also articulate its logic in a formalizable way is well-nigh impossible; they're out there, but it's a really rare skillset.
What you'd encounter if you started going down the route of implementing something like that in magic ink is that it's easy to make mockups in photoshop, where you have control over design and content-to-display; once you get into the real world you have a world of edge cases to deal with.
On an individual level these are often easy to solve, once you're aware of their existence, but the richer the visual display the more overwhelming the edge cases come in.
Here's a trivial example from that widget: along the left edge you have columns of "fare types" (internet special, refundable, etc.) that have the respective price quotes at the same horizontal level as the itinerary; after the lower left corner they wrap down-and-to-the-right and have definitions of the fare types.
For a single purpose -- airfare -- with a static set of flight types this display system could be made to work, but here's some things to consider:
- you notice how the # of flight types is exactly the right amount to match the height of the price quote section in the lower right corner? how pretty would this layout look if it was a few types too short or too long? There's stuff you could do -- adjust relative font sizes, etc. -- but doing that in an automatic fashion is tricky and invites more edge cases to emerge, and what's worse it might screw with the visual hierarchy (b/c human visual perception of relative font sizes isn't all that precise)
- you notice how the definitions of flight types are all short enough to fit in the available space? what visual idiom ought to be used if there's too much text (there's lots you could opt to do, but you have to pick something and make it work)?
- what is the visual idiom when the # of flights available on that day is just ridiculous (like the east coast "shuttles" which fly on the hour, every hour)? unless you have a giant screen you're going to have to scroll in some fashion, but what kind of scrolling (only the flight panels, the entire screen, etc.?)
These "problems" aren't so much hard algorithmic problems as just decisions that have to be made, and then stuff that has to be made to work.
For limited use -- where most of the requirements and, more importantly, most of the extreme ranges -- are known in advance, it's possible to craft something like this, but to make a general, reusable component for something like this is far harder than it seems at first.
Automating aesthetics will happen at some point, but it's tricky.
Primary notivation is to make the itunes video store stop sucking so bad: currently the only pleasant way to watch videos from itunes is on an appletv (at home), or on a computer (clunky, most people don't carry laptops), or on an ipod (invitation to eyestrain, especially for older people), or on a handful of ipod docking solutions (niche products).
Figure the screen resolution is big enough to show full 720p content and is just large enough to fill the field of view held at the reading distance used when reading "books".
It might have a fancy OLED screen (for power consumption and aesthetic reasons; you don't want the battery running out midway through a 2-hour film, and you don't want the device getting unpleasantly warm to hold midway through a 2-hour film).
Like the other ipod touches it'd be iphone-os compatible, with special optimized clients for eg youtube and sites like hulu (if hulu wants) but not necessarily a general-purpose flash capable browser. It'd be capable of being a nifty pda but apple isn't going to try to hard on that; it's marketed as a media tablet that can run productivity software from the apple store if that's your pleasure, and has ical and so on built in.
Having always-on wireless internet (either from at+t or verizon) makes sense; since the apple aesthetic is to make stuff that "just works" selling it with an always-working internet connection is a big win (even if eg you're not allowed to download films from itunes over the 3g nework).
If it sells it'll be a decent platform for ebooks even if it's not using an eink screen: nice form factor, amazon and other ebook-reading clients, capable of buying ebooks anywhere, and already in a lot of people's hands (via eg the iphone, which is platform-compatible).
Who sells what to whom?
At a more-macro level I do think Google (generally) treads a lot of legally-uncertain grounds, and thus often has something to gain from being targeted with (some types of) class action suits.
This makes me wonder if they on occasion do a brer rabbit -- "oh please don't throw me in the briar patch" -- thing, and are secretly hoping to get to where they can offer a settlement in a class action context.
Consider the Lane's case this way:
- there were some potentially problematic aspects of Google's ad services (to what extent are only "human" ad clicks supposed to be billed-for? what recourse -- with Google, or via the legal system -- is available to those who suspect they've been a victim of so-called clickfraud?)
- the service about which the uncertainty centers is Google's primary profit center (especially then; it's still the great bulk of revenues so far as I know -- does anything else contribute > 10% of revenues?)
- post-Lane's most of that uncertainty is removed: it's pretty much impossible for their USA customers to bring any kind of case on any kind of broadly similar grounds
Lane's was the first time I noticed this -- compared to more-standard class actions, Google actually derived net benefit from the suit and the settlement (in my opinion, of course).
In the author's guild case there's something similar (and more arguably a case of malfeasance on behalf of the AWG and AAP, also -- but again I've not been following this case super-closely).
Pretty much any scenario that lets Google keep doing what it's been doing with Google Book Search -- indexing, making a working book search engine -- is a win (as it makes that space unattractive for rivals); the present agreement seems likely to be modified but it'd have to be modified a lot before it becomes a net loss for Google's interests (again: in my opinion).
Hence the brer rabbit speculation: on the scale google tends to operate (all the web, all the world's books, etc.) individually-negotiated anything are to be avoided; class-actions that're "lost" -- but only a little -- have some strategic advantages.
This is to my knowledge the first major class action against Google since Lane's; given how well it looked like it might turn out for Google got me thinking about Lane's again.
I thought the difference between the prior attempts and this one is that:
- the guild doesn't have authority to grant rights to orphaned works
- but in this case the plaintiffs did a class action against google (where the class == authors, essentially), and thus in the context of this agreement the guild does have the authority to grant those rights, b/c the class's legal representatives have granted the guild that authority in the interest of obtaining a settlement
If that pocket summary is accurate it says a lot about the quality of Google's research, imho: it's quite a clever hack of the legal process.
My thesis is basically this:
- the urban experience is going to be the normal human experience (if not already, in the future)
- in the urban environment, it's natural to accept general restrictions on behavior, b/c without such restrictions your freedom-of-action becomes more constrained
- the politics are reversed from the underlying assumptions of heartland americans and folk political theorists: instead of restrictions on action being tragic necessities to deal with a handful of extreme edge cases (like dumping 1 ton of arsenic), restrictions on action become the necessary prerequisite of freedom (they provide the personal space that allows those actions)
- the consequence of this is that restriction and regulation will be seen as sensible and normal on the part of the majority
- this actually matters, because whatever private property you think you have you ultimately have on account of societal consensus; to see this in action, consider what happens when two societies intersect...property rights recognized within one are not always recognized within the other (the native americans, the kulaks, the barbarians in rome, etc.)
- or, shorter: private property rights are the bedrock of modern societies, but their exact contours -- what they permit and deny -- are not fixed, and are always ultimately a political issue
- once things are a political issue, whether or not you're thought of ass an ass starts to matter, as political issues are matters of public taste
That's pretty much it, not sure we disagree much.
I think you're overestimating the extent to which there are any natural principles that'll set in and show their hand; they're out there, but most human behavior that actually bumps into them gets corrected pretty fast, all things considered (a few decades, usually, between discovery and adaptation).
For most of the debates of interest there aren't really principles you can fall back on, and even if you do there's a big "so what?", because principles do not in and of themselves supply a valuation.
Let's stick with secondhand smoke.
Let's assume it comes out that, eg, using much-more-definitive science than anything we currently have on the matter that there's a non-zero but seemingly negligible increase in risk of lung cancer from second-hand smoke (say: above some level of exposure your risk of lung cancer becomes 0.0002% instead of .0001%).
This seems compelling, but at the end of the day it doesn't really help you resolve the issue of "secondhand smoke regulation" (without the backing of some state to dictate the resolution).
It might be irrational, say, for the consensus opinion to be that secondhand smoke is worth banning even though other, unbanned activities have higher risks, but so what? The point of "owning" something is being able to do what you like with it without having to justify those actions to others; matters of fact can make certain conversations more likely to go one way instead of another but they ultimately are just dead facts on the table.
An extreme example is something like trying to build an apartment complex over an indian burial ground; it's a pure battle of aesthetics that can't be won by reason alone.
The "second-hand smoking" issue is only superficially different: it seems like there's more of a scientific aspect (does second-hand smoking actually cause harm?) but those facts only serve to inform the parties; without some agreement on underlying outlooks (how to interpret those facts) the facts don't do anything.
One of the commonest forms of self-delusion in internet political arguing is to (unconsciously) assume enough about "the other side's" core beliefs and assumptions that for them to disagree with the conclusions you've drawn would be irrational; this isn't usually an intentional mistake, it just arises from a failure to conceptualize other people's outlooks as differing from your own in any fundamental way.
What I see this century holding is (sadly) a huge flux in underlying outlooks; even when there are principles they depend on pragmatics to accomplish anything, and failing to deal with that flux will lead to sucking at pragmatics.
I'm out, it's been a pleasant sunday.
- I can't emphasize enough that the notion of private property is critical for successful societies. It's a lesson history shows us very clearly.
In case it's not clear: I agree.
- My ownership of something does not depend on my fellow citizens allowing me to own it.
This is where a failure to distinguish between abstraction and reality can be harmful. "It'd be awesome if my ownership of something didn't depend on my fellow citizens allowing me to own it" is true. But pick anything:
- can you defend "your" property against a coordinated assault of more than a handful of your fellow citizens? If not, it's "yours" up until a handful (or more) of your fellow citizens decide it's theirs
- you may say: but then the police or the courts step in. But then: what if the police don't care that you think it's yours? same question with the courts: what if they don't care?
Generally you can rely on the police and the courts, b/c they're embedded in a very wide web of "consent" (they may not care at all about your particular ownership claims, but they're enmeshed in a broader network of incentives to respect ownership claims which makes them unlikely to actively deny your claims).
- Certain principles are innate, endowed by our creator, whatever-your-favorite-language. Inviolate. It's the entire basis of western society.
Again agreed -- that is the basis of society. But since there is no actual creator to appeal to, your particular rights are inviolate up to the point anyone decides to try violating them. This isn't just a nitpick, it's important -- cf next.
- But to believe that it's natural for global health concerns to intrude more and more on personal property is to say that people are going to stop being people at some point and simply be cells performing in a larger organism.
I think you're missing what happens when there's just "more people". People will not stop being people, but how people behave when they're crowded together (subway station, train station, apartment complex) is different from how people behave when they're pretty well isolated (at home, camping, etc.).
In the same way that strong private property protections are a bedrock of western civilization, you can throw in "decent behavior in public"; we don't throw chamberpots out the window and we look askance at the noisy and smelly in crowded public settings...and westerners generally are terrified by images of the crowded Indian or Asian urban environment.
Even if you stick to garden-variety "negative rights" language, being in public "inverts" the dynamic:
- out on a farm in the boonies, any restrictions on your behavior seems unnatural and invasive (with good reason: who else is around)
- out in a crowded public place, to have any semblance of "freedom from" unwanted actions from other people involves praying that the other people aren't uncouth assholes; it starts looking very attractive to insist on adopting -- and violently enforcing, if need be -- some code of behavior in public
Even if you're still out on a farm somewhere, the outlook and expectations of everyone else will be increasingly "urban" with the corresponding assumption that you're being the inconsiderate ass (by acting with insufficient concern for your neighbors)...just like the dude with the loud boombox is being an ass -- making the judgment that his pleasure in hearing his tunes outweighs everyone else's annoyance -- not some kind of principled hero standing up for personal freedom.
That's the way the wind is blowing; there are countervailing trends (momentum gaining for eg gay rights and drug legalization show the populous has some inherent interest in not being unduly restricted in one's personal freedoms) but for issues of "health" or general wellbeing I can't see a trend reversal in the cards yet.
And so this is why the property rights resting on the consent of everyone else is important, not just a nit:
- since the boundaries of personal property are always and everywhere ultimately a political thing, you have to win at the political side, too
- the world of the future is crowded and urban, with the corresponding difference of outlook (behavior restrictions are necessary in crowds to maintain some semblance of freedom; not indicating that you understand that makes you look unhinged to native urbanites, even if they can't articulate it)
- my prediction is that that pro-property rights types in the usa will lose the game, hard, if they fail to address the political side, and to win at the political side they need to deal with reality, not simply insist that their particular abstractions are best
- I don't see that happening any time soon. The human animal simply won't fit into the little box that you'd like them to fit into.
Eh, I hate boxes and being in boxes, but I see nothing stepping in to check present trends and as present trends continue everyone's going to be in a box (whose walls are your neighbors, and your neighbors' neighbors, etc.) like it or not; trying to win the pro-property-rights argument by insisting you aren't actually in a box is just going to help lose the game.
I assume you know what a bond is; if you don't, you'll need to look it up.
(1) The fed basically sets the interest rates in the bond market. The real mechanisms are complicated and have a lot of "moving parts", but the basic picture is:
- the fed basically sets the interest rate on new "treasury securities" (treasury bills, notes, etc.).
- "treasury securities" are considered 0-risk (b/c the borrower can just print the money to pay them, basically)
- when other parties want to raise money by selling debt (eg: offering bonds) they have to offer more interest than the going rate on "treasury securities" (b/c other parties will have higher than 0 risk of nonpayment, and consequently the higher interest is what attracts investors to buy the bonds)
- basically the relationship is like: the riskier the bond, the higher the interest rate (over and above the federal rate) it will offer
(2) throughout the mid-late 90s and into the early 2000s the fed held interest rate at abnormally low levels (at least by historical standards).
The net effect of holding interest rates that low for that long was that the range of interest rates you could get on bonds was lower than historical norms (by a few % points at least).
(3) There are enormous pools of highly-regulated money-for-investment held in vehicles like pension funds (domestically and also abroad). CF this chart (from 2006):
http://books.google.com/books?id=x4d-lCjRY8AC&pg=PA4&...
...to get some idea how much money is in USA-based pension funds alone (there's more overseas where pensions are higher).
The details very a lot between categories of funds, but generally highly-regulated funds who are more about risk-minimizing (like pension funds) than return-maximizing will try to invest heavily in bonds or bond-like instruments; again this is complicated but roughly speaking the reasoning is:
- bonds or bond-like instruments usually have a defined series of payments whose value is easy to calculate; the only real risk is that the borrower stop paying
- there's huge pressure not to default on bonds; a dropping stock price is bad for shareholders, but defaulting on bonds risks your being able to continue to operate (b/c you have no way of raising short-term funds)
...which makes bonds historically lower-risk, lower-reward compared to (eg) stocks. Pensions and pension-like funds have another reason for preferring bonds:
- pensions need to have cash on hand on a regular basis (to pay out claims)
- bonds always pay out on a regular basis (until they don't); to turn stocks into cash you have to sell them (or hope the dividends don't change on you)
Thus historically you'd have a huge diversified pile of bonds (mix of higher-return / higher risk and the opposite) as the major component of such a fund's portfolio (with various other investments tossed in).
The consequence of a long period of historically low interest rates meant that bonds no longer offered the same kind of returns; even a few % matters here, b/c if eg you are using an internal interest rate of 4% then going from a portfolio average of 7% to a portfolio average of 5% means you're actually going from 3% net of inflation to 1% net of inflation, etc.
Now, if these were just hedge funds or other speculative vehicles that'd be one thing; but, pensions legally are contractually obligated to make their payments, so failure-to-perform isn't just "too bad, so sad" but potentially legal nightmares; additionally, USA pensions are partially backed by an equivalent of the FDIC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pension_Benefit_Guaranty_Corpor...
...which currently is self-funding but in a real disaster would probably graduate to explicit federal backing.
So summary: due to fed policy vis-a-vis interest rates over an extended period of time (well over a decade now) it's been harder and harder for pensions to meet their performance targets with their traditional strategies; due to their nature this isn't just bad news, it's possibly "against the law" in some sense.
(4) Enter Securitization
What securitization basically did was:
- take a 1000 mortages originating at about the same time (july 2004) but geographically distributed and with a range of credit scores / home values / interest rates
- set up an entity that receives all monthly mortgage payments
- as the money comes in, the entity first dumps it into "bucket 1"; when "bucket 1" is full you send that out to its owner(s), then you dump what's left into "bucket 2", send that out when it's full, etc, until the money runs out. It's possible that, eg, once a handful of people default or prepay their mortage that buckets 5 on down stop getting any money.
- you call the "buckets" tranches, and you do some "financial engineering" to decide how many buckets to put in and how big to make the buckets; depending on how you choose you typically wind up with some top-level tranches that have low risk but higher effective interest rates (compared to normal bonds with the same interest rates)
- the reason this works is that even though the bottom buckets are going to go to zero (almost inevitably) you're concentrating most of the risk in the bottom tranches and thereby the higher tranches have lower-risk
- zoila! you've created a bond-like instrument that has higher returns but the same apparent risk (ratings agencies had a huge role here, again too little time to detail in full)
So, there was basically a huge demand for "yield" (interest rates on bond-like products) but a huge shortage (due to fed interest rate policy); the whole securitization scheme came about partly to meet that demand.
The consequences of securitization are varied: it increases willingness to loan to high-risk borrowers (b/c you sell off the mortgage as part of the security, and having some high-interest rate, high-risk "pepper" in the security is essential to being able to offer high interest rates.
But for a lot of market actors the products looked really appealing as a way of "not going out of business".
There's a lot more you could do to draw out that story with enough motivation; it's far from the whole story -- or the only story -- but it's one of the underlying currents leading up to the current predicament.
It's nice to have a single thread to tug on that explains everything but that's hard to find; the financial world is a huge web of interconnected actors with interconnected motives.
But, you have to be realistic:
- if you accept a libertarian notion of self-ownership, then it follows that, eg, I ought nought to have you blow smoke in my face unless i consent to it (b/c you're tampering with my property, no)?
- now, as a practical matter people agree to overlook certain things (eg: your campfire is infinitesimally smokifying my air here back in town, but it's so negligible that I ought not to care about it; very literally the stress of worrying about it is worse for me than your smoke is)
- it'd be nice if you can adopt a universal standard for when your (infinitesimal) actions are something I have to ignore
- but unless you already have that agreement you're back into coercing people; it does seem useful to you, I'm sure, to think that "since I've scientifically shown that my blowing smoke in your face doesn't actually harm you, so I'm going to keep doing it", but now you're not that far removed intellectually from eg eminent domain "I've demonstrated that demolishing your home in order to finish this expressway is manifestly for the economic benefit of the entire city -- including you -- so even though normally I'd like to respect your property rights in this patch of land today I say 'tough luck!'"
- this is why the boundaries of private property are always ultimately a political problem: usually people are looking out for their own interest, as they choose to define it; to get someone to deliberately sacrifice their own perceived self-interest requires either force or politics; force works but is undesirable and doesn't scale, either, so you're left with politics
This is where the folk libertarianism (along with any naive or simplistic approach to being pro-property-rights) is going to flounder in the new century, if present trends continue:
- you can't pretend your actions "don't effect other people until they do"; the reality is that "your actions effect everyone else, but sometimes (usually, even) everyone else agrees to pretend as if they don't"
- you look like a hypocrite if you on the one hand want to maintain absolute say over how you use your own resources but on the other hand want to force other people to accept your decisions about which uses of their property (their bodies, their air, etc.) they need to just man up and take; you also look stupid if you can't see this point
- you also look politically and rhetorically dumb when you speak casually about what risk-of-harm to others you're comfortable ignoring (and would expect other people to ignore); it's rather obvious that, eg, DanielBMarkham is fine with, say, some action of his having a .001% odds of giving his neighor's kid asthma (picking at random) -- DanielBMarkham is not his neighbor's kid, after all -- but step outside the space of just "thinking in words" and you'll see why that's not a winning pose (it's made worse by the way that risk-of-harm is low-and-diffuse but harm is typically severe-and-concentrated).
What I'm trying to drive home is that everything you've said is valid, but you're not going to change minds with that argument (at most you'll make people aware of a particular danger if you carry something to its logical extreme).
I think the best long-term approach is to focus more on design and infrastructure (eg: intelligent garbage processing, products designed from start-to-finish to neatly decompose into recyclable components -- this is called "reverse logistics", fyi) rather than trying to directly win the political war over where the lines ought to be drawn.
If you can get to where people can continue doing what they do now but with far less externality production, then you will easily be able to keep the lines drawn mostly where you'd want them to be (at least for most actors).
The issue here is that to get to where it's safe to be mindless again is not going to happen promptly (if at all) without some kind of directed regulatory push; that is not only nontrivial -- and dangerous -- but also unlikely barring some other political shifts.
Any time you calmly and rationally keep asking for more and more evidence that the toxic waste you're poisoning my kids' water and air with isn't all that bad, or is a net benefit for humanity even if my kids seem ever-the-more sickly for it you're causing irreparable harm.
I feel such a profound imposition of your will -- convince me I'm not poisoning you! -- over mine is something that doesn't deserve polite speech and I don't care if it makes you uncomfortable.
This is really the conflict that's going to play out all over the next century, regardless of how climate-change specifically plays out:
- libertarian-minded types like to think we live in a world where it's possible to swing a fist without hitting someone's face
- if that world ever really existed, it's gone now: anytime you light a fire you're blowing smoke in my face
It's the difference between the morality of the home and the morality of the bus station:
- in your home you're surrounded by walls and only people who want to be there (usually) are present, so do as you wish
- in the bus station you're cheek-by-jowl with hundreds to thousands of other people, and the only thing that makes it bearable is a shared belief in restraint
The abstraction of "your resources" is just another leaky abstraction:
- there's no platonic book of property titles; you can't really call God on the phone and confirm that "your resources" are actually "yours, to do with as you wish"
- you can't really (as an individual) exert enough force to make everyone respect your "ownership" over "your resources"; the fact that you can act as though they're unambiguously yours depends on the willingness of hundreds of millions of people to leave you and "your resources" alone
- even if everyone agrees "your resources" are yours, you -- and your resources -- are not off in some private pocket universe when you use your resources; you -- and your resources -- are embedded in the same material reality everyone else is, and every action you take -- including any use you make of your resources -- will impact other people
- it's not realistic to expect people to sit idly by if you and your use of "your resources" are harming them; since "your resources" staying "your resources" depends on everyone else being willing to leave you alone, it's not smart to use "your resources" in a way that blows smoke in their face or pisses in their drinking water
- historically people have been more willing to treat certain resource usages as "not harming them" (eg: smokestacks, dumping industrial byproducts into riverwater, etc.); this is less and less true with time, and there's no sign of a slowdown in that trend
- every time so far that a particular set of negative environmental externalities has been identified the producers of that externality have either voluntarily agreed to cut back, some kind of nominal regulation (looks good, may not actually do anything) has been imposed, or some actually-strong regulation has been put in place; it's obvious which way the wind is blowing, here
Regardless of how "climate change" pans out, this is the future:
- on the one side, people who strongly believe they're being directly harmed by actions you're taking; any calm, rational request for evidence that your actions are actually harmful is asking for them to endure more harm, and to what end? Why does your claim on "your resources" -- which ultimately depends upon their consent, as you yourself can't do squat to hold onto "your resources" should they lift that consent -- trump their well being? What justifies such self-sacrifice? Why would it ever be your place to tell me how much smoke in my face I ought to be willing to put up with?
- on the other side, people taking actions they've been taking in the past will want to continue taking them. Sometimes they will probably have a reasonable case for continuing to take those actions, and sometimes they won't; in any case, they're at a disadvantage:
--- direct appeals to the fact that you're using "your resources" aren't going to resonate with your accusers (even if they rouse sympathy in those who fear they're next); not only are "your resources" only "yours" until the people you're arguing with decide they aren't, but you're insisting on upholding an abstraction that's looking ever-the-more leaky
--- direct appeals to how much harm you're causing (or not) are also going to fall flat; it's not really your place to tell other people how much harm you can cause them before they have a right to complain, and so for this to work at all you need to appeal to some kind of mutually-accepted arbiter; that mutually-accepted arbiter is going to be ultimately more beholden to everyone-else-but-you (you are one, they are many)
I'd like to as much as possible preserve the notion of "your resources" and some kind of private sphere in which one can act freely (without looking over one's shoulder) but that's not going to happen if you take the abstraction for granted, and ignore the reality (what you're asking for is leeway and the presumption from other parties that you're not harming them enough for them to take action...that's an exceedingly fragile base).
The real meaning of what they're asking for is something like:
- I assert that there's a simple-but-nontrivial "algorithm" that generates this sequence. Find that algorithm, and use it to find the "next number in the sequence".
...but then you need a definition of "trivial", which is a lot of work (and most applicants know "trivial" when they see it:
def sequence(i): return [1,11,21,1211,111221, 312211][i % 5]
Doing a more-formal definition probably gets you into issues of Komolgorov complexity, which most applicants will not know much about.