Mediocrity, monogamy, social control and totalitarianism

2008 All rights reserved

The dictator was in a good mood so when the young man asked him how he managed to stay in power, he did not have the impudent infant executed immediately, but ordered a servant to bring a cane, and took the young man for a walk.

As they walked through fields of bright red flowers they talked. Of all kinds of things. The young man noticed that the dictator invariably used his cane to strike off the head of any flower that was taller than the rest.

In “Where have all the Intellectuals gone” Frank Furedi  attempts to understand the mediocritisation of culture and the decline in educational standards. He talks of postmodernism and a cultural elite of non-elitists but  seems to miss a vital point.

Socialism and communism, elegant theoretical structures, tend, when implemented as forms of government, to turn to totalitarianism very rapidly.

In “The Black Swan” Taleb documents the misuse of  the Gaussian distribution and shows how this leads to inevitable disasters ( and, to be fair triumphs) .

Taleb describes  how the 19th century intellectual Quételet fell in love with the Gaussian and its associated bell curve and, assuming thet all human characteristics were distributed in the population as a bell curve, defined the concept of an average man. Since, apparently, the Gaussian distribution was originally applied to the description of errors in astronomical measurements, and the measure of the spread was, and is, known as the standard deviation large deviation from the average began to be considered abnormalities to be cured or punished. Also, apparently, Marx fell under  Quételet’s spell and Taleb quotes  Marx as writing

“Societal deviations in the terms of the distribution of wealth for example, must be minimised”

In  Quételet’s day divergence from the mean was treated as an error. The dictator would have been ecstatic at that, he would not have had to execute the brighter humans, the populace would have lynched them for him.  Taleb then links this to what he calls the Grocery store mentality that led to Poujadism, characterised by a suspicion of wealth and brilliance.  This suspicion lingers to this day. I recall reading that a few years ago the Dutch government wanted to tax returning expatriates  higher than the stay at home citizens as part of a “crackdown on excessive remuneration in the private sector”, most governments try to arrange their tax system so that everyone ends up with about the same disposable income.  Their freedom to do this is limited because if they try too hard the bright and brilliant either emigrate or simply stop trying to increase their income when they judge too much of the increase is taken by the government.  In Britain is it still common to see the self employed and entrepreneurs described as “getting ideas above themselves”.

Obviously those in power want to keep power and will use  obvious tactics, like the dictator, and subtle ones, like debasing the educational system to ensure the populace are docile and conformist.  As mentioned above  Quételet led Marx to drive  communism and its sibling socialism in a needlessly conformist direction.  At the other end of the political spectrum the right want to preserve rhe power of the rich and the easy way to do this is to turn the human populace into sheep. Since governments inevitably see  people as problems to be managed not talents to be encouraged, and fear honest informed political debate,  corporations find it easier to market to the average person, and most often target the lowest common denominators of society,  employers love tractable  nearly stupid employees to brilliant mavericks, and many other  groups prefer a population that is docile, conformist and predictable, the pressure is on to swipe off the heads of the taller flowers.

In chimpanzee bands and ancient civilisations the big men got the  best women and those at the bottom  got the remainder or went without. Taleb  asserts that  monogamy, one man one women, or limited polygamy, as in Islam today, gave the man at the bottom the chance to mate without having to  start a revolution just to get access to females. Monogamy can therefore bee seen as an institution of social control.  Taleb however ignores  the fact that monogamy in theory does not mean monogamy in practice, any more than medieval priests and popes were celibate.  and the evidence suggesting that women are more likely to engage in adultery than men since according to an essay by Eric Raymond, author of “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”   a woman who has children by different fathers maximises the chance her children will have good genes.  Monogamy however, by increasing the ability of the poor to find a mate, also tends to ensure the the genetic component of brilliance and creativity, if there is any, is diluted by conformity and docility.  Even a child genius cannot fulfil their potential if the environment in which they live is hostile to deviations from average intelligence.

Thus  an obsession with the average person,  and a vision of deviations from the mean as  errors led to a political culture on the left that stressed uniformity and conformity , while on the right  a conformist society was desirable as a way of preserving the power of the rich. The cultural and other elites  promoted a culture of inclusion based on the nonsensical ideas of postmodernism, that resulted in the lower orders being given the illusion of education while the elites retained the reality and the power that went with it. And monogamy was used partly to ensure political stability and partly to   reduce the incidence of brilliant but  hard to control thinkers in society.

As a result we have democracies that tend to fake democracies, an education system that pretends to include everyone but but  reserves the best education for the rich, and a  venerable sexual ethic that tends to reduce  the overall intelligence of the population.

Your mileage may diiffer. I  look forward to reading this in a few years time and disagreeing with myself.

References

1.Furedi, Frank : where have all the intellectuals gone 2nd Edition Contimuum 2004
2.Taleb, Naseem Nicholas: the Black swan, Random House International Edition 2007

Postmodernism, Social control and democracy

In “Where have all the intellectuals gone” Frank Furedi discusses how postmodernism has - by denying that truth exists - downgraded the value of a quest for knowledge, how the idea that education is valuable in itself has been replaced by an instrumentalist approach whereby anything that does not have immediate economic value is regarded as valueless and a resulting politics of inclusion has resulted in a decline in standards not only of education but also of critical thinking.

Furedi postulates a number of reasons for this, but to my mind is insufficiently cynical about the elites who run our society and has failed to ask the question “who benefits”

So who does benefit from Mathematics graduates who can understand complex theorems but not realise that 1% of 60 million people is a lot of people, who regard a million pounds given to Social Security claimants as a lot of money without realising it is within the statistical error of government accounts? From Physicists who cannot understand ( or don’t care) that their work could be used for malign purposes, from Lawyers who are more concerned with making money than the reasons laws exist?

Who benefits. At the start of Chapter 12 of Where have all the intellectuals gone” Furedi

discusses the “politics of inclusion”, which seems to be an attitude that no one should fail, that everyone should leave a contest with a prize, even it it is valueless. He states that the institutions of culture and education treat the people as consumers who have culture and education spoon fed to them. He says

“The cumulative effect of the politics of inclusion is a docile and conformist public”

To me this is the key remark. Who benefits from a docile and conformist public? Now I recall Lenin, after the Tsar was deposed, saying that the proletariat were obviously incapable of ruling and so the Bolsheviks would have to rule for them.

There was an old saying that “Knowledge is power”. This oversimplifies, for if knowledge is universally available all who have it are equally powerful. Knowledge hoarded is power.

In the Middle Ages the church kept power, in a largely illiterate society, by keeping knowledge, namely the content of the bible, to itself. It was illegal to translate the bible into English, indeed, I recall reading, it was illegal for laymen to posesss even a Latin Bible. Dogma was mainly transmitted orally and the official interpretation of the scriptures was enforced by fire and stake. Today, according to Furedi, one post modernist claims that a professor “is no more competent than memory banks in transmitting established knowledge”, a statement that implicitly equates established knowledge with religious dogma. St Augustine spoke out against the vice of intellectual inquiry, and religious leaders in every country detest the idea of their congregation thinking for themselves and asking questions. So do their governments. The religious leader with an illiterate following who only hear the words of their religious leaders are a powerful force, whether they are television evangelists or other fundamentalist control freaks.

Seneca the Younger said “The ignorant consider religion true, the educated consider it false, and the rulers consider it useful”. This is still true today. Religion is as much a tool of government as ever. And religion requires a docile and conformist following. The politics of inclusion is geared to making life easier for a ruling class of politicians, priests ( in certain countries) and administrators. It reduces the quest for knowledge to indoctrination, for if all “truths” are equally valid, why not make the public accept those truths which makes life easy for the rulers?

In “The rise of Political Lying” Peter Oborne charts the move, by New Labour in the UK from basing policy on facts to basing it on an official narrative – with brief notes that seem to me to indicate that this seems to have been inspired by the US neoconservative right. In the process our leaders seem to have lost touch with reality. In “Unpeople: Britain’s secret Human rights abuses” Mark Curtis shows that the British Government has a long tradition of lying to the people.

At the base if all this there is a contempt for the people, the public, the electorate. You and me.

The disastrous things about this contempt is that is it not totally unjustified and that it becomes self fulfilling. Suffrage should be universal but the vote IS wasted on some people. This is true in any country, but a responsible government would use education as a tool to minimise the size of this segment of the population. By pandering to the tribal football hooligan mentality – and there are proportionately as many of these in the upper and middle classes as in the lower classes, and treating the public like children the public lose the habit of thinking. As a result social control becomes easier.

The result is a public alienated from politics and politicians unworried by being elected by less than a quarter of the votes cast since they are able to manipulate the perception of their legitimacy and back this up with police and troops in need be.

So what can be done? As with any enterprise the first thing is to define goals. The ideal is something that may never have existed. A public that is politically sophisticated, willing to engage in political debate and not manipulated by emotionally based arguments and crooked thinking. A public that is aware and on the lookout for the tricks politicians will use to sway them, and ready to devote time to understanding complex issues.

Back in the heady days of the 1960s there was a chorus of politicians, lawyers and other professionals claiming that the country needed more scientists, technologists, engineers. As a result the best talent headed into these areas, which resulted in less competition for the the politicians, lawyers and other professionals. Education in these areas focussed, often of necessity, on getting students to grasp complex networks of facts, and the result was scientists contemptuous of politicians and technologists and engineers so enthralled with the fact they could do something that they did not stop to consider whether it should be done. We still need the scientists technologists and engineers, but we need ones who can apply rigourous thinking to the often fuzzy areas of politics and economics, who are interested in the impact of their work on society and how their work might be hijacked for nefarious ends by unscrupulous politician and business leaders and ready to combat this. An example of what happens when science develops in this vacuum, independently of ethics, is the growing pressure for RFID chips to be inserted into everyone – despite the fact these chips are now known to pose an increased cancer risk. An example of what happens when art develops independently of ethics, is the artist who recently got a grant for chaining up a dog and filming it starving to death.

As always change starts with individuals. Read, especially people with whom you disagree, and think. Above all think both of you may be wrong. And both of you may be right. Over to you

Lessons for Employees: a rough life guide

Martin Lewis (http://www.moneysavingexpert.com) states three things as the most important lessons you have never been taught

1.A company’s job is to make money from you
2.Debt isn’t bad, bad debt is bad
3.Loyalty DOESN’T pay

In the same spirit here are corresponding lessons for those in work or about to start work.
You will find a different, gentler take on some of these in

“The Rules of Work A definitive code for personal success” by Richard Templar

Your employer’s job is to make money from you.
Loyalty doesn’t pay
Your manager is not your friend.
There IS life outside work.
The only person will look after you is you.
What they pay you is not related to the value of the job but to the scarcity of people who can do it
Never trust your fellow workers

Your employer’s job is to make money from you.

This is easy to forget when faced with the happy smiling faces of the recruiters or the company website talking about how they want to empower employees. Treat this all with a pinch of salt. If you are not making money for them you are useless and as soon as they find out, you will be history or reassigned to something much less to your liking.

How does the employer make money from you?

Simple. Just as a business wants to extract the maximum amount of money from customers in return for as little as possible, preferably nothing (Think insurance companies here) the employers wants the maximum work from you for the minimum amount of money. If they can get away with paying you less than you need to survive that is your problem.

You make money for your employer either directly (sales) or indirectly by doing useful work ( making things or products) or by being part of a department that exists solely to let others get on with useful work (Human resources, facilities etc.). There is another category concerned with protecting the employer (Legal, Security etc.). If you cannot see how you are making money for the employer you have to consider yourself at risk.

Bottom line is to you employer you are not a person but a resource, or even worse, a commodity. Live with it and turn this to your advantage.

Loyalty doesn’t pay

My first job was in defence. The company was one of several defence companies in the area and it was known that those who made the tour, spending two years working at each company ended up much better off than those who loyally stayed with the company.
There are good reasons for this. New staff mean new ideas, new staff from your competitors means you get what is in their heads, even though they observe any non disclosure agreements to the letter.
It costs money to hire new staff, and who is going to pay for that? Yes, the existing staff.

There is also a management attitude that anyone who stays more than a couple of years is unable to get a job elsewhere. I recall hearing a manager say that to a worker. The worker made a phone call and started a job elsewhere on more pay the next week.

You have to keep an eye on industry trends as well, or your employer will fire you because your skills are out of date, and hire someone younger for less.

Loyalty does not pay. Look after yourself and move on as necessary either to get a higher salary or to get more experience and upgrade your skills.

Your manager is not your friend.

Friendly relations with you manager are just professionalism. Don’t mistake you manager’s enquiries about your health and family for concern. In many companies the manager is selected because of their willingness to sacrifice anything, even family life, for their employer. This doesn’t contradict “loyalty doesn’t pay” - managers move on as much as anyone else, it means that the manager is seen as an asset because of this.

Even if you manager likes you, drinks with you after work and is godfather to your children they will sack you if they are ordered to, if they see you as unable to do the job, or as a threat to their position. They may feel bad about it, but being willing and able to do it is part of their job.

Like you managers have pressures on them from more senior management, work deadlines, and other workers. They can never be your friend and manager simultaneously. Each manager adapts to this in a different way.

Finally some managers, like politicians, choose their career path to compensate for psychological weaknesses and disturbance. Traits that make them “eccentric” in reality are seen as assets by the corporation. Lack of imagination = follows instructions perfectly. Monitors staff arrival and departure times = exactly what the corporation wants. Control freak = keeps an eye on details.
Unable to deal with people = perfect for dealing with machines. If you have a manager who is a borderline psychiatric case, and I have met a couple, don’t walk, run. Remember only you will look after you and dealing with such a manager will damage your health.

There IS life outside work.

Family, friends, community, hobbies, sports. Nurture them for they will be there when your employer is bankrupt or has decided you no longer matter. Nurture then for themselves and also for the chance they give you to recharge your batteries, keep work in perspective, maintain your health and network for new opportunities and let your subconscious come up with new solutions to problems at work.

Whatever they say your employer will resist you maintaining a full work life balance. And why not, you are a resource, a commodity, replaceable. Not maintaining a good work life balance will damage your ability to perform in your job and put you at risk. If you management do not understand that and want you to give up sports and hobbies friends, community involvement or family life in order to work longer hours, or they complain about you taking paid or unpaid leave to look after sick children, leave the job as soon as you can. Just prospect you future employer carefully.

The only person will look after you is you.

If you damage your health on behalf of your employer and can no longer work will they be grateful and give you sheltered employment? NO, because you are a replacable resource, so resist the temptation to work long hours, surviving on takeaway pizzas and three hours sleep a night in return for a smile from your manager ( who is never your friend, at least when working). I recall a friend worked in a hospital ( in the good old caring United Kingdom) who was faced with a 23 stone (300 pound) patient who had to be turned over instantly to stop them dying. My friend managed to turn them over and saved their life, but tore a shoulder muscle and was dismissed for not being able to work. Fair or not this is how the business world works. Humans consider fairness important. To businesses and politicians fairness is irrelevant, though a reputation for fairness is essential.

And now to ethics and legality. Both are tied up with life outside work. If you find your employer is behaving unethically or indeed illegally leave the job if you can. There will probably be a clause in your contract preventing you blowing the whistle and you may end up as the scapegoat if they get caught.

What they pay you is not related to the value of the job but to the scarcity of people to do it

Why are rubbish collectors so badly paid? Without them things would collapse. The reason is anyone can become a dustman. Why are waiters so badly paid? Because almost anyone can become a waiter. What is the value of a waiter to a restaurant? Go to a good restaurant, work out the price of a good meal, subtract the price you would be willing to pay for the same food in a self service buffet. Multiply the difference by the number of tables in the restaurant and divide by two and you will see roughly how much the waiter is making the management per hour. Then compare that with the waiter’s wages.

At the other end of the scale lawyers, doctors, dentists, and of course top managers are well paid. They are relatively scarce, have networks to look after them ( its not what you know but who you know that counts) and are in a position to look after themselves. Politicians are a class apart. Whatever happens to the country they look after themselves. Extremely well.

So if you want a well paid and secure job make sure your skills are scarce, make sure you are properly connected, and make sure it stays that way.

Never trust your fellow workers

In a clash with management those of your colleagues who say “I’m right behind you” mean “so far behind you’ll need a telescope”. There is always an office gossip willing to take anything you say and twist it into an amusing tale, there is always the office informer passes anything you say to the management, distorted to match their own goals, there is always the manager prepared to lie about you to keep their own position safe, and there is always the honest person who cannot keep their mouth buttoned.

What is in you head is your problem. Make sure what comes out of your mouth or the work of head or hands is what you want people to see or hear.

Lessons for employees

The Rules of Work

A definitive code for personal success

Richard Templar

Environmental Fascists as government pawns

Why are “greens” so negative. Their only response to environmental threats seems to be to recommend a retreat from the twentieth century to an imagined past utopia.

A few years ago someone started a flap about the amount of atmospheric pollution caused by aircraft. I recall an eco-spokesman on one of the UK TV channels fulminating that cheap flights should be stopped because air travel produced 3% (yes three percent) of all carbon emissions. Soon after that there were all the signs of a campaign going into reverse as then Prime Minister Tony Blair said being ecologically responsible did not mean having to wear a hair shirt, and when then Chancellor Gordon Brown doubled airport tax the campaign went dead, though even now the urban legend of aircraft emission is floating around from place to place like spam advertising “real Viagra”

Before I go further I am NOT debating the percentage of carbon emissions caused by aircraft. I am looking at what might loosely be called the sociology of such panics.

Back in the middle of the Thatcher regime in the UK there was suddenly a clampdown on Social Security fraud. The claim, broadcast on radio, was that it was costing £600 million pounds a year. I noted this was less than one third of a penny in the pound of government revenue and suggested to my elected representative that supermarkets and insurance companies would be ecstatic if thir losses from fraud and theft were that low.

I got the normal anodyne letter from my MP and kept watching. Two years and two clampdowns later the claim was that Social Security fraud was costing the tax payer £12 billion per year.

So what did twenty fold increas in two years mean?

Did the crackdowns reveal unexpectedly high levels of Fraud? That the original figure was just the tip of the iceberg. I would doubt it, especially as the first clampdown should have reduced the figure anyway.

Did the crackdowns cause a heightened awareness of how to defraud the system and therefore lead to more fraud? If so the answer would be to stop having crackdowns.

Or were the cost estimates simply plucked out of thin air, or suspect data, like the 12 year old Graduate Thesis used to bolster the claim, later found fraudulent, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction?

You decide on that. My point is a little different

Soon after the doubling of airport tax all went quiet about aircraft and various airlines announced plans to reduce emissions. These should have had an effect relatively quickly.

BUT, suddenly I notice that commentators are claiming a plane ride creates as much carbon emissions as a car journey - cars were previously cited as causing 25% of all carbon emissions and that car journeys and train journeys have about the same environmental cost. Of course this now means that if we believe these figures, cars, trains and planes contribute about 75% of all carbon emissions and power stations and factories are minor offenders, it is us, with our desire to travel,see the world and broaden our mind, rather than squatting in our own dung heap who are to blame. It nicely lets government and industry off the hook.

So where did the hundredfold increase in jet plane related carbon emissions in two years come from? especially at aitme when the airlines were trying to reduce emissions.

Was it all a government spin to justify a rise in airport tax, one that now will not die?

Were the original figures hopelessly wrong? In which case can we believe the new figures either?

Or were the original figures invented by someone?

You decide.

My reading of this is that the government wanted a rise in airport tax and decided to use the environmental movement as pawns in this game. This is why we saw environmentalists on prime time TV when normally they are as rare as hen’s teeth.

But I read into it an unpleasant undercurrent. I noticed the campaign concentrated on CHEAP flights, and this to me read as a desire to reserve the air for the rich and for the poor – i.e those who are not rich to stay where they are put. This would benefit Government by helping produce a more docile and conformist public.

So I consider the campaign was a government spin using environmental groups as naïve and enthusiastic pawns, primarily aimed at justifying a rise in airport tax with the secondary benefit of legitimising the idea that the skies should only be for the rich – our political masters and our employers, and us plebs should be grateful for what we have.

Now back to my original question, which I can paraphrase as why do environmentalists always suggest negative solutions, not positive ones.

They say use less electricity, NOT “give every house solar panels, a wind turbine and an incinerator linked to a combined heat and power system, so they can be self sufficient 90% of the time and sell their excess to the national grid thus reducing the need for more coal fired power stations and the reduction in volume of the rubbish left would reduce pressure on landfills and mean councils could save money on rubbish collection”

They say “Don’t use your car” not “Push for development of viable electric cars and far better public transport”

They say “drink tap water not mineral water and don’t use carrier bags” ignoring the fact that tap water may contain high levels of hormones from farming and heavy metals from industry, things ignored in official analyses. In fact it would be better to avoid tap water and collect and purify rain water or melt the ice in your fridge. As to carrier bags the average bag gets used three times before ending in a bin or being burnt.

Why are the environmental movements not raising funds for research into alternative energy sources, or even “free Energy” a host of devices, most of which merely tap the Earth’s magnetic or electric field, and ways of getting things like solar powerd phones and laptops intot he hands of ordinary people.

I charge the environmentalist movement as a whole with a number of sins including

A naïve attitude to governments and politicians.

Letting themselves be used to further political, for example the campaign against air travel

An anti democratic and luddite approach to environmental problems, for example focussing on cheap air travel.

A lack of vision and creativity, shown by the unwillingness to fund research into alternatives and promote the results of that research.

Tying themselves to the establishment and the status quo, for example by clinging to the idea of central provision of services and utilities rather than pushing to have everyone become self sufficient.

How to rebuild democracy - opposition voting

“Turf them out”    http://www.turfthemout.me.uk

 

It’s an open secret that modern democracy is not only something the Greeks would not have recognised but broken – every country  claiming to be a democracy has broken their democracy in different ways and the only reason it os not being fixed is that the broken version serves the interests either of a minute elite or of big business.

 

To some extent this is unavoidable.  Instead of taking part in the day to  day processes of government we  use a voting system to elect representatives who we trust to look after our interests not theirs and who are accountable to us.  Arrow wrote down a number of criteria any system of electing representatives should satisfy and proved, mathematically, that it was not possible to satisfy all of these.

 

This might not matter if our representatives were saints, not humans. Plato said that those who seek political power should not be allowed anywhere near it, and observation of politicians worldwide in majoritarian democracies like the UK and USA and consensual democracies like Switzerland bears this out. 

 

Perhaps we should not be too unfair to politicians for being vote-chasing kites fluttering in the wind of  perceived public opinion, and not condemn them too much for betraying the principles and  ideals that, in some cases at least, led them into politics. Just as a business is dead without profits, even though survival and growth, not profit, is the aim of the business, so politicians with principals and not votes will never see their dreams realised.

 

A politician is by nature a control freak – if they did not want things done their way they would have a life rather than having to brown-nose voters and party representatives and risk diabetes or  worse by forgoing exercise for endless rounds of committees and speeches. A politician is someone who can persuade themselves that what is good for themselves is good for the country and their constituents. A politician is a master of the glib phrase, the meaningless sound bite, the superficial not the considered solution to every problem.

 

And yet there are always choices. There is always an honourable and a dishonourable way to conduct public affairs. It seems to me that the Blair government, and the Conservative regimes that preceded it consistently chose the less honourable option, saving themselves in the short term but laying up trouble in the long term. I would like to think that Brown’s government will reverse this trend but am not hopeful, nor do I think any other government would do otherwise. The result has been  a widespread  and spectacluar increase in distrust of politicians in general.

 

And this is a good thing. Uncritical respect for authority, uncritical trust of our elected representatives and the bodies they create to organise our lives is the royal road to (elected) dictatorship. On the other hand the mutual contempt of politicians and public is also dangerous.  A result of the lies and deceptions of the Blair years – and earlier, though earlier governments hid their duplicity better – is that sentiments about Westminster are being uttered that could have come  verbatim from  the opening chapters of Mein Kampf.

 

Part of the problem is that politicians generally have safe seats. In many parts of the country a goat would be elected as the local representative if they only stood for the right party. This means that instead of compromising their principles in order to win over the electorate they have to choose the party that they think will most likely provide a vehicle for realising their ideals – if, that is, their goal involves more than the mere seeking of money, power and status. Once they have chosen their party they are stuck with it and have to disguise their aims in order to get into a position to realise their ideals – if they have any.

 

This first betrayal, inevitable as it is, as necessary as it is, corrupts the politician as surely as a single drink corrupts the alcoholic or involvement in crime as a means of finance corrupts the ethics of terrorist organisations. Every action changes you and an action that is unethical will tend to make further slides inevitable just as the monsters who masterminded the holocaust  or ran the death camps slithered along a path that started with small things, not even crimes, that enabled them to commit the next, worse act till they were no longer human except in a technical sense.

 

And the first betrayal arises because the de facto political elite have organised the system to ensure they remain in power.  

 

There are ways this could be changed, but turkeys seldom vote for Christmas, and the idea of continuously adjusting political boundaries so that any change in the number of seats a party has in Westminster, or Congress, or the Senate is proportional, if voting patterns do not change, to the number of votes that party gained nationally at the last election would simply be laughed out  by all parties, the idea of restricting the number of years anyone could be an MP or minister would likewise be ignored and abolishing general elections by ensuring that while every MP served a 5 year term, their terms were staggered so that every day would see one or two by-elections would similarly be dismissed (Everyone loves the carnival that is a national election) .

 

But there is a way round this - one they cannot stop. 

 

Opposition voting.

 

The principle is simple.

 

At every election vote against the person in the seat of power –  MP, Councillor, Head of the Parent-Teacher Association or something else. After all even if you really want them to be in power, if you vote them out you can vote for them again next time when you try to unseat their replacement. Perhaps by then their party will have decided the people should be educated not  effectively disenfranchised. This is a way to let voters reclaim power.

Distributed computing, Economics, Evolution, Federalism

Most of my reading recently has hammered home the point that centralised control of anything does not work, except in the most trivial of instances. Two books in particular stimluated my brain and this is an effort to put my forst half baked ideas to print

“The Evolution of Wealth” by Eric D Beinhocker (2006) and “Out of control” by Kevin Kelly (1994).

On the Economics side “The Undercover Economist” by Tim Harford showed me that Economics is better viewed as a branch of sociology than of Physics.

Kelly focuses on Swarm systems and emergent properties, the collective properties of swarms of interacting agents. Hockbeiner focusses on Economics as a complex adaptive system with emergent properties.

Kelly notes that evolutionary systems tend to be loosely coupled and interactive. I will analyse his statement more in a later post when I go back and look at the book in the lighto of today’s knowledge.

One statement he makes is that the members of a swarm are very simple and do simple tasks. It seems to me that this is the very essence of J2EE development or indeed of any distributed application - for example a phone network. Very simple agents with slightly more complex agents controlling them, and more complex agents in turn controlling the higher layers. Another point he makes is that when evolution creates new rules the old ones are not discarded, just ignored. When I read this I had a vision of the legacy applications I modify that hold thousands of lines of unused code that no one has the time or courage to remove.

The knowledge that I am participating in the evolution of software systems and distributed applications makes me feel a little happier about redundant code and the amount of trial and error needed in development.

What has this to do with Federalism?

Kelly states that the best way to run a country is to start with towns, then when the towns work well, introduce a county government then when counties work well introduce higher levels of government. Beinhocker notes also that it is often best for a corporation to give maximum possible autonomy to its subsidiaries. To me this is a working definition of Federalism, the word that UK “Eurosceptics” - many indistinguishable from the BNP use to scare a xenophobic British population.

To get back to software, I have found that trial and error is essential at all levels. Even if you know what the manual says and it worked on the last project it may not work on this one. Beinhocker’s idea of “deductive tinkering” rings a bell. It means go as far as you can by reasoning from known facts then, when the number of possibilities becomes too large, experiment.

Any software developer recognises this, that elegant schemes (Capitalism, Marxism, NeoConservatism and most religions) work well on paper but fall flat on their face when faced with reality. Unfortunately their proponents then dismiss reality as false.

Sherlock Holmes said “When you eliminate the impossible what remains must be the truth”

Captain Vimes of the Ankh-Morpok city watch said something like “Its not the impossible that takes time to eliminate, it’s the thousands of possibles”

Deductive tinkering seems to me to be the way to organise and eliminate the possibles.

And now it is time to do something else

Stock photography, oil crisis,IT, Burnout; government persecution of the self employed

I just checked my mail after three months overseas.  My favourite magazine had a flyer for a book about the expected end of oil.  I am not too worried about this though I think everyone is either in  denial or attacking the wrong problem. Personally I think  governments should give every house  its own wind turbine, solar power generator and  incinerator for combined heat and power.  Households should stay connected to the national grid as a backup  but be able to sell their surplus to the grid. If each household burned its rubbish there would be less  pressure on landfill and reduced costs for rubbish collection.

The real answer to the oil crisis is to find and use alternatives to oil. There seems to be a concerted attack on air travel which generates about 3% of carbon emissions and  a determination to ignore the fact that cars generate nearly 40% of carbon emissions ( latest figures I have, no source in my memory).  If more people walked or cycled there would be an additional health benefit and reduced carbon footprint from medical equipment.  I recall an extremely fat man near where I lived who would use the car to go 100 yards to the mail box.

I submitted some of my most popular photos on http://www/aayawa.aminus3.com/portfolio  to a microstock site yesterday. They were rejected on quality grounds.  Paradoxically this makes me feel happier about the agency - if they are this fussy there is a good chance the photos will sell if I can get in there. The pictures are still good but may have to go to my Photobox gallery rather than via an agency. It also looks like it is time to upgrade my camera.

Information technology is a very draining field to work in.  I  finished a nine month contract in the Netherlands just before Yuletide and I am only now beginning to feel less burned out. In a few days I may be able to resume self training while hunting the next contract. I suspect the fatigue I felt may have a touch of SAD  but the intense nature of the work, most of which involved eliminating multiple possible causes of error in an application that talked to several other computers over a crowded network resulting in days dissappearing up my own fundamental orifice did not help.

I have been involved in a lot of discussions on  http://www.shout99.com , a valuable resource for UK based software contractors  - it also offers benefits for expat workers like myself, but not enough that I have been able to justify joining.  The main gripe there is the UK government’s grossly unfair implementation of the IR35 legislation which essentially says that  if a contractor runs a limited company, as the tax man requires, and their company secures a contract with a client then the contractor is a disguised employee of the client  and the company is merely a tax doge. The same rules do not apply to larger companies and this imbalance is causing a lot of resentment. If you want to know more visit shout99.com.

The general picture I am picking up from  UK government legislation of the last decade is that they are trying to hound the self employed out of business. Yes they make the right noises about entrepreneurialism, but IR35, Section 660 and the latest proposal on “Income Shifting” add up to  a desire to eliminate the self employed, something the Civil “Service” has wanted  to do for decades.

To add insult to injury  a top Tax official was recently discovered to have engaged his wife’s consultancy for the Tax man and that brought her nearly £100,000. At least he was dismissed when found out but then it was revealed that the Her Majesties Revenue and Customs was responsible for  half of all fraud commited by civil servants but only about 5% of the cases discovered were prosecuted.

Upgrading to leopard, Photography, C# and Java

I recently upgraded to OS X 10.5 leopard and it has been an improvement. My old system (10.3.9) was beginning to exhibit strange behaviour including occasionally locking the screen while I was still typing.

On the negative side the lack of cvlassic support meant one of my staple programs (photoshop 3.5) is now history and a lot of applications I kept on CD in case I needed them are now junk. I will also have to upgrade Graphic converter - A must have program in many ways, if only becauuse of the ability to keyword lots of pictures at once. I estimate I could use spend at least £150 on updating software or buying new shareware.

My efforts to make money from my photography are failing at present. My images seem to be popular on the photoblogs ( http://www.aayawa.minus3.com/portfolio and http:// www.photobloggers.net/nemo) but the commercial side (http://www.photoboxgallery.com/aayawaimages and the stock library http://www.upixa.com - search on aayawa) is languishing and I have to revise my strategy.

The upgrade, plus using the latest version of the mono framework takes me closer to being able to develop c# applications in OS X without having to step back to the days of developing via text editor and command line and wondering which dll holds the missing file. I can almost run sharpdevelop under Mono but the missing dll problem rears its ugly head.

Clients want commercial eperience with c# but after what feels like a lifetime with java c# seems a doddle especially if I have a good ide.

All good things come to an end. It is boxing day and now we go to hit the sales

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