To be clear:  our modern culture threw $100Billion with a B of bored capital at the Facebook IPO...an entity that employs about 3500 people.

That same entity just recently threw $19Billion with a B of bored capital at 'WhatsApp', an entity that employs 55 people.

Wither gradient going anywhere?

To me, this isn't evidence of a nefarious plot; this is evidence that, without the boundary condition of dirt simple 2D geopolitical gradient, intellectual frontiers do not create broad opportunities; they create opportunities only in other narrow intellectual fields, and that fact-- not our current ratcake political theories -- is the source of increasing disparity in incomes and wealth.   If there is a societal/cultural need to raise outcomes for more people, it is not by enslaving success in the service of subsidy in some kind of half - assed targeting of stasis and equality(were all eventually equal at 0 under that plan), but in intelligently redirecting success into areas that recreate frontier and gradient and broad opportunites.

In the past, with the existence of 2D surface gradient/development wave,  the existence of an actual frontier and the resulting gradient of opportunities resulted in intellectual frontiers creating broad economic opportunities;  a Bethlehem Steel employed 330,000 Americans and created broad economic wealth.

The effort to put 12 sets of footprints on the Moon was not for those 12 astronauts.  That effort and reach went all the way back to Huntslville Al, Los Angeles, CA, Bethpage, NY, Houston, Tx, Cape Kennedy, FL, and to all the research universities and labs where human beings imagined and reached.   That was the result of the gradient of needs and opportunities extending from earth to the Moon...

That spark is still alive at places like SpaceX and even, deep within NASA.    But that spark is a sideshow in a -culture- that is slouching towards ... Facebook, etc. in $100B sized whacks.

regards,

Fred

(Edited by Fred Bartlett on 7/07, 6:09am)

Vera:

Ha!

Well, the telephone -can be- used mostly for crap, and TV and Radio -can be- used mostly for crap and the Internet -can be- used mostly for crap, but there is some small amount of bandwidth -- some tiny fraction of the promise -- that yet drives the rest.   It is not the other way around.   King Consumer slouched on the couch might be a massive gaping maw waiting to be filled, but it does not fill itself, nor can it.  It can be pandered to for transient power over a dead carcass, but it cannot be driven to create beast.  That is what the minority does with its tiny slice of all that wasted bandwidth.

It is the concept of gradient that drives markets, and the argument is, that only in the presence of geopolitical gradient/growth paradign do intellectual frontiers create broad economic opportunities.  Otherwise, without that 'dirt simple' geopolitical gradient, intellectual frontiers spin off into eddies that create opportunites only in other intellectual frontiers, going nowhere and providing jobs for fewer and fewer of the King Consumers.   This, to me, is what is at the foundation of the growing disparity between haves and have nots, why income and wealth disparity is accelerating.

What are the alternatives?    Shepherd King Consumer into the purely intellectual frontiers?  Not happening.

Seriously...what are the alternatives?   If nothing, then all now is an end game and we are in the rats on a sinking lifeboat stage of the festivities, and some rats scramble better than other and will survive an additional 15 minutes. then what?

But that is entirely consistant with the end of gradient; the transition to stasis is an end game.  The end of economies.

Canary in the coal mine:  you are laboring in the bits and bytes arena as an independent.  Me, too.   Then you've noticed the changing nature of what folks ask you to do for them, and have sometimes been shaking your head. I like you have saluted the flag and bid on and got my share of doing what folks claim they want to do, and have sometimes been disheartened at the nature of what that is.  Not always.  But these days, increasingly.

As you say, no matter what you call it, sell them what they say they want.  It pays the bills.

Obama recently announced that Ike's MIC is actually building Iron Man.    They are hiring the special effects studios who built the suit for the movies.    It's part of the new Community Organizer/Poliical Scientist view of systems engineering: fantasy first, physics later.   So far it is expensively shitting the bed.   Physics is a real bitch.   But the animated promos are killer.

"The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,

 Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun..."

-W. H. Auden, "Stop All The Clocks"

(Edited by Joe Maurone on 7/08, 4:20am)

very romantic notion Joe :)

being myself a disillusioned romantic I cannot help but be moved - but I stand by my earlier comment: just like Auden uses his bereft subject to 'adjust' the world around him to his own loss, humanity uses the world around it to 'adjust' it to it's own destruction ... pack up humanity - we've waited long enough for a potential to become an actual - or how long do you suggest we muddle through til that promised day?

so you, me and Fred go to Mars with Buzz - but I'll not open a faecesbook account to quack about it :P

love the cover - Thanx :)

Michael,

I didn't say it doesn't make a difference, however if you want to have the choice to live by objectivist standards, you cannot take that choice away from those who want to live with slaves - you can't force others to be as enlightened as you are, as productive, as rational as you know the human species could be

in the ultimate consequence you'd have to lead a crusade of objectivists - of course with reason only - but your reason would have only minimal effect on the masses of the non-rational and thus would either have to be backed by force (big no-no) or a lot of patience and even more effort to educate them over several hundred generations ... and the outcome would still be in question, as mankind keeps sliding backwards after each great leap ahead - as your own examples show ...

An odd observation, made by others.  (I forget for the moment where I saw this; a consequence in myself of the very fact.   I think it was a Youtube video...)

If you take a picture of an object, say, a building, at two far enough separated points in time, you will have two static images of the object.   But just looking at the images, we can generally distinguish which image was taken in the past and which was taken in the present.    The building might have new windows, or a new addition, but in general, without great effort(and the results of that effort will be disorder elsewhere, swept under the rug so to speak) it will show signs of 'age' and based on those signs, we can infer the direction of the arrow of time.

Is this is mere consequence of the passing of the time, which we have learned, or is it fundamental to the concept of time in a Universe that is slowly dissassoicating all gradient and inexorably grinding down to some dim gray 3 deg K ... 2.9 deg K .... 2.8 deg K.... completely uniform future without significant gradients?

Does that observational fact apply in some sense to mankind itself?   Certainly to us as individuals, even if we are more atune to this process in our old age than we are in our youth, but that is not what I mean.  To the species?  To civilization.

I wonder that because we are -not- the same nation we were even 50 years ago; I doubt we are much the same species we were 1000 yrs ago except in the most trivial of ways.   I'm thinking more of the spine than the brain..

regards,

Fred

(Edited by Fred Bartlett on 7/09, 5:07am)

Michael:

Enjoyed the 'Razorboards' piece.   

I had a summer student working with me once, for a couple summers back in the mid 90s. He was a smart young man.   The first year, right out of HS, before his freshmen year of college, he was eager to learn.   By the second year, after a year at school, he was telling me that it was beneath him to program in any language that didn't have garbage collection.     I think he 'learned' that at school.   What he learned would serve to isolate him at many layers of abstraction above the spinning machines.   I saw 'this' happening in the late 70s as a young development engineer; increasingly, new arrivals were huddled up around the new vector terminals, staring at 2D pristine meridional views of machinery, and not down in the lab pouring over ripped apart machines alongside of HS grads who have been building these machines for decades,  with worn bearings and leaky seals and rubbed rotors, getting their fingers dirty and seeing where designs have fucked up.  'This' being, ever more abstract layers appearing between the developers and the spinning machines.   At some point, we become too separated from reality when we focus exclusively in a virtual pristine simulation of reality.   Before you know it, UN Panels are basing policy based on the outputs of uncalibrated computer models, as if they were reality.

What I am about to say, I've said many times, like most of the BS I say.   I don't intend it to apply to everyone.   But when it comes to technology, at least in the USA, I see a tendency for us to be raising riders, not drivers.   There are far more folks interested in playing games than designing/building games; there are far more folks entertained by pressing buttons and appearing to be in control than there are folks who grok how linear algebra hurling triangles at a 3D pipeline relates to creating the experience, or are interested in the technology underneath the buttons and close to the spinning machines.   Way more folks wearing shades and pressing buttons than pressing keys and writing shaders.

As I've pointed out before... F14, F15, F16, F117, F18, B1...and certainly B52 ..   all rapidly developed, including their avionics, before or during at time when PONG was state of the art video gaming.    Modern breed of engineers with more computing power on their desktops than existed in the entire USA when the B52 was developed, with the advantage of access to every program that preceeded them, spent over 20 yrs developing the F22 and F35.

And yet, we are not even raising a nation of game developers.    We have raised a nation of game players. Of Razorboard riders.    Riders, not drivers.   The drivers are still to be found but are fewer and far between.  It is tech that creates a demand for tech; otherwise it is just guys in suits banging out shrink wrapped plastic for riders who have been convinced by flying dreadlocks in silohette...or maybe the image of a 'brilliant' curmudgen skating by on his Razorboard-- to want the latest plastic thing.   Gee, I can skate on my Razorboard; I can appear to be brilliant, too.   That, too, is the power of glamor.

regards,

Fred

Vera, even though philosophy supplanted religion as the primary source of moral teaching, people still worshipped gods in Athens. Aspasia, Anaxagoras, and most famously, Socrates, were prosecuted for impiety.  In the Renaissance, millions of people did not seek to become l'uomo universale.  In the great age of industry, 95% of the people in America lived on farms.  Historical trends are created by some; and everyone else just follows.

I have seen changes in the last 50 years that indicate broad and deep improvement in the general culture.  

In baseball, you can strike out two out of three times at the plate all season long, and lead the league with a .333.  Edison paradigmatically tried nine or ten thousand filaments to get one that worked.  My point is that in America, we do not count the failures.  We only reward the successes. 

First we took Manhattan; then we took Berlin.

Jules:

ugh.

I've seen youngun's playing these virtual sports games and 'configuring' their player/avatars.    Press a few buttons, slide a few sliders, and 'you' can be effortlessly bigger, stronger, faster, more 'athletic.'   Well, mainly, the thumbs.     Instant gratification.  Instant results.   'success' in a virtual world, without effort.    Might as well be selling crack to addicts.  ALmost precisely the same process of gratification.   No, seriously, it takes some skill to light that pipe.

But don't diss steroids like that; steroids do not make anyone bigger, faster, or more athletic;   steroids permit faster recovery between workouts, allowing a more strenuous training regimen than without steroids.   The -results- of the more strenuous training regimen is getting bigger, faster, more athletic.

Steroids are as much 'cheating' as vitamins are.   If someone takes steroids and sits on a couch for three months, nothing good will come of it.   They are not magic pills.

Steroids up until at least the 70s were legal in sports.   There was a period from the 50s until the 70s when they were not only legal, but totally uncontrolled(no prescription from a doctor required, like in the 70s)

And did we notice?   It wasn't until steroids were 'banned' from sports, chasing all the legitimate doctors away, that HS teams started looking like college teams,  college teams like pro teams, and pro teams like those virtual freaks on Madden 2014.   Which makes me suspect, the reason for the ban was to exactly chase the doctors away, to encourage more athletes to go full bore nonstop cowboy so that fatasses in suits could ride them like trained ponys.

Sure; it's modern vitamins.  They got suddenly much better, coincidentally, when steroids were 'banned' from sports.   As if.

Would I rather see my son taking steroids, under a doctors supervision, with weekly blood work (like in the 70s) and running up hills, working out 7 days a week in the off-season, or would I rather see him sitting on a couch sliding sliders and playing Madden?

It's not even close.   But today, unnecessary, at least with 'scholarships' for game playing.

For game making?  I could understand that in a heartbeat, and applaud it.  There would have at least been some brain muscle exerted.   But game playing?   Sitting on a couch and playing a game made by some other creative mind?   A total rider?

Nothing wrong with enjoying a game and being entertained by someone else's effort and creativity, which Mom or Dad paid for at $49.95 a crack.  But being rewarded for it?   

Reminds me of handing Krugman a Nobel prize for making the observation "More than one nation can manufacture automobilies."   Attaboy, Paul, here is your cookie.

regards,

Fred

(Edited by Fred Bartlett on 7/10, 9:06am)