Today is the birthday of one of the patron saints of mad science grumpy visonaries, Nikola Tesla. In lieu of doing anything myself, of course, I'll just point you at a) Google's nifty logo today (seriously, you don't need a link to google), b) The Davenport Sisters' Clockwork Cabaret episode and birthday card about Nikola Tesla, and c) apparently there's a hard rock band called Tesla too.

Why is that many of the people who talk the loudest and the longest about "bravery" and "toughness" and so on were the first people to completely panic about terrorists and demand, say, pointless and intrusive searches, wars with unrelated countries, and generally bombing the crap out of other people, just so they can feel safer from the Magical Supervillain Terrorists?

(And yes, I know several possible answers. I'm mostly being rhetorical here)

So far this year, like every year, the regular old flu has killed thousands more people than the Panic of the Moment Animal Flu.

The More You Know!

So, Dr. Steel? Total Son of Aether. Especially the video interview parts, where I find I agree with more than a little of his justification of world domination. Mostly the part where he's the one in charge, not me. :)

Very short category review:
Lots of: explosions, and giant robots fighting each other, plot holes, tasteless jokes, generically "hot" women, war porn, missed opportunities, badassness for Optimus Prime, macguffins
Few of: character arcs, names for new characters, characterization for new characters, lines for new characters
Way too much: Man ass, testicle jokes, humping jokes, length of time


So, basically, it was just what could be expected for a Michael Bay sequel to the Michael Bay first movie, turned up to 11. Entertaining if you're not expecting anything more than giant robots fighting or are a thirteen year old boy. It was pretty much what I expected, and I was entertained in the theater, though afterwards the plot holes started to irritate. But I didn't expect more than it was, so I got what I expected.

Okay, so this one program I'm using for this research project?

It's written in FORTRAN.

Seriously.

No matter what I do, or how well I do it, I'm never going to be as awesome as Buckminster Fuller.

If you're ever telling your child something at all similar to how they're the greatest disappointment in your life, you're doing it wrong.

You're not trying to "challenge" them, it's not "tough love", you're just hurting them, and possibly setting up a dramatic battle where they repudiate you and all that you stood for, rather than trying to meet your expectations. Possibly in a thunderstorm.

Also, it's not your job. Your job is to help them, train them, and encourage them to go out and kick the world's butt, then get out of the way and let them do it their way, and offer help when they need it.

But then again, I don't have kids yet, so I could be completely wrong. But I don't think so.

A post, over on Salon, called "The Utopian Economics of "Star Trek" lays out part of the foundation for a Star Trek future. The defining part of the Star Trek future, for me, is the optimism of it. Part of the optimism is Star Trek is a future largely without scarcity. Even before the replicators of TNG, most resources are easily available. The only limits are energy, and some rare elements, especially the dilithium, the handwavium that makes the nearly-limitless energy available. And once most things aren't scarce, current economics falls apart, as the cots of everything would approach 0.

Which, frankly, is not really that unreasonable, for a spacefaring civilization that's managed to spread beyond a single solar system. Think of the Kardashev scale. The Federation's obviously at least Type II.

To get to a Star Trek future, there's lots of problems to be solved, some technological, but just as many social, political, economic, and everything else. There's room for everybody to work to make a better world.

In the modern world, there's no escaping advertising. Something like half the email in the world is spam. Webpages have pop over, under, around, and through ads. TV shows are at least a quarter ads. There's ads on buses, taxis, signs, buildings, supermarket floors, even over the urinals in men's rooms, or inside toilet stalls. You can't even PEE without somebody trying to sell you something. And besides the sheer annoyance of somebody always trying to sell you something, the thing that bugs me the most about this is what it does to people. When somebody's always trying to sell you something, you always have to wonder what somebody's trying to sell you. Even things that otherwise look awesome, you have to wonder who sponsored it, or if it was somebody really doing it. Here I'm thinking of those videos of "spontaneous" dancing, since flash mobs got hijacked. Or that Guitar Hero ad they made with the kid and the bike, and cheated it with CGI.

It's really hard NOT to get cynical when it's justified to constantly be suspicious of what anybody tells you. And that pisses me off. Cynicism is a false comfort. "Oh, if you don't expect anything better, you're not disappointed." Great, thanks. When did avoiding disappointment become a justification for enabling a half-assed civilization? The disappointment you "avoid" with cynicism and not expecting things to be better is a real slight comfort compared to the fact you weren't surprised because things SUCK. Way to go there. You keep your smug comfort. Me, I'm choosing the naive idealism that both we and the world can be better than now. Fuck your dystopias. We're gonna build a Star Trek future while you're busy letting the world live down to your expectations.

I've been trying to avoid blogging about politics lately, since I haven't had the time, and I'm trying to focus on school to get where I can help make actual fixes to problems.

But then sometimes something so ludicrous, so mind-boggling, so downright stupid happens, that I can't.

First, Texas governor Rick Perry said "We think it’s time to draw the line in the sand and tell Washington that no longer are we going to accept their oppressive hand in the state of Texas. That’s what this press conference, that’s what these Texans are standing up for." in a press conference, shortly after appearing at a "tea party" where outraged reactionaries were protesting having their taxes cut. And at that appearance, "Texas Gov. Rick Perry fired up an anti-tax "tea party" Wednesday with his stance against the federal government and for states' rights as some in his U.S. flag-waving audience shouted, "Secede!" ..."There's a lot of different scenarios," Perry said. "We've got a great union. There's absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that. But Texas is a very unique place, and we're a pretty independent lot to boot."

Yes, he's talking about seceding from the United States. Again. But hey, it's he's a Texas Republican, they've always been a little crazy, right?

It's not just Texas. Georgia, my current home state, passed a "sovereignty resolution" essentially affirming Georgia's right to ignore any federal laws they don't like.

Seriously.

No, seriously, and other politicians have been talking about it too. The governor in Oklahoma vetoed one.

Seriously. I could not make this shit up. I've joked about the "Confederate Party", but now they're talking secession. Because of... the stimulus? Or because they're not in control of government? Or... Hell, I don't know. I know some reasonable people who're Republicans, but large portions of the party have gone stark raving bonkers.

The same party that tarred anybody who disagreed with them as "anti-American" or "unpatriotic" is now talking about seceding from the United States because they lost an election. Seriously.

The Civil War is over. The South lost.

GET OVER IT.

Hmm. I'm beginning to suspect that to do lots of the many things I want to do (one of which is to find an old building and turn it into a factory of awesome), I'm gonna need a significant amount of cash. Not Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark level of money, but quite a bit of dough. Now to figure out how to get it in ethical ways that would leave me the time to enjoy a factory of awesome. Which leaves out some of the more entertaining possibilities, like heist capers, for both reasons.

Wow. Not one, but TWO op-eds, in major newspapers, ranting about the evils of denim and jeans. Seriously. I'm not gonna bother linking to either of them, they don't need any more traffic.

But the entire premise, besides Grumpy Old Man syndrome, seems to be that because of jeans, they can't look at people and tell what social class they are. Ohnoes!

For all the glories and conveniences civilization brings people, there's one problem with it.

It's BORING. All of the little, necessary work to keep things running? Not exciting. It's papers and numbers and routine maintenance and zoning laws and public meetings and procedures and plenty of non-exciting minuate. It's all the little things that need to be done and done right and when they're all done, then you've got the giant pretty skyscraper. Now you just need people to clean it.

Excitement is what happens when things go wrong.

I've been looking for this chart for weeks, and finally found it. This is the key to why we're in the economic mess we are, and have been.



This chart shows the growth of the GDP (basically the "income" earned in the country) with the median household income, with 1979 set as 1 to have a standard for comparison. From the end of World War II to about 1980, the two tracked pretty well, when the GDP went up, median incomes went up by about the same percentage. There's a little bump where incomes went up faster than GDP, but the most notable point is 1980, where the two completely diverge. After 1980, median wages grow more slowly than GDP, and hardly at all from about 2000 to 2007, where the general way the two lines track seems to completely break down.

Now, correlation is not causation and all, so I leave figuring out what events could have caused this to the reader for now, and am just going to get into the implications of what the break means.

What does it mean for median wages to grow more slowly than the national "income" of the GDP? It means average people's wages haven't been keeping up with growth. It means that using the GDP as a predictor of the "health" of the general economy has been useless for at least 20 years, since the general economy, by definition, is driven by average people.

Our economy has lately been driven by "consumption", that is, selling plastic crap made in China to each other. So if GDP's been going up, it means people have been spending more (to vastly simplify). But if GDP's been going up, and the money people make hasn't been going up as fast, that extra money's got to come from somewhere. How can people spend more money than they have? Well, by going into their savings (our savings rate is less than 1%, or at least it WAS) and by taking out loans. Loans like, say, credit cards, or mortgages, or other kinds of debt. The median household had $3000 in credit card debt they carried from month to month in 2007. Just look at the proliferation of "payday loan" places. Or, say, the mortgage bubble.

The other thing it means that the growth going on isn't being shared equally. It's going somewhere other than regular people's wages. And while gaps of a couple percent don't seem like much, over 40 years, that adds up, quickly. Everybody remembers compound interest, right?

So where's that extra money been going? Well, since the chart uses median income, rather than mean, that extra money could be going to a very few people, not enough to affect the position of the median very much, since the median's where 50% of the sample is on either side. Like if Bill Gates walks into a bar, the mean income goes up a lot, but not the median income. So that's one possibility, which seems to be part of it if you look at numbers for income growth among top earners.

It could also be that some of that GDP growth didn't exist. Or at least didn't represent anything productive. Things like say, financial "innovations" like betting on mortgages, that seem to generate a lot of money, but don't actually DO anything.

I think it's some of both. Some of the economic "growth" over the past 20 years has been illusionary, some's been fraud, and some has concentrated into a lot fewer hands. The housing bubble was caused in large part because people were treating houses as investments and ATMs, since their wages weren't covering things. That lack of growth has been hurting many facets of the economy, but that's been covered up for years by the explosive growth of the finance sector, which was a combination of fraud, smoke and mirrors, and a gigantic transfer of wealth from everybody else to a very few. But that couldn't go on forever, there's only so long you can cook the books and make popcorn from your seed corn before you run out. And that's what hit, and the ginormous bets so many companies made almost brought down their whole house of cards, only government guarantees and bailouts are holding it up right now.

So what to do about all this? Well, I have a number of suggestions, but I'll save them for another post some time. People who know me can probably guess at some of them though.

Zombie Squad.

"Zombie Squad is an elite zombie suppression task force ready to defend your neighborhood from the shambling hordes of the walking dead. We provide trained, motivated, skilled zombie extermination professionals and zombie survival consultants. Our people and our training are the best in the industry.

When the zombie removal business is slow we focus our efforts towards educating ourselves and our community about the importance of disaster preparation. </p>

To satisfy this goal we host disaster relief charity fundraisers, disaster preparation seminars and volunteer our time towards emergency response agencies.

Our goal is to educate the public about the importance of personal preparedness and self reliance, to increase its readiness to respond to disasters such as Earthquakes, Floods, Terrorism or Zombie Outbreaks. We want to make sure you are prepared for any crisis situation that might come along in your daily life which may include having your face eaten by the formerly deceased."

Charity. With zombies. Awesome.

"Think of it. We are blessed with technology that would be indescribable to our forefathers. We have the wherewithal, the know-it-all to feed everybody, clothe everybody, and give every human on Earth a chance. We know now what we could never have known before-that we now have the option for all humanity to "make it" successfully on this planet in this lifetime. Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will b a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment."  — R. Buckminster Fuller

Though the quote makes me wonder about my choice of vocation, because we have all the technology we need to make all this happen. What we're lacking is the will, and the models, and the explanations, and the incentives. That's what we need to change. The systems.

Today is obviously power music day. Dinosaur Comics and Slacktivist are both about power music and/or the power of music today.

Personally, I'm a huge sucker for big epic power music, be it ballands, metal, or whatever. Including Journey. There's just something about big epic musical awesome things. Probably that they're big epic and awesome.

Can anybody recommend a good program to go through a lot of music files, identify the duplicates, and remove them? I installed iTunes, and it asked if I wanted it to consolidate my music library, which meant it made copies of all my other songs into the iTunes directory. More organized mostly, yes, but now they take up twice the space. And twice a lot is a lot!

Not that I'm doing anything particularly steampunky lately, but just in case I don, I'm totally dibsing the name "Bloody Clever" for my airship.