Internet and adult entertainment.

An interesting excerpt from a PBS Frontline interview:

Clearly one of the main reasons initially for getting on the Internet was sex. If you look at the words almost any one of the Internet suppliers has kept track of, you'll find that "sex" is probably the most frequent word used as they look for programming of any sort. So clearly, there is a desire to see it.

I think what Yahoo did was go one step beyond and say, "OK, my customers want to see sex. I'll make it easier for them, and I'll categorize it." And I think what they realized afterward was that they were taking a far more active role in supplying this programming than just making it available. "Here's bestiality, here's whips and chains, here's whatever." That was going into probably more active participation by Yahoo than they really wanted to do.

Prayers don't help heart surgery patients.

An excerpt from research on intercessory prayer by Harvard's Herbert Benson:

In a clear setback for those who believe in the power of prayer, their prayers were not answered. Prayers offered by strangers did not reduce the medical complications of major heart surgery. Not only that, but patients who knew that others were praying for them fared worse than those who did not receive such spiritual support, or who did but were not aware of receiving it.

Prayer is an illusion -- a video comparing the impact of praying to God versus praying to a jug of milk.

Patels

Excerpts from an interesting article on how the Patels from India took over more than half the room and board industry in the United States.

In the mid-1970's, Patels from Africa and Asia began to emigrate to North America. Any immigrant willing to invest $40,000 in a business could apply for permanent residence, the first step to citizenship. There were limited opportunities for such an investment. Restaurants required the Hindu Gujaratis to handle meat, an uncomfortable activity. Furthermore, a restaurant required one-on-one interaction with guests, confusing for newly-arrived immigrants. But distressed roadside motels could be acquired outright for $40,000.

Human Rights

Communist and dictatorial regimes have poor human rights records -- Stalin, Mao, Saddam Hussein; Tiananmen Square.

But do democracies fares much better?
Two invasions of the Middle East were conducted by the world's most powerful democracy, which went on to flagrantly violate the Geneva Convention on treatment of prisoners of war domestically and internationally.
The world's most populous democracy fares no better.
Even Hitler was, to a certain extent, democratically elected.

What does this portend? Perhaps that human rights violations will continue as long as large powerful central states exist, whether democratic or not.

Democracy does not work in multi-ethnic societies...

Democracy cannot work in a multi-ethnic society, so says the Paradox of Imperialism. An excerpt:

[T]he result of the [World War I] crusade to make the world safe for democracy was less liberal than what had existed before (and the Versailles peace dictate precipitated World War II). Not only did state power grow faster after the war than before. In particular, the treatment of minorities deteriorated in the democratized post–World War I period. In newly founded Czechoslovakia, for instance, the Germans were systematically mistreated (until they were finally expelled by the millions and butchered by the tens of thousands after World War II) by the majority Czechs. Nothing remotely comparable had happened to the Czechs during the previous Habsburg reign. The situation regarding the relations between Germans and southern Slavs in pre-war Austria versus post-war Yugoslavia respectively was similar.

Nor was this a fluke. As under the Habsburg monarchy in Austria, for instance, minorities had also been treated fairly well under the Ottomans. However, when the multicultural Ottoman Empire disintegrated in the course of the 19th century and was replaced by semi-democratic nation-states such as Greece, Bulgaria, etc., the existing Ottoman Muslims were expelled or exterminated. Similarly, after democracy had triumphed in the United States with the military conquest of the Southern Confederacy, the Union government quickly proceeded to exterminate the Plains Indians. As Mises had recognized, democracy does not work in multi-ethnic societies. It does not create peace but promotes conflict and has potentially genocidal tendencies.

Order from Anarchy

From chaos arises order, as seven European Cities do away with Traffic Signs in an experiment to see whether people can self-organize their interaction with others:

"The many rules strip us of the most important thing: the ability to be considerate. We're losing our capacity for socially responsible behavior," says Dutch traffic guru Hans Monderman, one of the project's co-founders. "The greater the number of prescriptions, the more people's sense of personal responsibility dwindles." ... Psychologists have long revealed the senselessness of such exaggerated regulation. About 70 percent of traffic signs are ignored by drivers. What's more, the glut of prohibitions is tantamount to treating the driver like a child and it also foments resentment. He may stop in front of the crosswalk, but that only makes him feel justified in preventing pedestrians from crossing the street on every other occasion. Every traffic light baits him with the promise of making it over the crossing while the light is still yellow.

Creativity, innovation and sharing of ideas.

Excepts from an interesting article (Protecting the Golden Goose by Pamela Jones of groklaw) on the clash between the long-term objectives of freedom and the greed of short-term-oriented businesses:

• Compatibility is a bedrock [Free and Open Source Software] value, but it goes against corporate thinking. Corporations want to differentiate and lock in customers [through incompatibility].
  
• Corporations will naturally be reluctant to share knowledge. Whether it's for competitive reasons, for confidentiality, or most probably, due to time pressure, it appears to me that the flow of testing results and the promptness of getting fixes out to the rest of the world is slowing down a bit.
• Regressions [to isolationism]: Creativity inevitably springs from large numbers of people experimenting, combined with a low barrier to entry to sharing and contributing. Those are essential ingredients in Linux's success.
• In code, progress is incremental. [IP] laws that seek ... to keep knowledge out of the pool ... end up [creating] a barrier to learning, preventing the rapid progress you could have had from pooling ideas and skills.

The economics of divorce

Hmm.

Miracles: How did the sea part?

Many religions mention a miracle of the sea parting to make way for someone to escape from their captors. This article explains the Old Testament's "crossing of the Red Sea". An excerpt:

Many years ago Aristotle wrote about miracles and he said that the “efficient cause” of a miracle could be a natural agent, with the “final cause” being the will of God. The miracle is revealed by the extraordinary timing of the event. I believe that the “efficient cause” in many of the Exodus miracles was a natural agent (a porous rock, a strong wind, a volcano, etc.) and that science can discover this natural agent and give the mechanism of the miracle. Indeed, as we have seen, the Bible is explicit that the crossing of the Red Sea was enabled by a natural agent, a strong east wind.

Teamwork

Excerpt from a recent blog post advising geek entrepreneurs:

One of the ironies of the programming world is that using Lisp is vastly more productive than using pretty much any other programming language, but successful businesses based on Lisp are quite rare. The reason for this, I think, is that Lisp allows you to be so productive that a single person can get things done without having to work together with anyone else, and so Lisp programmers never develop the social skills needed to work effectively as a member of a team. A C programmer, by contrast, can't do anything useful except as a member of a team. So although programming in C hobbles you in some ways, it forces you to form groups whose net effectiveness is greater than the sum of their parts, and who collectively can stomp on all the individual Lisp programmers out there, even though one-on-one a Lisper can run rings around a C programmer.

How governments accumulate power

I came across this description recently.

The Chicago School of economics favored and still favors the theory of "regulatory capture." Under this theory, an industry or some portions of an industry cultivate government to obtain laws and rules that favor the industry.

The government trades favors for what it wants. Politicians gain political contributions, side payments, and votes for being seen to control the industry. The industry captures the regulators. End of story.

[Gary North] called the first step of obtaining favors "baiting the trap." But matters do not stop there, he pointed out. The trap is set when the industry becomes comfortable with its subsidy, tax break, tariff, exclusive position, license, or whatever. It then begins to extract monopoly rents and to lower product quality.

This then leads to further steps such as public outcry and a government demand for the industry to police itself. Then come crisis, further regulatory intervention, and eventually a government stranglehold over the entire industry via a panoply of boards and price controls. This is when the trap is sprung. The market is replaced by government power and bureaucrats. Government, its aim being control, traps and captures the industry.

In the shorter term, the interest groups use the state against the public. In the longer term, the state and its bureaucrats rule the roost. In the end, the government bureaucracies expand. Paperwork and soft jobs rule the industry, innovation and competition are eclipsed, and the public suffers from poor product quality and high prices.

This summarizes the argument made in "Walking into a Trap", an essay by Gary North, that originally appeared in 1978 in The Freeman, on the threat to American medicine posed by the State.

Internet pollution

Spyware, parasites and unscrupulous search engines that encourage the creation of bogus websites for Click Fraud are increasingly polluting the web.

Download this list of hosts, read the instructions and modify your PC settings to prevent this internet pollution. No more recycled ads on third party websites. Goodbye, cookie trackers!

Why are you satisfied?

Comcast called me yesterday for a customer satisfaction survey. I think they know via cable box that I have not connected my TV or watched any channels so they are calling me every two days to ask if I am happy. When I told her I was "satisfied, rating 5 on 5" she asked me: "Why are you satisfied?" That was a new one. I had to say "I am satisfied because I am not unsatisfied."

Opens up a Pandora's box of vexing philosophical issues.

Apparently this is not so uncommon.

Before and after.

It is but a short way from yesterday's star trader to world's biggest loser today. How does one lose 6 billion dollars? The mind boggles.

America's biggest export is...

.. the dollar.

Watch this space for more on the topic. "Green Paper Flight".

Elitism

Elitism is the natural consequence of freedom -- under any metric, some will always be superior to others.

For this reason a community centered on egalitarian, non-elitist principles cannot thrive.

This explains among others, phenomena like: why plutocracy is the inevitable result of starting with either democracy or socialism, why corporations with flat organizational structures quickly develop heirarchies, etc.

Needs more thought.

Cathedral and the Bazaar

The canonical example of bazaar style development, Linux, allows anyone to modify source code, but pre-designated individuals, who are presumably competent, are the only ones authorised to make these changes permanent. Eg., if you want to change something in the kernel of the operating system, you have to successfully make a case to Linus.

Wikipedia lacks this quality control by domain experts, leading to a lack of polish. One co-founder, Larry Sanger, who devised the details of Wikipedia's neutrality concept, is starting an improvement over wikipedia called Citizendium.

The rise of Fascism

After the US government revealed some weeks ago that it was spying on its citizens and running torture camps abroad, private sector has joined in on the fun -- Hewlett-Packard hired investigators to illegally spy on the activities of its own board members, many reporters and their families.

Where will this lead to and when will it stop?

Too many "realtors"

Is it really impossible to sell or buy real estate without the intermediary activity of a realty agent? Is "realtor (TM)" really a true professional, like a journalist, a doctor or an engineer? Is it justifiable to charge a fixed 6% of sales price for every transaction independent of the amount of time or effort involved? Does a real-estate agent really spend time trying to get you the best sale or purchase price, or is he primarily concerned with making a quick buck on a fast deal?

One attorney, David Barry, is fighting a crusade against some aspects of this bogus industry. In a recent article, "Nine Pillars of the Citadel", he estimates that in a truly competitive and efficient real-estate market, the commisions would be 50% lower, the average realty agent would make 30% more and there would be 83% fewer realty agents.

Cultural attitudes

Recently, on three different occasions I had the opportunity to share a table with an Israeli and an Indian each time. Six different individuals, and I had the opportunity to watch their attitudes as they discussed friends, family, country, work, vacations, etc.

The difference in cultural attitude was strikingly stark -- Jews have a strongly ingrained value that "you shall not play down your race", the Indians were more than glad to bad mouth their homeland. As an example: The Jews speak their mothertongue at home and bring up their children strongly in the Jewish tradition, but the Indians seem to prefer to speak English at home, rather than their mother-tongue. Small data set to generalize from but: Wow!

Does this not say something about survival of the race vs individual?