The title says it all … I’ve migrated the SSS Blog to my own domain, please bookmark ssshupe.com to see more recent posts. Thanks for reading!
Better Late than Never (aka, I Need You!)
I turned sixty today. Not dealing with it particularly well, truth be told. I’m finally aware that my life is not just finite (something I knew intellectually but never felt inside), but extremely finite. All that time I had to do anything I wanted to do? Well, it’s mostly ticked away.
There’s one thing I’ve always wanted to do, but never seemed to find the time to do, and that’s write. Write seriously. It’s hard to motivate myself to do that when I look at the sheer volume of material on the internet; who needs more words, really? Plus the Twitter-ization and Facebook-ification of writing, with its emphasis on short and pithy, is discouraging. Does anyone read past 90 words anymore?
But now that I have the time, I’m going to commit to seeing whether my in-my-head belief that I’m a good writer, that people will be interested in what I say, holds up in the real world.
Part of what’s always held me back was a belief that my (non-fiction, expository) writing had to be internally consistent. I couldn’t say “x” and then say (or even imply) “y” and then (God help us) say or imply “2”. But I hereby abandon that belief. It’s too limiting. I’m not one consistent whole, I’m a jumble of different, often conflicting parts. I’m permitting myself to flesh out an idea one week, and then the opposite (or tangent) idea the next. So be forewarned: Any criticism based on inconsistency will be met with an emphatic “Yesssss!”
I’ve also been held back for fear of offending people I care about, people whose opinions matter to me. This problem arises in particular because I’m a pragmatic, common-sense, no B.S., politically middle-of-the-road Midwesterner living in one of the most liberal places in the world. Some of the things I want to write about (no, some of the things I will write about) will surely agitate the provincial bien pensants. Can’t be helped, I’m afraid. My only defense will be that I promise I’ll piss off conservatives too.
Although by training and temperament writing non-fiction essay-style pieces comes easiest to me, I’m also curious to write fiction too. I fear I don’t have the creativity to do that well, nor is it clear to me how to present fiction in a blog. So that may or may not happen. If it does, bear with me, and remember it’s not my strength.
To the few of you who are regular readers, thank you. Please stay tuned. I need you! I need to know at least one other person out there is hearing, digesting, thinking about what I write. For my part, depending on the subject, I’ll do my best to be as honest, thought-provoking, original, humorous, insightful, biting, kind, straightforward and, above all, as genuine as I can be. I look forward to your judgment as to how successful I prove to be.
Why Does Windows Still Suck? Thoughts on Progress and the Best Possible World
A rhetorical question but, as you’ll see after a short techno-rant, one that opens a door into a basic truth about the world.
For an older guy, I’m pretty tech savvy — early internet adopter (Usenet, anyone?), longtime Linux user (and reformed distro jumper), Python/machine learning dabbler. So the fact that the Windows operating system is still, after how many years now (well Windows 95 was a big thing, remember, and that’s more than 20 years ago), as slow and clunky as it is.
I have two machines at home, a desktop and a laptop, with comparable hardware. The desktop runs Windows 10; the laptop runs Linux — Fedora 24 with the Plasma 5 desktop (a sweet distro by the way, beautiful, stable, and highly configurable). The Linux laptop boots up in about an eighth of the time as the Windows machine, and, unlike the Windows machine, when the bootup is done and the desktop appears, you can actually start working right away without suffering through the Windows experience of clicking an icon and then waiting an uncertain amount of time additional for the hard drive to do whatever the heck its doing before deciding to open the program.
Updates are where Windows takes the worst comparison hit. Linux updates download and are installed entirely in the background. In contrast, a couple of weeks back I spent an hour and twenty minutes waiting for Windows updates to download and install on my desktop computer, and an equal amount of time waiting for the same process to happen on my work machine. Close to three hours of unproductive time.
For my non-tech readers, Linux is a free “open source” operating system, which runs an entire ecosystem of free, open-source applications, all of which are as good as (and in some cases better than) the equivalent Windows versions. Software for word processing, photo editing, playing and organizing music and videos, spreadsheets, presentations, and all variety of web connections is available at zero cost. And, unlike Windows, Linux systems allow the user infinite options to customize the computer desktop experience.
So why is it that the expensive operating system continues to be inferior to the free one? Why is it that Microsoft, with its hundreds of billions of dollars in revenues and its huge stock of bright, capable employees, hasn’t been able to put out a better product after all these years?
***
When I was younger, in the face of a proposal to fundamentally change something in the world — laws, institutions, morals — part of me always reacted negatively, out of a belief that, having developed over time, the world must have already sifted out good ideas from bad ones, that the laws, institutions, and morals of the existing world were entitled to a presumption of “best fit,” that a sort of natural selection must have occurred in human history, with disadvantageous systems dying off and effective, useful systems surviving. I believed, too, in the impossibility of human intellect to grasp the complexity of the world, to really know whether or not a new idea might have unknowable negative consequences. A fundamentally conservative mindset, based on a faith that it simply must be the case that we mostly live in the “best possible” world.
With age and experience, I no longer believe that. The edifice that is the combination of human-created social, political, economic, and moral structure was created in layers. New ideas don’t get to work on a blank slate; they have to glom onto, fit and mold into, the already-existing structure. Only in extraordinary circumstances does a new idea remove or “sand down” the surface of the existing edifice. And the new ideas don’t necessarily represent progress — there’s a randomness to the world that our order-desiring minds don’t want to contemplate.
The result is a cobbled-together world, a lumpy, unattractive edifice, layers on layers, that is the way it is largely because of the way it was. The best analogy from science isn’t natural selection, it’s geology — slow accretion and sedimentation over time, punctuated by random, unexpected volcanism and asteroid strikes.
Human institutions are extraordinarily sticky. They remain in place even when their negatives outweigh their positives.
Windows still sucks for the same basic reason. Originally built on a less-than-optimal, already largely deprecated operating system (MS-DOS), once the Windows system became dominant, and third parties started writing software using it, it became impossible to overhaul it. Too much was invested in it, too many other elements relied on it, the danger of unintended consequences from major tweaks was too great. So most of the computer world slogs on with an inferior, expensive operating system infrastructure, even though a free, better system is available for anyone to download and use.
I no longer presume we live in the best possible world. We just live in the world we have.
Marks and Dupes, It’s Already Started
Less than four days from the election and the veil is already coming off.
Repeal Obamacare? “President-elect Donald Trump is already signaling that he might backpedal on his promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act,” according to many sources, including the Washington Post.
“Drain the Swamp” by eliminating the corrupt establishment from government? Nevermind. “President-elect Donald J. Trump, who campaigned against the corrupt power of special interests, is filling his transition team with some of the very sort of people who he has complained have too much clout in Washington: corporate consultants and lobbyists.” Included are a Verizon lobbyist helping picking staff at the Federal Trade Communication, an energy industry lobbyist in charge of the “energy independence” portfolio, and a lobbyist for giant food and beverage companies setting up a new team at the Department of Agriculture.
Add to that all these down-home, non-establishment folks being considered for cabinet positions, according to ABC News:
- Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, who’s always looking out for the little guy, or Carl Ichan, corporate raider and destroyer (also a champion of man in the street) for Treasury Secretary;
- Bomb-throwers John Bolton (longtime G.W.Bush official and controversial ambassador to the U.N.) and the greasy pseudo-intellectual, as establishment-as-they-come Newt Gingrich for Secretary of State;
- Forrest Lucas, head of the huge Lucas Oil company, for Secretary of the Interior (no conflict there that I can see);
- Jack Welsh, former CEO of General Electric, “dubbed ‘Neutron Jack’ (in reference to the neutron bomb) for eliminating employees while leaving buildings intact,” who cut 110,000 jobs in five years (1980-1985) and then left with a $420 million “walk away” package, for Secretary of Commerce;
- Harold Hamm, Oklahoma oil and gas developer, net worth $11.3 billion, whose companies pioneered shale oil fracking, for Secretary of Energy (where I’m sure he’ll be an honest broker whose job one will be looking out for the middle class working folk)
He said he’d drain the swamp. He forgot to mention he’d be replacing it with a cesspool.
But wait, more Trump plans to benefit the little guy also came out this week, like:
Repealing the federal estate tax, so all those miners in West Virginia will be able to leave more than the current tax-free amount of $10.9 million to their kids.
“Modernizing” Medicare; a buzzword for “converting Medicare from an entitlement program and giving its beneficiaries a certain amount of money to help buy private health plans.” Sounds like … Obamacare! But don’t worry, premiums will be low.
And all those jobs? It’s no secret that most middle-class job losses result from technological advances, not bad trade deals, and no politician can undo that fundamental economic reality. The only short-term way to stimulate jobs is for the government to engage in an aggressive plan to build and repair public infrastructure. Too bad that requires something — Oh My God!!! Government Spending!!! — that’s anathema to the Republican Congress that would need to approve it.
The truth will slowly come to Trump voters, at least those having the capacity for honesty: They were marks, dupes, played by a master manipulator who used their fear and vanity to his own ends. I hope you enjoyed that satisfying, brief, intense ‘fuck you Hillary, fuck you, establishment’ feeling of power when you marked your ballot. If you’re not in the 1%, it’s the only thing you’re ever going to get out of your vote.
Magical Thinking and Boiled Frogs
Through the process of raising our boys, Suzie and I were introduced to the concept of “magical thinking,” a phenomenon common in adolescents. In that context, magical thinking is an unconscious belief that merely thinking that an positive outcome will occur is enough, by itself, to make it happen. Magical thinking allows adolescents to dream, to picture themselves as succeeding, without having to engage in any hard work to make success happen. It is, as it turns out, surprisingly common, and a recipe for failure.
If nothing else, this election was a demonstration of the power of magical thinking, a belief by almost half the voters that by saying something over and over, by checking off a box on a ballot, by wishing hard enough, great things will just happen. Don’t think about the details, about the specifics of how to actually get from here to there … just believe really, really hard, and good things will come. Jobs! Security! Peace! America ascendant! All corruption and political self-interest gone! A blissful return to an idealized past America.
Having swept Trump to victory, a new form of magical thinking is now appearing: The belief by some, on both the right and the left, that somehow Trump will metamorphize into a reasonable, normal political leader — that he’ll take advice from experts, that he’ll listen to others with contrary views, that he’ll grow in office.
Dream on. For the past 18 months, we’ve seen exactly the same Donald Trump, day in and day out: megalomaniacal, mean-spirited, self-obsessed, authoritarian, impatient, simple-minded, volatile, uncivil, and completely unqualified, with the attention span of a five year old. There’s no “real Trump” under all that. If there were, it would surely have been trotted out during the campaign, since it would have boosted his prospects immensely.
No, what you’ve seen is what you’ve got.
Part of me looks forward to watching him slowly come to terms with the reality — which I’m sadly not sure he gets — that even the President can’t just snap his fingers and make things happen; that there’s a huge difference between criticizing and accomplishing; that you can’t cut deals with Congress by pissing all of the members off; that each one of those men and women has their own little power base and are beholden to you for absolutely nothing; that the administrative apparatus will rest largely unchanged; and that many of the things you say you want to do will harm your own supporters. Abolish Obamacare? Shrink Medicaid? Better have a plan — not just wishes and dreams — for the millions of lower-class white folks, your core supporters, who’ll lose a benefit they now have.
I’m going to enjoy the spectacle of a man who thinks he knows everything, thinks he can do everything, a man who honestly thinks he is a messiah, slowly and painfully come to the realization that he’s failing. That assumes, of course, that he has the ability to ever admit failure. But even if he can’t, we’ll all see it. A slow process, like a frog in a pot of cool water placed on a lit stove, the temperature rises slowly, and eventually the frog is cooked.
An appropriate visual to end a difficult week. Enjoy the weekend everyone. We’ve lots of work to do.
After the Deluge
I woke up at 4:15 this morning, panicked, out of a vivid, realistic dream. It took place at a lake that looked much like Donner Lake near Truckee, but with gentler slopes all around it, and with an enormous dam at the east end where the state park is. There were houses all up and down the hills around the lake, a small city really, four or five thousand people, and Suzie and I lived in one about midway up.
In the dream we were driving away from our house when we heard on the radio that a gigantic freak rainstorm had hit upstream; an enormous wave of water was headed toward the lake. We drove frantically toward the top of the ridge to try to escape the water, to no avail. Water swept over the car, and we were lifted off the road and into the wave, tumbling over and over in a white froth, thinking we were going to die.
Then, miraculously, as happens in dreams, our car was deposited in the yard of a house at the very top of the ridge surrounding the lake, just next to the high-water level. We got out of the car and immediately noticed that wherever we set foot, the ground was cracking and crumbling, the integrity of the ridge itself was suspect. Looking down, we saw that all of the houses below our level were underwater; the death toll was certainly in the thousands.
In the bizarre dreamscape we managed to meet up with a group of six other survivors. The only way to leave the location we were in was to follow the ridge and then cut down and across the front of the dam. Someone managed to find a minibus and we jumped in and started driving.
We got to the dam and started driving down the ridge to pass in front of it. The discharge tunnel was raging, the churning water produced an eerie groan. The face of the dam — enormously long and high — seemed to be bulging, straining to retain the massive load behind it. Fissures were appearing in the dam face, small leaks at first and then spurts of water from an increasing number of openings. We drove on in deep fear; we’d survived this far, but would the damn hold?
I bolted awake.
An obvious metaphor. Floods are natural. The real question is: Will our dams hold?
November 4, 1980 (aka It’ll Be OK)
Election day 1980. I was in my second year of law school in Ithaca, New York, and invited about 15 of my fellow classmates/friends over to the attic apartment on College Avenue that I shared with my Sue and Sue to watch the election returns.
As the evening went on and it became clearer and clearer that Ronald Reagan was going to become the next President, the sense of disbelief in the room grew and grew. There were a few Republicans in the room, I think, but as you’d expect at a (relatively) exclusive Ivy League school, the vast majority were solidly liberal. Reactions ranged from incomprehension, to fear, to put-downs of those ignorant folks living in what were not yet then called the “Flyover States,” to pledges to move to Canada, to forecasts of national gloom and doom. I remember in particular one young woman sitting next to me with a look of dread on her face, saying nothing, just shaking her head. Confusion and distress filled the room. A second-rate right-wing actor was going to be President; the country was coming to an end.
But of course it didn’t come to an end. The country did OK during Reagan’s terms; even a Republican President couldn’t stop the ongoing technological, demographic, and cultural changes. And he likely did have a hand causing one of the truly amazing historical events of the last century, the liberation of Eastern Europe from Soviet control. He kept us out of any major conflict. People continued to live their lives, work at their jobs, raise their kids.
While Donald Trump is an order of magnitude worse (Reagan at least had political experience as the Governor of California, and his attitude toward life was light and optimistic, in contrast to Trump’s pathetic everything-is-gloom-and-doom), if on the off chance he does get elected tomorrow, we should all remember this: Our country is bigger than one man, our institutions were designed to impair a President from doing too much damage, our people will continue to live and work and love and grow, life will continue on. If the worst happens, I’ll remember that night of November 4, 1980, and how wrong, at base, we all were in predicting the future.
Soccer, Python, the Election, and Understanding a Stochastic World
I have a former colleague whose daughter is an outstanding soccer player on one of the best high school teams in the area. The paper today reported that her team had lost in the quarterfinals of the playoffs by a 1-0 score. That made me start thinking of how unfair it is that athletic contests have a binary outcome, and then thinking about how we overvalue the results of arbitrary binary events (we love “winners,” we don’t love “losers”), even those most of life isn’t binary at all. If I apply for a job and don’t get it, my career doesn’t end, it just continues on a different path.
Then at the gym the TV had on two of the most influential election-predictors, Nate Silver of the site FiveThirtyEight and Nate Cohn of the New York Time’s site The Upshot, talking about their election predictions. That got me thinking about my colleague’s daughter’s soccer game again, and about how, in my view, most people don’t have a good way to think about randomness, probability, and stochastic events. We don’t have a good way to mentally separate the specific outcomes of stochastic systems from the as-yet-undetermined pre-outcome state of those systems.
Here’s an example. I drive to work down a main road called Old Redwood Highway. The first stoplight I come to is at a main intersection, and if I miss that light, I end up sitting a good while waiting for the next green. As a result, I usually “jump through” a yellow light rather than stopping for it (I note that the intersection has no pedestrians, and cross traffic is backed up and unlikely to move into the intersection, making such a move relatively safe). After that light there are several others further down the road.
One morning I jumped through the yellow and noticed that the car in the lane next to me made the opposite decision. Four stoplights down, as I was stopped for a red light, the very same car pulled up right beside me.
I automatically said to myself, “What a useless thing it was to jump the yellow … I took a risk and it didn’t get me anywhere.”
But later I realized that I was wrong. The fact that in one specific instance jumping the yellow didn’t get me ahead of the car that made the opposite decision says nothing about whether it’s a good decision in general. I may not always be ahead by the fourth stoplight if I jump the yellow, but on average I will, and only in a very, very rare “black swan” scenario would I ever be worse off (e.g., going through the yellow results in my being in an accident that wouldn’t have happened had I stopped). Jumping the yellow is a good decision if I want to get to work faster (even though sometimes I won’t), and my colleague’s daughter’s soccer team is still better than its playoff opponent even though it lost its playoff game.
Getting a feel for the nature of randomness is difficult. One of the best (and easiest) ways I’ve found is to simply watch the discreet results from a random process as they happen. One of the hobbies I’ve taken up in semi-retirement is programming using the Python computer language. The on-line class I took from MIT when I was first learning (outstanding, by the way, and starting again in January on EdX) spent a good deal of time on how to program to evaluate stochastic systems (surprisingly easy to do). In doing that I found myself often just watching the output of a random event, which really did seem to give me a better “gut” feel for how “randomness” and “probability” manifest themselves in the world.
I’ve created a short, no-brainer Python program to help you get that “gut” feel as well. If you go to this link and hit the “run” button, the program will spit out on the right (at 3 second intervals) random numbers (rounded to two decimal places) from a “normal” distribution (the good-old bell-shaped curve) having a mean of 5 and a standard deviation of 2 (meaning that about 95% of the spit-out numbers will be between 1 and 9, and about 68% of the spit-out numbers will be between 3 and 7).
What will intrigue you, I suspect, is how much more frequently than expected you will see numbers not close to 5, numbers that seem to be on “runs” (i.e., multiple “4”s in a row), and numbers distant from the mean of 5.
Returning to my colleague’s daughter’s soccer team, suppose that her team is much, much better than the other playoff team — so much better that, on average, the daughter’s team will 70% of the games played between the two. A spit-out of actual Wins and Losses for this scenario is here. The first time I ran it, the first spat-out result for my friend’s daughter’s team was a Loss, just as happened in the real world, even though you’ll see if you run the program that her team mostly kicks butt.
As for the election, well … who knows what will happen, but we can hope that the actual, particular of the election will be more in line with what the polls show than the actual, particular outcomes of my commute and my friend’s daughter’s soccer game.
What Vlad Knows
It’s now almost a certainty that Russia is attempting to influence the U.S. Presidential election by leaking stolen/hacked emails from John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager. And it’s evident who Russia wants to win the election: Donald Trump.
Before pulling the lever, or filling in the bubble, or marking an “x” on the ballot for Trump, every Trump supporter ought to take a good long while to ask, “Why?” Why is it that Vladimir Putin wants a President Trump and not a President Clinton?
Clinton had an opportunity during the debates to answer this question, but having committed to the Putin-Trump “bromance” meme, she whiffed, saying Putin wanted to install his puppet in the White House. (Leading to that highlight of Presidential debate discourse: “You’re a puppet. No you’re the puppet.”)
But Clinton is wrong. Putin may be an authoritarian, anti-civil rights, anti-free-press, kill-and-imprison-your-rivals oligarch, but he’s smart and calculating man with no illusions. Putin knows Trump is about one thing and one thing only: Trump. Putin knows Trump is too unreliable, too unmoored to be useful as a puppet.
Vlad supports Trump for one reason: He knows that an America having Donald Trump as its President will be less of a threat to Russia than an America having Hillary Clinton as its President, an America less stable, an America more divided, an America furious, roiled, and error-prone.
Putin wants Trump to win. Now the question for Trump supporters: Do you think Putin supports Trump because Putin wants to Make America Great Again?
Think long and hard on that one, would-be Trump voters. Vlad knows the answer. Do you?
Augusta
Suzie’s Aunt Ellen is an Episcopal nun. Until I met Suzie and Ellen, I didn’t know there were Episcopal nuns, nor that there was any kind of monastic tradition left in American religious groups. But Ellen is living in a convent, called the Order of St. Helena, which recently relocated to a beautiful, calm piece of property in North Augusta, South Carolina, just across the river from the more famous Augusta, Georgia, with its golf and all.
The convent consists of a large central building containing the chapel, dining hall, and administrative offices; separate cottages/houses for the sisters; and a guest house containing eight individual (single) rooms and a large kitchen/common area. We stayed in the guest house for two nights.
The facilities are new, and distinctly modern in design, resulting in an interior that is clean and filled with light.
When we arrived on Saturday evening, we were invited to afternoon prayers, which consisted of the sisters signing/chanting verses from the Psalms in a “call-and-response” fashion. Very simple and moving. After the military ceremonies at Fort Benning, the crowded hustle-and-bustle of Atlanta, and the hordes of Bull-dawg fans in Athens, it was a calming and soothing relief.
Today we spent the day in and around Augusta. A morning visit to the Waffle House (!), followed by a walk along the river downtown:
From there Suzie did a search and found the Savannah Rapids Park, another beautiful spot along the Savannah River and the historic Augusta Canal:
The next spot we found was in some ways even more beautiful and interesting: The Phinizy Swamp Park. Elevated wooden trails took us over a swamp adjacent to the river south of Augusta. We saw waterfowl, turtles, flowers, and these unusual things, which Ellen called “Cypress Knees“:
We finished the day with a remarkably excellent (and inexpensive) Mexican dinner in North Augusta. Yum.
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