Pledge Allegience Gone Wrong

This was an insightful comment I couldn't help but remember.

Having people pledge alliegence to the Country they belong to is a bad thing? That's brainwashing?

Yes, it is a bad thing. You can see it on CNN, you can see it in the attitudes of American tourists overseas. They think that, just because random chance led them to being born in the USA, they are somehow a higher form of life than everyone else. Pride in your country should come from the actions of the people themselves striving to better themselves and their country, not from some dogmatic pledge injected into every childs brain.

Seems I have decided to keep posting here.

Fall of the US Dollar

I hope this is preserved, in case anyone ever wonders why the United States ever fell from glory. The US experiment may not fail, but this offers insight and renders the plausibility scarily close to home.

Hollywood Tripe

Rottentomatoes shows aggregate statistics collected from various review sites all over the internet. I use it to decide if a film is worth paying to see in theatres. I've effectively stopped seeing movies since I started reading this site.

More revealing, perhaps, is that in a given theatre with 10 films, typically only a single film will have an aggregate rating of greater than 60% positive ratings. One out of ten. The other 9 films were each considered by 60% of the reviews to be poor.

However, this is in contrast to the independent movies, which in spite of their limited distribution are often rated fantastic. This says something about either the distributors or the clientelle, or both. Or perhaps it says something about the standard of the review, but I am skeptical of that, based on personal experiences with both independent and Hollywood movies.

The value of 80 hour work weeks

Well, the Blog crashed and lost my last post. I will bear this in mind for some time.

The link goes to a slashdot article on the potential for 80 hour work weeks. Interestingly enough, it is very much in line with what I was thinking.

I often wonder how slave-driving organizations deal with the degradation in quality of work resulting from pathologically unsustainable working hours.

Things to do

Some things to lobby for, to promote effective government:

Problem: Representation in the electoral system is not fair.

• How: Condorcet method of voting.

Problem: the policitcal incentive; those attracted to the electoral system are of a certain type, not generally philanthropists; political power attracts those who desire power.

• Limited number of terms in office.
• Limited salaries and pensions.
  
• Ultimately: Lottery elections.

Problem: Regulation of environment, securities, etc is expensive and ineffective.

• How: Reward whistleblowers, and competing companies for providing evidence of breach of regulations.
  

Problem: Lobbying is private.

• How: Publish all lobbying.
  

Problem: The expensive of litigating against large corporations prohibits Rule of Law.

• How: Equalization payments for extraordinarily one-sided litigation. Eg. when you sue a large corporation for having wronged you, if there is a plausible case, then remedy should not be denied because you cannot afford to litigate.

Progammer incentives

I have spent a great deal of time pondering the incentives and disincentives of creation. This is my take on programmers, having been one myself.

(As posted on slashdot)

Programmers are a lot like lawyers, value-wise. Like lawyers, the value of programmers is, or traditionally has been, their creativity and intellect. Better tools have reduced the value of that personal asset in programmers, but not eliminated it.

It is notably different from most engineering in that the products do not require large capital to distribute, once the creativity is complete.

In this manner, I have often wondered if programmers would work better in limited liability partnerships rather than corporations. A small group of programmers who produce on contract to corporations would be, if well organized, very valuable.

The corporate structure lends itself to growth in traditional economy, whereas a larger programming companies have, in my limited experience, not been efficient. There are exceptions, like Electronic Arts, I think.

But the hierarchical view of corporations, looking down upon employees, is flawed in the programming world because the direction of the company is often better felt by the programmers themselves, and management has often had a terrible disconnect from the technical reality, and a tendency to dictate where they should listen. Good management isn't necessarily this way, but many people cling to this management style.

In a partnership, the partners would be responsible for bringing in clients, the design, the programming, and the effective reuse of code. In a corporation, they are typically responsible only for the programming. I believe savvy programmers would be much better at selecting appropriate clients and choosing the direction of the code. I believe, when it comes to the effective reuse of code, a partnership would have better structures adopted to accommodate it.

This sort of delegation among partners has been very effective, in my opinion, in lawyer partnerships. I believe the effectiveness could translate into programmer partnerships. Mind you, moving programmers into management positions in companies may have the same effect, but I think the hierarchial structure inherently causes problems. The distinguishing feature being that in a partnership, management would also be programmers, and vise versa. There wouldn't just be a "delegation to programmers" by management, so to speak.

Eerieness in human-likeness

It seems that an uncanny but slightly off anthropomorphism results in an eerieness described in Doctor Mori’s thesis, as described on the link. A fascinating observation I thought I would share.

Economist on Patent Reform

Well, here's to the obvious. The incentives in the patent system are so far from innovation that they are distorting the principles behind patents.

Patent commons

The skew of patents is well known. What isn't is how to address it adequately. The commons mentioned here is certainly interesting, though we shall see how effective it is.

Microsoft Indemnification against IP Claims

Well, Microsoft is indemnifying their clients. More precisely, their legal department has determined that the threat of litigation against Microsoft customers is negligible in comparison to the media benefit of claiming that you can indemnify your clients.

Microsoft would indemnify their clients only if their clients will never need it.

What I'd like to see is some sort of warranty or guarantee, such as "we will recoup your losses for worms, viruses, and malicious hacks, provided you show your due diligence". That's about as likely as Microsoft ever actually indemnifying a client.