TKG Audio

I got to feel a little like George R. R. Martin today. Auditioned narrators for the audio book of The Kassa Gambit. OK, it's not as exciting as auditioning actors for a TV show, and actually, I kinda hated it, because I had to pick just one, and they were both great.

On the other hand, I feel like good old George every weekend that goes by without any progress on the next book, so there's that.

It was very strange to hear a stranger reading my words. I cringe every time I hear the sound of my own voice in a recording, and oddly, listening to my book being narrated by someone else induced almost the exact same response.

Luckily our darling Sophie won't suffer from that debility; she can watch videos of herself forever. And slide shows on the TV. And she has books full of pictures of herself (Artscow rules!) that she reads for her bedtime story. This has to be the first generation that has grown up watching itself in virtually real-time; I wonder how it will affect them?

Arcology

In one of the versions of Sim City, your city got to the point where it could build arcologies: super-buildings that were a self contained environment.

And now, this:

Sky City will boast a hospital, a school, 17 helipads, and enough apartments to house 30,000.

Above the world in 90 days: China building world’s tallest skyscraper — 220 storeys — in just three months

Just think about living there - the social aspects aside, I can't believe they can run water for that many households. Can you imagine taking a shower on one of the top floors? I know we need more urban density, but I don't think this will work. In 30 years it will be a slum, just like many of the huge housing projects in Britain, and for the same reason. The Brits committed what one writer called the "arithmetic heresy:" the idea that if 8 families in a block of flats could live together in good community, then 800 could do the same in a skyscraper. The Chinese perhaps have stronger cultural and social norms; but 30,000 people is a town, not a neighborhood. The building will need its own mayor and police force.

On the other hand they won't need a gym. Just going for a walk up and down the stairs will keep everybody fit for a marathon.

The End of Politics

It's over. Sanity prevailed; presumably people will conclude that not releasing your taxes, flip-flopping with abandon, and telling outright lies (Jeeps to China!) does not win elections; and thus, the next election will abound with disclosure, principle, and integrity.

Already my prediction is coming true. Bill O'Reilly speaks with naked candor now:

The white establishment is now the minority.

The "w" word has crawled out into the open, like Nosferatu at the end of the movie, blinking in the revealing light of day. Just before he bursts into flames.

In any case I can shut up about it for a while. I am sure that is a welcome development to everyone.

Socrates had the same problem, really

On The O’Reilly Factor on Nov. 1, John Stossel, former correspondent for ABC’s 20/20 and current host of the Fox Business Network show Stossel, said that “the government should stop insuring areas” prone to disaster.

“What if nobody wants to insure you?” O’Reilly asked.

“Then you take your own risk. Then the private insurance market is saying, you live in a risky place, don’t build there.”

Stossel himself once received $250,000 in FEMA money, but said during the program he would not do so again.

What a libertarian looks like when he opens his mouth

Socrates had almost the same exact problem. That is, he used the Athenian right of free speech to call for a revolution to end free speech. And I'm sure, when someone pointed out that the only reason he was still alive was because of the Athenian tolerance for free speech, he was just as smarmy, self-righteous, and outstandingly hypocritical as John "I've got mine, screw you" Stossel.

Eventually, of course, the Athenians did take him at his word, and offered the choice between drinking poison or leaving the city. In one of history's greatest acts of narcissism, Socrates chose death rather than admit he might be wrong about something. His acolytes wrote the history books, and now we think of Socrates as a heroic martyr instead of the way the Athenians thought of him, which was as a trouble-making conspirator whose nephew had twice overthrown the government to create a police state.

Poor Stossel won't have such loyal acolytes to remake his historical image; but then, I think we all know perfectly well that if FEMA showed up and offered Stossel the loose change in their pockets, he'd vacuum it up without moving his lips out of that permanently self-entitled pout.

A new culture of idiots

A very long article that details the many ways in which serious thought can be derailed by bad behavior. It's all worth reading (although it should be taken with some tongue-in-cheek, as its choice of language makes clear). I just want to pull out the serious nuggets:

Bar Patron 1 seems moved not by facts but by a certain idea of a capitalist society, the idea that, in a free market, people get what they deserve.

Even on philosophical grounds, however, this view is exceedingly hard to defend. That is true according to none other than the archconservative twentieth-century apologist for capitalism, F. A. Hayek. He writes:

There is little a man can do to alter the fact that his special talents are very common or exceedingly rare. A good mind or a fine voice, a beautiful face or a skilful hand, a ready wit or an attractive personality are in a large measure as independent of a person’s efforts as the opportunities or the experiences he has had. In all these instances the value which a person’s capacities or services have for us and for which he is recompensed has little relation to anything that we can call moral merit or “deserts.”

The billionaire investor and oracular philosopher Warren Buffett echoes the point:

My luck was accentuated by my living in a market system that sometimes produces distorted results, though overall it serves our country well. I’ve worked in an economy that rewards someone who saves the lives of others on a battlefield with a medal, rewards a great teacher with thank-you notes from parents, but rewards those who can detect the mispricing of securities with sums reaching into the billions. In short, fate’s distribution of long straws is wildly capricious.

In other words, ideas of deserts just don’t justify the going rate of rewards. Bar Patron 1 cannot infer his IQ or his deservingness from his paycheck.

 How Fox News created a new culture of idiots

 As an ironic example of the decay of modern discourse, note how the piece consistently misspells "desserts." It's even wrong in the Hayek quote, which leads me to conclude that Slate has replaced its editors with interns and/or Microsoft Word.

Practical arbitrage, or how to be a hedge-fund manager in your own backyard

Right now, Intrade has Obama at $5.55 a share. That means odds of 1.80 to 1.

Sportsbet has Romney at 2.63 to 1 (and Obama at a far more reasonable 1.50 to 1).

This means if you bet $10,000 on Obama at Intrade, and $7,000 on Romney at Sportsbet, you win no matter what!

You spend a total of $17,000; if Obama wins, you get $18,000; if Romney wins, you get $18,400. Either way you make at least a grand.

And,. you get to call yourself a hedge-fund manager, with an 8% return for 2 weeks worth of arbitrage, or a roughly 200% annual return.

This is what high-finance does; it makes money on the margin, the difference between what two groups of people think is reasonable. No wonder there is so much unreasonableness in the world; there is an entire financial market dedicated to exploiting it, and thus, perpetuating it.

Obama is our Gorbachev

Why do America's Super-Rich Feel Victimized?
Evident throughout the letter is a sense of victimization prevalent among so many of America’s wealthiest people. In an extreme version of this, the rich feel that they have become the new, vilified underclass. 

This is the triumph of Any Rand's fiction; the source of Romney's 47%. These people actually believe that half the nation are takers, being carried on the heroic shoulders of the makers. They actually think that everyone should be grateful to them for amassing huge fortunes and concentrating wealth while others starve.

Because they, and their poor, deluded, co-dependent victims/voters, actually think this is how economies work. I have had Right-Wingers tell me time and time again, if it weren't for these rich sugar-daddies, we would all starve. They really believe that.

And no amount of facts makes any difference. Common sense, Nobel-prize winning economic theory, empirical observation - none of it is sufficient to challenge the fantasy Ayn Rand unleashed. Those that have, made it, because of their innate genius, and without them, that wealth would not exist. If there wasn't a capitalist to cut worker pay while increasing hours and pocketing the result, why, there wouldn't be any work at all.

The mere fact that every nation with a tax rate close to %50 is a nice place to live - and every nation without is not - has no impact. The mere history of America's climb to greatness after WWII - when the top tax rate was 90%! - has no impact. The worship of a military that can do no wrong and never spend too much coexists, side-by-side, with the adamant belief that the government cannot even deliver mail efficiently.

Because, in the end, it is all about this:

“The idea that the rich deserve to be rich is a very comforting idea if you are rich.”

And all those blue-collar factory workers voting for Romney? They are rich, in a global sense; and they got rich in no small part because America exploited the world, 1/16 of the globe's population consuming 1/3 of the globe's resources. The billionaires are speaking for all Americans, who are after all the elites of the world.

 

And everyone understands that if being rich is not a sign of divine favor and personal character, then all those people are starving to death in Africa for no reason. All tjose kids in Asia are building our iPhones are being robbed; all that oil we bought for the trivial price of a few gold coins and a lot of guns to the biggest thugs in the region was theft.

To admit that the poor in our nation are poor through no fault of their own would be to admit that the poor in the world are poor through no fault of their own. When they accuse Obama of "apologizing" for America, this is what they mean.

This is why rattling sabers and God and guns and climate denial and Sharia fear and no sympathy for the 47% all mix up together. Because, in the end, it is about protecting what we have, whether we deserve it or not. And Obama, and Liberals, and Socialists, and Progressives, and all those people who talk about fairness - there is the strong, strong suspicion that they might mean global fairness.

To allow the light of fairness in, to admit even one chink in the perfection of the capitalist system, is to surrender our Empire. All the other facts are irrelevant; all the lies and truths are beside the point. Either things are the way they are supposed to be, or they aren't. Either you are voting for the continuation of the American Empire by armed force (as Romney has made clear), or you are not. Not to say Obama does not embrace the security state, the military, the banks, the hedge funds; but he does so reluctantly, instead of with full-throated zeal. It is not that they fear Obama will dismantle the Empire thorough direct action (despite all their nonsense claims of his Islamic Marxism); it is that they understand that he will let it decay through inaction, through failure to enforce the harshest terms of servitude on our commercial colonies, because he is merely a centrist instead of a full-on right wing zealot, and in these waning days of our empire, centrism might as well be surrender.

Obama is our Gorbachev.