This is an undeveloped thought, in response to an essay by Paul Graham, in which he takes on the idea that enormous variations in wealth are a social evil. First, an excerpt:

Variation in wealth can be a sign of variation in productivity. (In a society of one, they’re identical.) And that is almost certainly a good thing: if your society has no variation in productivity, it’s probably not because everyone is Thomas Edison. It’s probably because you have no Thomas Edisons. In a low-tech society you don’t see much variation in productivity. If you have a tribe of nomads collecting sticks for a fire, how much more productive is the best stick gatherer going to be than the worst? A factor of two? Whereas when you hand people a complex tool like a computer, the variation in what they can do with it is enormous.

I agree that technology has the ability to magnify differences in productivity. It’s the unwavering fact behind catchphrases like “the digital divide.” There are individual technologists and business folks who have brought the world innovations that have created enormous good to the whole of society. Life-extending pharmaceuticals are a good (and entirely unquantifiable) example. But what material rewards should accrue to those individuals?

Read the rest of this entry »

Okay. So the indictments were delivered today. Press conference on Thursday. “Rumors” of up to 5 indictments. Fitzgerald spotted at Rove’s lawyers office this afternoon.

You know what? I refuse to be excited.

I simply cannot suspend disbelief anymore when it comes to the shit sticking to this administration. It’s been five years of non-stop fuckery: police records, army records, using tragedy for propaganda, ruining the careers of respected statesmen, hiring convicted felons to manage a centralized database profiling every single american citizen, hiring convicted felons to manufacture evidence for war while spying for Iran, paying off journalists to spread that evidence, making up journalists to attack its doubters, flat-out incompetence up and down the line, flat-out lying over and over until the lies become just the other side of the story, putting our soldiers, our nation, and our founding ideals in the shithouse for some neo-fundamentalist principles cooked up because a Chicago professor couldn’t handle seeing the sexual imagery on TV that he could never get in the bedroom. I don’t even need to link to those stories, because they’ve all been so widely reported, double and quintuple sourced, that they have finally trepanated our unbearably thick collective skull. But it hasn’t changed a single thing.

I’ve done my best to take a long-term view of things. It’s been bad before, but what’s eight years? Well, to me these eight years are more than just a rough patch, more than just squandering what will be remembered as an historic opportunity, possibly the last. This experience has shown me over and over that despite the best efforts of some of our most brilliant and well-intentioned individuals, the media-pandering, on-message political machines will always win, must always win, because those are the rules of the game. The rules of their game.

So right now I am not only an empiricist, but I am a skeptical empiricist. I will not even believe it when I see it. I will not believe it until Karl Rove and Dick Cheney are in handcuffs and entering pleas. And even then I just won’t be sure.

Because though they may not own the prosecutor, or the grand jury, or the judge, they’ve got the executioner by the balls. You’ve already heard the memes hovering, probing the surface, waiting to be unleashed: “Making it a crime to be conservative.” “Two-bit prosecutor looking for a name.” “Perjury isn’t a real crime.” They sound absolutely ridiculous right now, right? Make no mistake, the Lutz’s and Rove’s and the Ailes’s of the world, these are true masters of their craft. Let them whisper in our broadcast ear. Let them repetition prime us a bit. Watch the tide turn back yet again.

Familiarity to bias becomes a bias of its own. Only the black swan can save us now.

Sona Mobile is putting the finishing touches on their new Star Trek Communicator mobile phone. I can’t wait…

Update: Pokia also has a bluetooth mobile phone accessory based on the ST:TOS Communicator.

Paul Hackett is the Iraq war veteran from Ohio who challenged Rep. Jean Schmidt (R) in last year’s special election. He narrowly lost, surprising many pundits who assumed a Democrat had no chance in the Republican stronghold. Hackett is back, and this time he’s running for Senate against incumbent Sen. Mike DeWine (R).

Salon interviewed Hackett recently, and I thought he had an interesting comment on what being “progressive” means.

Salon: Do you consider yourself among the party’s progressives?

Hackett: Sure, if “progressive” means standing up for the things that made this country great. If it means fighting for working Americans, fighting for an economy that allows working Americans to survive and provide for their families, and if it means demanding a rational discussion about how our military is used or misused … If that’s what progressive stands for, yeah, you bet I’m progressive.