The public television arm of government sent a letter and form politely requesting that I sign up to pay the TV tax. The letter says that tax is billed until until the authority receives notification that I am exempt from the tax.
Not owning a TV, I used their on-line form to politely decline by filling out the form to indicate a date on which I discontinued TV service that was prior to my taking up residence here.
I may reconsider if Swedish language broadcasts are an option, but the de facto policy on bilingualism suggests that English language shows would be easier to get than Swedish.
Will post more if anything comes of it.
Sunday, June 19, 2011
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Monday, June 13, 2011
Chaos Monkey rolls: Department head Apple+Zs university HR person's entire training session on the new workplan system
The department's (technical) administrator had (reluctantly) scheduled a two-hour training session with a university HR person, in the middle of summer during vacation season, on how to use the new 'workplan' feature to schedule time and costs in the ERP system. This is a new requirement by the federal government. Following two change of room announcements, the session's two attendees arrive five minutes late, followed by the trainer, since there was no activity in the appointed location.
After reviewing a flow chart of how we were supposed to develop workplans, he claims that we were misinformed by our department about how things were supposed to be done. Lacking a wireless connection to the university intranet, he couldn't get into the practical details. I fix this, allowing him to demonstrate what department supervisors and senior people are supposed to do in the HR system. Scrolling rapidly through several hundred form fields, it's clear that no one in the room is providing or receiving education.
We ask about why we needed to do both paper and on-line workplans, to which we replied that we had received different information from everyone in our department. Thirty minutes after starting, he had run out of material (or was discouraged when we asked 'Can just ANYONE in the system approve another person's workplan since supervisory relationships are not defined in the database?'). Approaching the door, as gentle pleading had kept us standing at our seats for several minutes, we intercepted the department head en passant, and asked him to offer some clarity.
Bottom line from the department: Do what the department has said; we'll fix it in August a few days before the September deadline.
After reviewing a flow chart of how we were supposed to develop workplans, he claims that we were misinformed by our department about how things were supposed to be done. Lacking a wireless connection to the university intranet, he couldn't get into the practical details. I fix this, allowing him to demonstrate what department supervisors and senior people are supposed to do in the HR system. Scrolling rapidly through several hundred form fields, it's clear that no one in the room is providing or receiving education.
We ask about why we needed to do both paper and on-line workplans, to which we replied that we had received different information from everyone in our department. Thirty minutes after starting, he had run out of material (or was discouraged when we asked 'Can just ANYONE in the system approve another person's workplan since supervisory relationships are not defined in the database?'). Approaching the door, as gentle pleading had kept us standing at our seats for several minutes, we intercepted the department head en passant, and asked him to offer some clarity.
Bottom line from the department: Do what the department has said; we'll fix it in August a few days before the September deadline.
Monday, June 6, 2011
What do I think about BitCoin?
[This was initially a personal e-mail response to a friend. I've revised it slightly, and added passages shown in emphasis.]
I won't repeat any of the seemingly excellent financial analysis of BitCoin's relations to the external economic system and currencies as we know them provided at Quora and ycombinator, because such analyses are largely irrelevant. BitCoin may emulate or implement a value-storing currency, but the infrastructure itself is based on different assumptions and exists for different purposes.
Since I first played with BitCoin a year ago, I recognised that it proposes to change relationships among users and shapers of capital. BitCoin can be used as a parallel currency like Liberty Dollars or Calgary Dollars or such, but its purpose (however ill-defined) is not to be a substitute for existing monetary instruments or securities. (Thus, I also find most of the financial analysis about BitCoin's role or relationship to the Dollar-denominated financial world to be uninteresting.)
The relationship shifts I see is as follows:
a) Those who wish to avoid the big corporate or government financial infrastructure (users of BitCoin as a cash alternative) become embedded instead in the big telecom/Internet infrastructure, and on a handful of individuals who make it route.
Under this heading, BitCoin creates new dependencies on electricity to generate wealth (through the computational identification of rare numbers) and to confirm each transaction through the peer network. The mechanics of BitCoin also firmly embed a functional and open public Internet as a requirement of operation. (Consider the case where some one-way firewalls could be used to control both the flow and generation of new BitCoins, or abuses of national gateways to do force transaction collisions. Or selective presentations of the public Internet or of the BitCoin tree to conduct neat tricks to confirm or dis-confirm transactions, or various area denial strategies to expose the real-world identities of users [in the same way as Tor is vulnerable to network manipulation].)
I also have some reservations about how sustainable BitCoins will be into the future. The currency will become more difficult to use as its transacted denomination becomes smaller since each client must calculate increasingly diverse parts of the BitCoin tree with increasing depth and granularity. (The entire BitCoin system is based on an acyclic graph with new coins and transactions added at the edges, requiring community agreement on calculations for each transaction. Since the BitCoin's deflationary model requires existing BitCoins to be divided into smaller and smaller units for use, the number of leaf nodes will increase exponentially over time.) As the number of divisions or branches increase, energy costs to validate each transaction will also increase. As the number of users and transactions increase, the number of calculations each user must do to validate others' transactions also increase. The costs to calculate, transmit, (and store) such transactions will also be somewhere near exponential, which makes BitCoins difficult to use as a vehicle to store and assemble wealth in the long term. (Imagine buying the billion-dollar company Skype SA using pennies.)
Of consequence, there is a substantial risk of social or political fragmentation of the tree depending on what is local and easy or difficult to confirm.
b) Using BitCoin, ordinary peons have the potential to insulate themselves from government and corporate regulation, where only wealthy could before.
In particular, its greatest current successes and supporters relate to areas in which BitCoin serves some (illicit) niches well. Such users judge BitCoin based not necessarily on what it doesn't do in comparison with government currency, but on what it does well by not being government currency. In developing or repressive regiemes, BitCoin could be used by peons to avoid effects of currency manipulation. BitCoin is interesting in developing and developed regimes because it is a way to un-link the transactions of goods from the formal financial mechanisms altogether.
A marketplace in which the transactional unit has an instant value unrelated to short or long term economic policies that happen also to use the same transactional unit for completely different purposes should be more robust against adverse externalities. The fact that BitCoin enables trust to be de-coupled with any particular formal institutional instrument (value-storing or not) should make it more difficult to centrally regulate. In particular, it has no concept of a single point of control or failure such as a central bank(er), nor can there be run on commercial banks. The flip side is that BitCoin also focuses the meatspace locus of illegal activity into a smaller number of venues in which BitCoins can be converted into real world capital. LEOs could use this as part of an area denial strategy.
c) BitCoin changes the relationship content in the action of storing value, and in the action to transmit that value to someone else. In conventional currency systems, convertibility between each currency and others has been desirable or required, but convertibility is not necessarily the goal of BitCoin users. The attitude that users only hold on to as many BitCoins as required for immediate transactions gives BitCoins some qualities of currencies under hyperinflation, but without the destabilizing time compressed effects. Since inflationary growth is not desired by BitCoin users (it makes the opposite economic assumption that deflation is to be valued) building in savings and something like interest into the holding of currency, but making that interest useless unless the currency is spent, should de-emphasize the accumulation of static capital.
In this regard, I find the discussions about currency speculation and the "bitcoin bubble" to be uninformed about the nature of the BitCoin system. It is first and foremost a trust system, through which a function that approximates currency has been implemented. The fact that the potential value of a BitCoin as denominated in state-backed currency systems potentially renders it incompatible with some uses of the latter neither renders BitCoin invalid as a currency system, nor invalid as a trust system.
Those who speculate that BitCoin's value will continue to increase relative to US Dollars, and expect to cash out in USD will only profit from other speculators, not from the BitCoin system. It may be of some concern to state regulators that users of its financial vehicles are abusing each other through incomplete information, but this is not new, nor a concern that materially concerns cooperative BitCoin users. (It would not be possible for BitCoin users to be completely insulated from the conventional currency system since the BitCoin economy does not contain all the instruments of production or consumption necessary to sustain itself. Therefore, BitCoin users would still be subject to macro-economic conditions that occur at scales unrelated to BitCoin's current or foreseeable footprint.) Unlike gold, Dollars, or other contemporary currency units, one cannot gain exclusivity on control of BitCoins as circulating units. BitCoins are almost infinitely divisible; the supply of BitCoin in circulation does not diminish with the denominated value of the BitCoin held and kept out of circulation. (The deflationary part of the system is designed this way.) Like social linkages and currency systems, the value of a BitCoin is only expressed when it is transacted, and heterogeneous uses yield more value than homogeneous uses.
If a holder of many BitCoins were to put many of them back in to circulation as a retail consumer, their effect would be to strengthen the BitCoin network as though through regular use. If they were to attempt to sell the analogue of several million dollars of BitCoins at once, they could buy a lot of one service or product assuming an able supplier (but the value to the spender would be rather low: marginal utility), or they would face the same kinds of problems as anyone who tries to sell a large quantity of anything (bananas, gold bullion, SDRs, etc.) in one shot (buyers within the BitCoin system would expect a large discount, and deflation is once again satisfied). From the system point of view, in neither case does accumulation of the BitCoin units provide the holder a great advantage relative to a user who acquires and spends BitCoins at market rates.
The idea that stored value is easy to come by but difficult to accumulate in the form of BitCoins builds in a neat safety net to encourage risky activities with capital. It also changes the ability to borrow (one always wants to borrow from others or from future earnings because the effective interest rate is always negative) in order to take risk, but that depends on social rather than financial or economic relations. This reverts the risk of entrepreneurship from being denominated in financial currency to being denominated by social currency.
In addition, BitCoin is a different way to socially display transactions: we display cash and credit transactions to a limited audience, but those are not forever searchable. BitCoin transactions are logged and searchable by everyone, but not (explicitly) strongly identified to particular individuals. The ability to use BitCoins to do formal chains of trust among anonymous individuals (via its non-repudiation is also very interesting: this enables anyone to perform the same functions as a certificate authority and to sign a chain of trust
My other concerns:
The current method to seed initial wealth is not optimal since it's difficult for anyone to obtain meaningful quantities of the currency to play with. It used to be that anyone could generate or obtain several BitCoins at no risk or cost, and spend them on useful goods and services, but that is no longer possible with speculators and others who simply obtain BitCoins without adding to liquidity or the network. Since BitCoin does not have to worry about national economic policies, I would suggest a lower threshold for many newcomers to generate (small numbers of) coins if network growth is desired, even if it means that the speculators and defectors can use the system to earn offline currencies. The specific individuals who receive initial wealth are of no specific concern, the market will redistribute BitCoins efficiently to those who want to pay in some resource (see Coase theorem, and in particular, how BitCoin initially appears to have no transaction costs). (The BitCoin network and base will be grown and strengthened when the defectors eventually buy things with their BitCoins; if they don't return their BitCoins to circulation, then at worst they've simply slightly moderated deflation.)
Interestingly, the BitCoin founder owns something like 25% of all the BitCoins in existence in large units. Despite my analysis above regarding currency speculation, I can see some circumstances in which the purchasing power of large and early BitCoin units could increase very significantly relative to small or late BitCoin units as the public market (petty transactions) gains a better understanding of the cost of computing transactions. (It could also go the other way since the cost to compute transactions on a coin that's been out of circulation for a while requires relatively expensive file operations.) The private BitCoin market (institutional transactions) will continue, as the dollar market does, to transact large amounts in big coins. (It will be fun to watch the private and public markets complain at each other about the computational and storage costs of having to verify each others' transactions. It's also possible that the BitCoin tree will fork into different high and low epochs where transactions are only verified back up to certain trusted points in the tree. This form of fragmentation would be the more sustainable way of internally differentiating the market, in contrast to the federation of a bazillion banks and reserves that generate the big frictions [and fictions] of the current currency market.)
I also have some social policy concerns. What if some services become available ONLY with BitCoins? What if the ability to participate in non-essential services becomes tied to expensive computing devices? This excludes a large number of lower socieo-economic status from participating in the economy. If it's not addressed in a sustainable way, BitCoins may just be a very inefficient way to convert electricity into other goods and services.
What are your thoughts?
I won't repeat any of the seemingly excellent financial analysis of BitCoin's relations to the external economic system and currencies as we know them provided at Quora and ycombinator, because such analyses are largely irrelevant. BitCoin may emulate or implement a value-storing currency, but the infrastructure itself is based on different assumptions and exists for different purposes.
Since I first played with BitCoin a year ago, I recognised that it proposes to change relationships among users and shapers of capital. BitCoin can be used as a parallel currency like Liberty Dollars or Calgary Dollars or such, but its purpose (however ill-defined) is not to be a substitute for existing monetary instruments or securities. (Thus, I also find most of the financial analysis about BitCoin's role or relationship to the Dollar-denominated financial world to be uninteresting.)
The relationship shifts I see is as follows:
a) Those who wish to avoid the big corporate or government financial infrastructure (users of BitCoin as a cash alternative) become embedded instead in the big telecom/Internet infrastructure, and on a handful of individuals who make it route.
Under this heading, BitCoin creates new dependencies on electricity to generate wealth (through the computational identification of rare numbers) and to confirm each transaction through the peer network. The mechanics of BitCoin also firmly embed a functional and open public Internet as a requirement of operation. (Consider the case where some one-way firewalls could be used to control both the flow and generation of new BitCoins, or abuses of national gateways to do force transaction collisions. Or selective presentations of the public Internet or of the BitCoin tree to conduct neat tricks to confirm or dis-confirm transactions, or various area denial strategies to expose the real-world identities of users [in the same way as Tor is vulnerable to network manipulation].)
I also have some reservations about how sustainable BitCoins will be into the future. The currency will become more difficult to use as its transacted denomination becomes smaller since each client must calculate increasingly diverse parts of the BitCoin tree with increasing depth and granularity. (The entire BitCoin system is based on an acyclic graph with new coins and transactions added at the edges, requiring community agreement on calculations for each transaction. Since the BitCoin's deflationary model requires existing BitCoins to be divided into smaller and smaller units for use, the number of leaf nodes will increase exponentially over time.) As the number of divisions or branches increase, energy costs to validate each transaction will also increase. As the number of users and transactions increase, the number of calculations each user must do to validate others' transactions also increase. The costs to calculate, transmit, (and store) such transactions will also be somewhere near exponential, which makes BitCoins difficult to use as a vehicle to store and assemble wealth in the long term. (Imagine buying the billion-dollar company Skype SA using pennies.)
Of consequence, there is a substantial risk of social or political fragmentation of the tree depending on what is local and easy or difficult to confirm.
b) Using BitCoin, ordinary peons have the potential to insulate themselves from government and corporate regulation, where only wealthy could before.
In particular, its greatest current successes and supporters relate to areas in which BitCoin serves some (illicit) niches well. Such users judge BitCoin based not necessarily on what it doesn't do in comparison with government currency, but on what it does well by not being government currency. In developing or repressive regiemes, BitCoin could be used by peons to avoid effects of currency manipulation. BitCoin is interesting in developing and developed regimes because it is a way to un-link the transactions of goods from the formal financial mechanisms altogether.
A marketplace in which the transactional unit has an instant value unrelated to short or long term economic policies that happen also to use the same transactional unit for completely different purposes should be more robust against adverse externalities. The fact that BitCoin enables trust to be de-coupled with any particular formal institutional instrument (value-storing or not) should make it more difficult to centrally regulate. In particular, it has no concept of a single point of control or failure such as a central bank(er), nor can there be run on commercial banks. The flip side is that BitCoin also focuses the meatspace locus of illegal activity into a smaller number of venues in which BitCoins can be converted into real world capital. LEOs could use this as part of an area denial strategy.
c) BitCoin changes the relationship content in the action of storing value, and in the action to transmit that value to someone else. In conventional currency systems, convertibility between each currency and others has been desirable or required, but convertibility is not necessarily the goal of BitCoin users. The attitude that users only hold on to as many BitCoins as required for immediate transactions gives BitCoins some qualities of currencies under hyperinflation, but without the destabilizing time compressed effects. Since inflationary growth is not desired by BitCoin users (it makes the opposite economic assumption that deflation is to be valued) building in savings and something like interest into the holding of currency, but making that interest useless unless the currency is spent, should de-emphasize the accumulation of static capital.
In this regard, I find the discussions about currency speculation and the "bitcoin bubble" to be uninformed about the nature of the BitCoin system. It is first and foremost a trust system, through which a function that approximates currency has been implemented. The fact that the potential value of a BitCoin as denominated in state-backed currency systems potentially renders it incompatible with some uses of the latter neither renders BitCoin invalid as a currency system, nor invalid as a trust system.
Those who speculate that BitCoin's value will continue to increase relative to US Dollars, and expect to cash out in USD will only profit from other speculators, not from the BitCoin system. It may be of some concern to state regulators that users of its financial vehicles are abusing each other through incomplete information, but this is not new, nor a concern that materially concerns cooperative BitCoin users. (It would not be possible for BitCoin users to be completely insulated from the conventional currency system since the BitCoin economy does not contain all the instruments of production or consumption necessary to sustain itself. Therefore, BitCoin users would still be subject to macro-economic conditions that occur at scales unrelated to BitCoin's current or foreseeable footprint.) Unlike gold, Dollars, or other contemporary currency units, one cannot gain exclusivity on control of BitCoins as circulating units. BitCoins are almost infinitely divisible; the supply of BitCoin in circulation does not diminish with the denominated value of the BitCoin held and kept out of circulation. (The deflationary part of the system is designed this way.) Like social linkages and currency systems, the value of a BitCoin is only expressed when it is transacted, and heterogeneous uses yield more value than homogeneous uses.
If a holder of many BitCoins were to put many of them back in to circulation as a retail consumer, their effect would be to strengthen the BitCoin network as though through regular use. If they were to attempt to sell the analogue of several million dollars of BitCoins at once, they could buy a lot of one service or product assuming an able supplier (but the value to the spender would be rather low: marginal utility), or they would face the same kinds of problems as anyone who tries to sell a large quantity of anything (bananas, gold bullion, SDRs, etc.) in one shot (buyers within the BitCoin system would expect a large discount, and deflation is once again satisfied). From the system point of view, in neither case does accumulation of the BitCoin units provide the holder a great advantage relative to a user who acquires and spends BitCoins at market rates.
The idea that stored value is easy to come by but difficult to accumulate in the form of BitCoins builds in a neat safety net to encourage risky activities with capital. It also changes the ability to borrow (one always wants to borrow from others or from future earnings because the effective interest rate is always negative) in order to take risk, but that depends on social rather than financial or economic relations. This reverts the risk of entrepreneurship from being denominated in financial currency to being denominated by social currency.
In addition, BitCoin is a different way to socially display transactions: we display cash and credit transactions to a limited audience, but those are not forever searchable. BitCoin transactions are logged and searchable by everyone, but not (explicitly) strongly identified to particular individuals. The ability to use BitCoins to do formal chains of trust among anonymous individuals (via its non-repudiation is also very interesting: this enables anyone to perform the same functions as a certificate authority and to sign a chain of trust
My other concerns:
The current method to seed initial wealth is not optimal since it's difficult for anyone to obtain meaningful quantities of the currency to play with. It used to be that anyone could generate or obtain several BitCoins at no risk or cost, and spend them on useful goods and services, but that is no longer possible with speculators and others who simply obtain BitCoins without adding to liquidity or the network. Since BitCoin does not have to worry about national economic policies, I would suggest a lower threshold for many newcomers to generate (small numbers of) coins if network growth is desired, even if it means that the speculators and defectors can use the system to earn offline currencies. The specific individuals who receive initial wealth are of no specific concern, the market will redistribute BitCoins efficiently to those who want to pay in some resource (see Coase theorem, and in particular, how BitCoin initially appears to have no transaction costs). (The BitCoin network and base will be grown and strengthened when the defectors eventually buy things with their BitCoins; if they don't return their BitCoins to circulation, then at worst they've simply slightly moderated deflation.)
Interestingly, the BitCoin founder owns something like 25% of all the BitCoins in existence in large units. Despite my analysis above regarding currency speculation, I can see some circumstances in which the purchasing power of large and early BitCoin units could increase very significantly relative to small or late BitCoin units as the public market (petty transactions) gains a better understanding of the cost of computing transactions. (It could also go the other way since the cost to compute transactions on a coin that's been out of circulation for a while requires relatively expensive file operations.) The private BitCoin market (institutional transactions) will continue, as the dollar market does, to transact large amounts in big coins. (It will be fun to watch the private and public markets complain at each other about the computational and storage costs of having to verify each others' transactions. It's also possible that the BitCoin tree will fork into different high and low epochs where transactions are only verified back up to certain trusted points in the tree. This form of fragmentation would be the more sustainable way of internally differentiating the market, in contrast to the federation of a bazillion banks and reserves that generate the big frictions [and fictions] of the current currency market.)
I also have some social policy concerns. What if some services become available ONLY with BitCoins? What if the ability to participate in non-essential services becomes tied to expensive computing devices? This excludes a large number of lower socieo-economic status from participating in the economy. If it's not addressed in a sustainable way, BitCoins may just be a very inefficient way to convert electricity into other goods and services.
What are your thoughts?
Thursday, June 2, 2011
It is... It is red.
Ground, reconstituted, and frenched mystery non-fowl meat Kebab in a sauce consisting chiefly of red and shallots.
Cabbage with not quite and simply tart cranberries. Vat of burger pickles. Vat of quartered tomatos.
If we're trying for the generic brightly coloured food square motif, the items should at least look like they're from TOS.
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
It's a boat
The weekend before, I had polished most of the the hull. In the interest of shaking down before the retreat in two weeks, we opted not to polish the mast or the boom this year.
The boating manual says that a mast could be fitted by one person. Two weeks ago, Captain H had thought that between my lack of boat assembly experience, and his lack of English-language nautical terms, we could do it alone. Fortunately we had help, and no one else was launching that day.
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