In re: Kris Kotarski: This is completely fucked up. Rubber bullets... gas... rifles pointed at photo reporters...

The US looks like a third world banana republic right now...

Occupy Denver protesters face off with police – Saturday, October 29, 2011 Photos – Photos and Video

B: If there is a clear and obvious design flaw in public assembly laws of western liberal democracies in general, we should acknowledge that problem and work to resolve it through usual legislative or novel means. If the usual legislative mechanisms are untrustworthy, they would require more than tents to fix.

However, if the preference is to complain about the predictable onslaught of projectiles, rather than to prevent or mitigate them, then the motives and reasoning need to be better explained.

tl;dr: How many supporters have tried to enact positive change, rather than simply complaining?

Kris Kotarski ‎B I'm not sure that the main problem here is the "obvious design flaw in public assembly laws of western liberal democracies in general", although this too is a problem. The main problem is the creeping intolerance for mass dissent, and the almost-complete militarization of police forces in the name of "fighting terrorism" or other some such...

CH: B, let me see if I can distill your post a little shorter: None of these people have done done something famous I've heard about, and they are therefore negative, nattering nobodies of negativity, which I can downplay when they are shot at. How predictable it is to be shot at.


One wonders, have you been? Have you talked to the people there? Maybe you just missed the actions that are being taken on the ground to create change. Now, we can argue about their likely effectiveness, but to cast OWS as nothing but a bunch of layabouts is deeply cynical.

CH: And yes, of course the normal miscreants are there. The Black Block largely caused the big ruckus here in Denver yesterday, but they are, as always, a small minority, used as an excuse by the police to stomp everyone else. I've been shot at and tear gassed because of these assholes before, and have no love for them. But they are never core - just angry people who don't see healthy outlets for frustration.

B: ‎+Kris Kotarski Intolerance for many things have been addressed (but not necessarily overcome) through explicit legislation protecting diversity, including diversity of political opinion. If there is a recognition, design, compliance, or enforcement problem with non-violent solutions, why consistently prefer the violent alternative?

+CH: My comments neither imply nor require all that elaboration.

If our goal is to live in a rules-based lawful society, the right to assemble, the right to dissent, and the right to contribute to the legislative process should be available to everyone. The vast majority of comments on social media, mailing lists, at meetings etc. are complaints about law enforcement actions and improvised responses to such actions, rather than ways to change the laws being enforced.

Municipal ordinances regulating by-law enforcement are surprisingly effective low-hanging fruit, in that a couple dozen people can get an ordinance to and through a municipal committee within a calendar year at most. An ordinance enabling peaceful assembly to override zoning, land use, and perhaps traffic by-laws would, shockingly, lower the risk of participation for everybody, not just for those experts in protesting.

The lack of attempts to protect local protest can only be attributed to an extremely unlikely cognitive gap (protestors and their supporters not knowing how laws can be changed), or a preference for the status quo of receiving violence at taxpayer expense.

Based on protest organisers' consistent and repeated calls made over years for onsite medics to respond to police actions, and distribution of literature about resisting crowd control tactics, I have to ask if and why legislative means to protect dissent have failed. And if they have failed, why are not the protests about such a far more crucial problem?

Could it be the case that if one's only tool is victimhood, every problem looks like suppression?

CH: B, my experience on municipal ordinances is a little different, although I certainly respect those who try to change the basic rules via the normal democratic route. But the ordinances I've seen pass, at least here in Colorado, are the ones that limit the use of space, not expand it. Anti-homeless ordinances are a local favorite, which are inevitably used against sign holders of all types. I was once threatened with arrest for holding an sign near a street corner, as a measure had been passed targeting pan-handlers, banning all sign holding and loitering near intersections.

More to the point, cops quite often disregard or ignore ordinances as they see fit. You can pass ordinances till you're blue in the face, but if police feel free to ignore them, they don't do the least bit of good. Sadly, most elected officials feel they can't be critical of such actions (or don't care), and many departments operate free from much interference from city hall.

Anyway, I still disagree with your main contention that the people at protests aren't the same ones agitating for changes in the law. Personal experience says this just isn't true, although the level of other activities varies with the target of the protest. During the Iraq war protests, no one (including myself) had much of an idea what else could be done without breaking the law. Some of my friends took that step, and blocked base entrances. Yet pro-marijuana legalization protests are full of people actively working on petitions and amendments (and being quite successful at it).

That street protest is suppressed in this country whenever possible does not mean that people should stop doing it until legal remedies have been brought to bear. That's not how one creates change. Your charge of victim-hood, to me, just shows you've not really been involved in rallies. Yes, there is a sense of victim-hood after being shot at and pepper sprayed - as there should be, as you've likely just been victimized. But except for the fringes, this is not what it brining people out. People come for community, and a hope that change is possible. Without those two things, protest fails. Indeed, the creation of victims via police violence can halt a movement in its tracks. Those who believe police violence makes a protest movement stronger (via media coverage, resentment, etc.) are full of shit, and that's something I think both you and I can agree on.

B: ‎+CH:

I appreciate that you have experience in this area. I'm not sure where it is that you think we disagree.

I also disagree with the "main contention that the people at protests aren't the same ones agitating for changes in the law" since that was never my main contention. See: "vast majority of comments on social media, mailing lists, at meetings etc. are complaints about law enforcement", "extremely unlikely cognitive gap", "preference to complain... rather than to prevent or mitigate ... need to be better explained", and "legislative mechanisms are untrustworthy... require more than tents to fix."

I also do not see many pro-marijuana, pro-same-sex union, pro-disabled, and other successful movements being subject to the same kinds of crowd control as practiced in 2011. Time will tell if this generation's remake of sit-ins will succeed or flop.

You'll find my experiences and opinions of rallies on the public record. To summarise, I did not find the typical Western style of group protest (hours of yelling and counter-yelling without listening, multiplied by hundreds of people) to be a productive use of my time in terms of communication or policy development.

Having more recently worked on the other side of policy, community organisers who are the most effective with respect to securing policy or programming are also the most effective at simultaneously spinning both media and supportive crowds. Note that this does not necessarily imply that the crowds' policy demands are being met or even considered. We've seen this gap with some of those elected on social media and "grassroots" hope campaigns in the last four years.

That much existing ordinance is of the restrictive variety should not in itself prevent permissive ordinances from being contemplated or enacted. If there are quality management problems in enforcement, those should be highlighted and addressed using the standard or novel approaches as appropriate.

CH: I think this conversation would have gone much faster in person, as you're quite right, we are more or less in agreement, with a difference in emphasis.

My largest experience was in the build-up to the Iraq war, which was largely organized at a high level, with many attempts to mitigate police action, attempts that I saw fail multiple times when small numbers of people who did not wish to cooperate gave the police the excuse they wanted to fuck everyone over.

Movements with more main-stream positions are subjected to less repression, but their history shows this wasn't always so. The history of homosexual activism is a good example of where the perceived position of the protesters in society largely dictated police action, not the action of the protesters themselves. It's also a good example of where protest and social activism marched hand-in-hand.

But you're quite right, yelling endlessly is a useless exercise beyond awareness, and it has limits there too. Sometimes protest is just cathartic, and that's okay in my book. On a day-to-day basis, OWS isn't operating this way. Yes, there are marches, and that's mostly what gets covered in the media, and there is a segment who wants to fight the police as both symbolic and physical manifestations of authority, but good deal of the time people are sitting around, talking, discussing, and building. Like you, I'm having a hard time thinking it will directly lead to much, but there is little question it has opened up space for other activists to make change. The issues members of OWS commonly mention have gotten far more air time in the U.S. then I've ever in my lifetime, and public opinion seems to be swinging in favor of many of the policies that are natural reactions to the issues. I'll keep offering support to OWS as long as it seems to be creating that space.

Tales of Supervision: Tales of research and writing

In brief:

Met with my student on Thursday afternoon as scheduled. Co-supervisor was away at a conference. We picked a different setting to meet (internal cafe).

After our meeting last week in which we had him tell us the story of his work, the student had written quite a bit about the local context of his empirical research. He reports using the notebook we provided not for his research work, but to plan an upcoming trip in November. I pointed out that he would forget even more after that trip if he didn't develop some good notes now. He said that he is more comfortable doing notes directly into the computer. The diagrams and explanatory text that he composed were good enough that I had scribbled "source?" next to them assuming he had neglected to cite them.

I'm OK with skipping the paper notebook step as long as he does it consistently. We'll find out at the next meeting if my co-supervisor has the same objection.

I expanded on the story-telling approach by asking him about what he had accomplished this week in the practical work, what were the circumstances, and what he thought about the project's progress. Having done similar IT work, I successfully spotted the dodges and poked him on those. He didn't seem to mind, and said that the questioning was helpful. I also had him think about what I or my co-supervisor would ask about at the next meeting since we still only have superficial knowledge about the details. He then thought of a few things that would be helpful to write down in the thesis, estimated the amount of space required to do so, and left the meeting excited to put in some more hours.

I found no major language issues other than some inconsistencies in terminology among different sections. One term appears repeatedly in the introduction but does not show up again. I had reservations about a couple of other terms, but he understood the implications when I asked about them.

Return of the course

Recap: In September I took a "scientific writing" course offered to graduate students. A few times during the course, I had remarked that this or that piece of writing could not have been written by a native English speaker, and was asked to explain why. I said that although technically and semantically correct (it would pass Word's grammar checker), we simply wouldn't express such ideas using such and such a form, but would use this other form instead. But it was difficult to articulate a rule for why that was the case. That was a problem for everyone who had learned to do English through strict adherence to rules.

The take-home assignment for the course was to write a four-page literature review. I submitted that assignment earlier in October. The instructor returned a copy with comments this week. Most comments were directives to apply such and such a rule strictly and always, even though they would violate prevailing scholarly and editorial practice. For example, section titles must follow the Introduction-Literature Review-Methods-Data... pattern and labels, even though editors encourage and readers appreciate more interesting signposts. And apostrophes were only to be used to indicate possessives, not as single quotes. Quotation marks should never appear except when quoting passages directly from text, never mixing the one kind of quotation marks with the other (smart quotes and straight quotes, although the instructor did not use that terminology). And series of quoted terms should be rendered in italics, rather than in quotes, despite the visual subtlety of the italicized comma. Fairly trivial changes that would take 10 minutes based on the local custom of writing English in the strict but not particularly engaging way that the locals are taught in school... OK, it was supposed to be a learning experience and I could dispose of the course forever.

And then I realized why technically correct English composed by Finns and Swedes stands out. They lack intuition about rhythm in English.

English, being a hairy language, has enough technical rules to follow without having to consider aesthetics. I do not sense that they are taught the idea that one could use punctuation to set pace beyond its immediate sentence. Or that rigidly structuring paragraphs can make them as uninteresting as rigidly de-structuring them. Or that thoughtful exceptions to rules can direct attention toward or away from particular measures.

I need to learn more from my student about how English is taught here.

In re: Why Self-Organized Networks Will Destroy Hierarchies

In re: Why Self-Organized Networks Will Destroy Hierarchies http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/why-self-organized-networks-will-destroy-hierarchies/2011/10/27?

?: This strikes me as mostly right, but the second-to-last paragraph seems hopelessly clueless about capital investment. Thoughts?

B: The second to last paragraph is the only one in which he attempts any insight. "the cultural pathologies of hierarchy" is a hypothesis that the broader tendency to coalesce and disband ordered systems may be moderated by human intervention. It's a bold claim to test, but the evidence so far is not favourable.

The trick with big investments and infrastructures (thinking beyond just monetary "capital") is that they take a long time to accumulate, and also a long time to disperse. The energy required to order atoms and other organisms around a tree or former Soviet city or missile fleet or taken for granted infrastructures can take as long to dissipate as to build in the first place. And such investments do not cease to provide value at the moment of their cessation as the ideal system.

Returning to our good friend the Coase theorem, when a hierarchy ceases to be, it can no longer enforce (the same) rules it imposed on the exchange of value it stored. Artifacts storing such stored value, even and especially if randomly redistributed, will tend to end up in the specific other systems in which they would provide the most value by reinforcing the other systems' orders and rules.

The P2P foundation piece misses this point that hierarchies depend on the ragged edges as much as the ragged edges depend on hierarchies. Although it does not explicitly specify how hierarchies come to exist, there are three possibilities. (I equate hierarchy to order for simplicity. I've not thought through a universe in which hierarchies do not imply at least order.)

a) Hierarchies (and order) simply spontaneously come to exist as fully formed systems.

b) Super-hierarchies decompose into into the hierarchies we observe. This cannot be independent of a) or c).

c) Hierarchies are composed of less ordered pieces, and by induction, of self-organized networks and whatever they are made of.

Decomposition with recomposition is the only explanation compatible with the piece's argument that progress (putting new order around things) depends on breaking hierarchies. Otherwise, new order would just form and overlay on the old order and everyone would be happy.

?: "I've not thought through a universe in which hierarchies do not imply at least order."

That's interesting. What's "order" in this case? Would a series of (relatively) rapidly shifting equilibria that still follows some larger pattern apply?

B: Hierarchy minimally requires arrangement of things into above/same/below categories. In this case, I think we're most interested in the kinds and instances of relatively stable and reliable relationships among the things ordered in a hierarchy. To maintain such arrangements requires an energy expenditure (and implied input), whether or not such arrangements generate exploitable efficiencies elsewhere in the system (I think that this was one of the points that the P2P piece tried to make).

The second part of your question concerns how to the spatial and temporal magnification on observations. How long has life on this planet depended on photosynthesis? Which species have provided photosynthetic services over the last 4 billion years and where? Does the series of ever-changing players in the common microbe/plant->animal->animal energy flow make a difference to the pattern, and what would notice?

And most importantly: Given the current network of lock-ins and dependencies, how much freedom does any component of the network have with respect to breaking those dependencies, and at what scale? All life on this planet also happens to be locked into sugars, fats, proteins, etc of the same chirality to be food-compatible with each other. Within Earth organisms, I can easily substitute fish for chicken for legumes for MREs as food, but I cannot easily substitute photosynthesis for eating as an energy intake if all editable (to me because millions of years of evolution have resulted selected for a relatively standard set of robust interfaces) food sources disappear.

(While we're here, this is substantially the reason that I find the anti-finance protests to be mostly pointless. Finance can easily substitute every particular source of inputs [almost exclusively interest and commissions] taken away by legislation. But, as has been pointed out, most of the value generated by finance stays within that system, and little value would be lost by most from its cessation. Humanity had gathered around great works long before there was a modern finance system.

As a highly optimised system, finance operates on a faster beat than the outside world, i.e. in milliseconds instead of hours, so even small decrease in inputs is noticeably multiplied throughout the system. Since the only external source of input into that system is from the masses, simply not feeding any more input into the finance system will be sufficient for it to burn out on its own. There's no need to expend the effort to actively destroy anything as suggested by the P2P article. Large trees and animals fall over and die all the time without being dragged.)

Translate server... win

It's interesting that this is written in English instead of Finnish.

Lights are on but nobody is home.

It's interesting that this is written in English instead of Finnish.

In re: Premier waffles on judicial inquiry into Alberta health-care allegations

RG: It didn't take her long to completely about-face with respect to this critical campaign promise. You can add her to the list of provincial Tories who are nearing zero credibility.

Premier waffles on judicial inquiry into Alberta health-care allegations

B: Competing unstated assumptions: Those closer to the badness have more knowledge to ask better questions of their peers, but are less trusted by outsiders. Those independent of the badness would have to learn quite a bit from their suspects to engage in the same depth of inquiry, but would be more trusted by outsiders.

No one is asking: How would we fund a multi-year independent inquiry at 7-8 figures per year (to do it correctly)?

RG: @B: I agree with the assumptions, but I'm not sure of their relevance. The problem with a health quality council review is that it has no teeth and would be seen as (and perhaps be in actuality) a half-hearted and insincere attempt to get to the bottom of things. A judicial inquiry would be independent and separate from any partisan politics (which is good, because some of the people suspected of inappropriate behaviour are in the PC party and likely to be whitewashed in any government proceeding).

As to the cost issue (which I have heard raised before), I understand your point. How, during times of fiscal belt-tightening, do we justify the cost of this inquiry when there's no guarantee it will have any "tangible" results (i.e., findings of wrongdoing, recommendations to prevent same in the future)? I guess my position is that it would be worth the money to know that people have been behaving in a responsible, accountable manner (or, conversely, that they haven't). If the money isn't felt to be "worth it", then why investigate any allegations of unethical/illegal activity--ever--be it at a government level or individual? Should we all be exempt from investigation and prosecution because of the cost to the legal system? As to the money itself, it's fascinating how the government can justify spending taxpayer money on astronomical oil company subsidies ($1 billion in 2008), redundant levels of bureaucracy, pay raises for MLAs...but when it comes to ponying up some meager lucre to ensure the people in power are behaving properly, there's no cash to be had.

At any rate, my initial premise was that Redford made a key campaign promise that many people (myself included) bought into (or at least WANTED to believe), on which she is now reneging. Either have a judicial inquiry, or don't; compelling reasons exist on both sides, and I can live with the decision (which is for people much smarter than me to determine). But when you promise something, make it a large electoral issue, then completely change your mind and sweep it under the carpet, I get frustrated and annoyed.

B: ‎+RG: One could determine what to investigate through the usual cost/benefit analysis.

Assume an independent inquiry. Also assume that it finds that all of the allegations of misconduct are true. What would be the benefits and costs to society to systematically address some or all modes of misconduct found?

Now assume the opposite, that the independent inquiry finds no misconduct and makes the commendation about better documentation and communication of policies. Do you honestly believe that critics will back off, and not simply allege that the independent inquiry was tainted, that witnesses refused to cooperate on government orders, or that it was not sufficiently independent? What would be the costs to society of this outcome?

No inquiry would come to either of those extreme conclusions. Given that we are talking about error prone processes performed by humans, we can expect some variance from the ideal some of the time. In manufacturing, a human might acceptably perform a standard task incorrectly one time out of 500. In data entry, that error might be as high as one time out of 10 (acceptable at the phone company, not acceptable at cheque clearing). In some tasks or professions requiring a high degree of judgement on incomplete information, humans acceptably make mistakes half or two-thirds of the time. Think baseball hitters. While there are policies that could reduce such errors (at varying costs), no procedural or physical policy can eliminate all errors.

Given that AHS conducts at least millions of standard and judgemental transactions a year, many involving ambiguous information, I would personally not be surprised at a finding of mis-queing (intentional or otherwise) in up to one-quarter of all cases. A quality or process expert would be able to more closely determine the expected error in the system as is.

If we want to do this through the quality council, or an independent inquiry, all parties should first agree to some well-defined basic things *before* it begins: a) the tests to be used to evaluate whatever they're examining; b) the thresholds for concluding that the system performed appropriately, inappropriately, needs improvement, etc. Otherwise, either process could cherry-pick or ignore the naturally occurring errors and conclude whatever the charismatic committee member wants to conclude.

I don't see parties on either side eager to do the kind of work needed to head toward an objective finding here.

M was correct

Up side: Halloween isn't a consumer event here, so the stores did not become filled with black and orange cruft for the six weeks before the end of October.

Down side: The red and green Christmas shopping season starts in mid-October.

Undecided: It's "Christmas" here, not the uncommitted "Winter Season's Neither Holy nor non-Holy Zero or More Days of Optional Consumer Excess but it's OK if you don't Celebrate Because We don't Want to Offend" marked in Canada.

Spooky bug

Tales of supervision: References and defenses

MSC student

I met with my student for the first time in a month. (My three conferences/meetings in North America broke our last scheduled meeting. Also, he did not present his research plan as scheduled three weeks ago, and has rescheduled for November.) He emailed the latest draft of his first three chapters. I marked perhaps ten sentence mechanics issues (a few less frequent cases of definite and indefinite articles), and another ten style concerns throughout. (I suggested that shifting tense within a paragraph was not the best idea, and that some sentence constructions.) I am really impressed with his progress. I had emailed both him and my co-supervisor that his draft made more sense than the papers I had reviewed recently for an international journal. (Then I found out that another student supervised by my co-supervisor, who works at the same firm as our student and started his thesis at the same time and was further along in the thesis, has hit a wall.) I am also pleased to challenge him to nail down his interpretations, ideas, and concepts.

I am concerned that this will set me up with unreasonably high expectations for future students. I will also have less material to discuss with my colleagues in North America who have helped me on this supervisory adventure.

My co-supervisor was pleased that the student had included 17 of the required 50 references. The student's development of ideas and themes so far doesn't ring any alarm bells, but I'll take a more detailed look at the references this week anyway since it's important to both of them.

We're now in the middle of the effort and since our original meeting schedule had run out. We decided to fix meetings on a weekly basis until the thesis is complete. I also demanded thesis drafts on Wednesdays from now on, so that I could comment in time for the student and co-supervisor to digest on Thursday before our meetings.

The student had not found himself a dedicated paper notebook for the academic part of this project, so I stepped out of the meeting to raid the supply closet.

He is using a design research methodology (mostly at my co-supervisor's insistence), which requires analysing various factors and conditions that occur during a design process. My co-supervisor and I repeatedly emphasised the importance of keeping track of the unique circumstances in which the student works, and the importance of having a memory aid at hand for figuring out the important theoretical and applied analyses later. The three of us agreed that the student would write or sketch at least half a page per day (my co-supervisor is into diagrams and figures).

I asked him to tell us the story of the project so far from the firm perspective. (Insert standard IT consulting project story here.) This helped all three of us think about how best to approach the big picture. My co-supervisor had independently concluded that the link from theory to empirical research could be stronger. She left it as an open question in our pre-meeting discussion; I had sketched some thoughts (to help me summarise with the student's work so far) on the hardcopy of the latest thesis draft. I don't know if that will be helpful for the student.

My co-supervisor also emphasised the importance of getting the thesis done in this calendar year, even if course credits are incomplete. Theses completed next year will be worth fewer course credits than in this year. For the next three year budget cycle, which comes up in the spring, the university will use the number of MSCs completed as a metric. 2007 was a good year in that regard, but will not be counted, so we apparently need to complete as many MSCs as possible in the next two months. (I also learned that it's not unusual to complete the thesis before completing coursework requirements.) In an internal department e-mail on Friday, my co-supervisor reminded everyone of the rewards of supervising an MSC to completion: 50 paid work hours (at 32.5 hours per week) to do whatever, and funding to attend a discretionary conference. (I'm externally funded, so the 50 hours do not affect me; I'll take the conference funding though.)

I ended with the usual open-ended "what questions do you have for us?", which again didn't elicit any questions from the student. (My co-supervisor had not thought to ask this.) I'm considering a different approach since he has not asked any questions in this context so far.

An unusual PhD defense

Scheduled start: 12:15. Actual start 12:30. This has apparently never happened before.

The fifteen of us in the audience stood as the candidate, his supervisor, and the external opponent, entered in that order. The candidate and the supervisor both wore identical tail-suits. The supervisor carried a doctoral hat (600e), wore white gloves, and a white bow tie. The candidate assumed the podium at right without a bow tie. The opponent wore a business suit under his academic regalia. I'm told that it's usually business casual for defenses.

After a scripted exchange of pleasantries and introductions, the candidate, a native English speaker, read an abbreviated version of his introductory chapter for the first 20 minutes. It was a compilation dissertation. Candidates normally present something more substantial, I'm told. The opponent (from a featured US IS school) asked some softball questions, including "which part of your research do you think was the best?" ("the best part was the part I enjoyed the most"), some technical minutia about where and how some details appeared in the printed document ("copy and paste error in the diagram, it's correct in the matrix"), "on which of the chapters are you the lead author?" ("the first three"), and "what was your strategy to choose journals to submit to?". The opponent also gave the audience some practical publication tips!

The supervisor (who looked a little too much like Mr. Bean for my comfort) took notes and fidgeted for the 90 minute exchange without speaking a word to the audience. He closed the ceremony with more script. The examiner was apparently supposed to hold forth for an extended period about the strengths and weaknesses of the dissertation, but closed with a recommendation that the faculty accept the dissertation. When asked if anyone knew of any reason why these two should not be wed the dissertation should not be accepted, one audience member asked "why did you choose exactly four studies?", to which the acceptable response was "my supervisor said so". My guess is that the opponent was jet-lagged if he had flown in from the US. Several times he attributed to old age some problems he had navigating his own notes.

My co-supervisor (from the above story) and I discussed the defense on the way out to coffee and cake. The first thing she said was: "I have never seen a dissertation or defense like this before." Four unpublished co-authored chapters seemed weak to both of us. At coffee, I asked about the tail-suits. No one knew, and we dared not ask either of the dapper gentlemen. I was asked if I knew why the opponent was wearing a strange costume. I explained North American convocation ceremony customs regarding academic dress, but I made it clear that I had no idea why it was deployed at the defense.

Bonus: Lessons from my former supervisor

While in North America, I took the opportunity to ask my former Master's supervisor about supervising. He told several stories about his experiences as a post-doc in the UK being supervised, as well as about supervising some of my predecessors and myself. We had always had a good working relationship as research collaborators, and a good personal relationship through good food, travel, and drink, but we had never discussed supervising in any detail. (He told me that this was the first time he had ever been asked to externalise his knowledge about supervising and teaching.) We had a good talk about the importance of communicating regularly and substantially (both the supervisor's and the student's responsibility to keep the relationship healthy; credit where credit is due); using different learning and teaching styles for different students (if possible adapt to the student, rather than expect the student to adapt); encouraging students to find and exploit their own areas of excellence; and the importance of learning how to supervise by supervising.

He confirmed that he did not know of any formal resources to help novice supervisors learn to supervise.

(I would like to collaborate with any knowledgable or interested reader to patch this gap in practice and in the literature.)

Most corporations are small businesses owned by the middle class. Discuss.

Being able to successfully conduct almost all of the work of living using a minority of the total resources is desirable according to standard environmental movements and economic models. But in this case, we're not even discussing resources, but rather proxies for resources, all stored in abstract computer systems. At a high level, does the friction come from imbalanced wealth and asset distribution, or with the inversion of the relationship between social and economic models embedded into our management systems. The total resources available more than meet the total needs of potential users. The top-level people in the system do not spend their days actively looking for ways to deprive individuals of access to the necessities of life. At the end of the day, they are all human and have enough of the generic kinds of graces and decencies that they maintain some semblance of generic human social function. The most heated arguments appear to be about how best to reconfigure the rules at the edges in order to conform to (evidently different) perceptions about the core ruleset. (The core ruleset is an implementation of a social model first developed a long time ago and incrementally refined ever since the Enlightenment, the American Revolution, the Information Age, or other convenient shorthand epoch. It necessarily embeds stated and unstated assumptions, some of which have become irrelevant today.. Rather than arguing how we should conform to the ruleset or model, we might ask if we need this particular ruleset or model to perform our desired social functions. Or failing that, we might consider how to revise the model in order to regain control over the rules we impose upon ourselves.) I don't see any individual in the top tier enjoying more than one set of clothing, one meal, one party, or one habitation at one time. For anyone but the extreme bottom tier, the question concerns degree, rather than having or not having. As we know from centuries of manufacturing, formal rules are very good at restricting variation until something catastrophic happens. If an explicit rules-based society is what we want (in keeping with the mechanistic Enlightenment paradigm), the rules to determine which corporations do or do not operate in a socially acceptable manner must operate repeatably. That is, the standards we apply to one corporation must be uniform across all other corporations of the same kind. In the past, we've designed rules around qualitative differences among corporations (monopoly, public, not-for-profit, charitable, professional, etc.). But under current classifications, it's not evident how Google (which knowingly sells bundles of ads that will mostly not be clicked) is different *in kind* from a firm that knowingly sells bundles of loans that will mostly not be repaid. Closer to accountability, all but the smallest of organisations exhibit some specialisation and distribution of tasks because few individuals have the knowledge, skills, or time to do everything. Hence, each layer of functional or organisational abstraction costs some information and transparency, and hence, accountability. The problem of information and communication gaps is ubiquitous (and possibly scale-free). This, I think, exposes one of the fatal assumptions we've been making: that wealth and assets as denominated or proxied in terms of money are conceptually or practically related to any social dimension. (This is not to say that there is no social dimension to wealth, but that the same social dynamics apply irrespective of particular wealth or lack thereof.) Investment firms, politicians, or profiteers are not socially destructive because they have different bits in some database next to their names; they would be considered socially destructive because they exploit trust and incomplete information in their social relations with other humans. This wealth manifestation is a symptom or outcome, not a cause, of some deeper dynamic that begins with exploiting individuals. tl;dr: If we believe the mechanistic relationship between input reactants (exploitation) and output products (wealth), removing product from the system would tend to drive the reaction forward (more exploitation). In contrast, if we want something other than a rules-based society, we would need to do something different in kind than adding or removing rules at the edges.

Most corporations are small businesses owned by the middle class. Discuss.

K: In numbers, yes. In employment, yes. In share of wealth & assets, no. Hence the problem...

N: There are too many layers in a corporation for it to be considered 'small'. 'Small' implies connection to all aspects of the business (from production to selling). Large businesses lose that, and therefore they lose accountability of the stages--that's where problems happen. It's the classic thing Hitler did when killing people...dividing up and isolating tasks...(i hope what i'm saying is clear).

B: Being able to successfully conduct almost all of the work of living using a minority of the total resources is desirable according to standard environmental movements and economic models. But in this case, we're not even discussing resources, but rather proxies for resources, all stored in abstract computer systems.

At a high level, does the friction come from imbalanced wealth and asset distribution, or with the inversion of the relationship between social and economic models embedded into our management systems. The total resources available more than meet the total needs of potential users. The top-level people in the system do not spend their days actively looking for ways to deprive individuals of access to the necessities of life. At the end of the day, they are all human and have enough of the generic kinds of graces and decencies that they maintain some semblance of generic human social function. The most heated arguments appear to be about how best to reconfigure the rules at the edges in order to conform to (evidently different) perceptions about the core ruleset.

I don't see any individual in the top tier enjoying more than one set of clothing, one meal, one party, or one habitation at one time. For anyone but the extreme bottom tier, the question concerns degree, rather than having or not having. As we know from centuries of manufacturing, formal rules are very good at restricting variation until something catastrophic happens.

If an explicit rules-based society is what we want (in keeping with the mechanistic Enlightenment paradigm), the rules to determine which corporations do or do not operate in a socially acceptable manner must operate repeatably. That is, the standards we apply to one corporation must be uniform across all other corporations of the same kind. In the past, we've designed rules around qualitative differences among corporations (monopoly, public, not-for-profit, charitable, professional, etc.). But under current classifications, it's not evident how Google (which knowingly sells bundles of ads that will mostly not be clicked) is different *in kind* from a firm that knowingly sells bundles of loans that will mostly not be repaid.

Closer to accountability, all but the smallest of organisations exhibit some specialisation and distribution of tasks because few individuals have the knowledge, skills, or time to do everything. Hence, each layer of functional or organisational abstraction costs some information and transparency, and hence, accountability. The problem of information and communication gaps is ubiquitous (and possibly scale-free).

This, I think, exposes one of the fatal assumptions we've been making: that wealth and assets as denominated or proxied in terms of money are conceptually or practically related to any social dimension. (This is not to say that there is no social dimension to wealth, but that the same social dynamics apply irrespective of particular wealth or lack thereof.)

Investment firms, politicians, or profiteers are not socially destructive because they have different bits in some database next to their names; they would be considered socially destructive because they exploit trust and incomplete information in their social relations with other humans. This wealth manifestation is a symptom or outcome, not a cause, of some deeper dynamic that begins with exploiting individuals.

tl;dr: If we believe the mechanistic relationship between input reactants (exploitation) and output products (wealth), removing product from the system would tend to drive the reaction forward (more exploitation). In contrast, if we want something other than a rules-based society, we would need to do something different in kind than adding or removing rules at the edges.

KM: Look at this week's Bloomberg Businessweek. Clearly the drivers of job creation are large corporations in any developed economy.

B: Perhaps you could summarise the evidence presented in this week's Businessweek instead of assuming that I will successfully guess at the specific references you want to cite?

In any case, "job creation" unlikely to be exclusively a top-down or bottom-up phenomena, and posing the question and assumptions as such only leads to unhelpful adversarial thinking. The vocations of most humans most of the time is to fulfill proximate needs identified locally, in the context of organizations of any size, including corporations, families, etc. that exist in some context. Now what forms that context?

With respect to economic employment, we need to eat, and can fulfill that need by creating the local role of the sole proprietorship corner grocer. Would that role be sustainable without being backstopped by a multi-trillion-dollar per month globally integrated supply chain? Would P&G be able to develop better products and serve new customers without being backstopped by the tens of thousands of low-volume distributors responsible for most of their administrative costs but almost none of their volume or earnings?

Contexts are necessarily co-created unless you believe society to be entirely technologically or socially constructed. Empirical evidence is against such deterministic interpretations. One cannot socially deconstruct a nuclear weapon any more than one can technologically construct a popular website at will.

T: Why should corporations exist at all, why give more economic rights to an abstract legal fiction than to actual people, and furthermore why set up an economic system which by its very structure subverts the political one?

B: Presently, the formal corporation affords us an entity to hold accountable when things go badly, and to continue desirable works when they do well. Otherwise, no city could reasonably procure a bridge from a skilled 60-year-old engineer, and we wouldn't have important multi-generational institutions like universities or hospitals.

More distantly, as a demand of the last major Western popular uprising, Cromwell et al. needed to keep track of the unlimited powers formerly held by the sovereign as exercised by Parliament. While the sovereign could more or less proclaim that such and such a group as identified ad hoc would be required to do X, this lead to rampant injustices. Codification into law was a convenient (but ultimately unsustainable) way to deal with this problem at the time. But formal laws could only act on formal legal persons, hence the need to create fictitious legal persons in corporate form. (One could consider Parliament itself as the prototypical corporate body with perpetual succession.)

There are certainly other-not a legally incorporated entity-ways to organise sustainable collective efforts while retaining some measure of accountability (several non-idolatrous open source projects seem to get this right [those with founder syndrome appear generally less sustainable]), but the public attitude has not been favourable toward more mainstream efforts from the Vatican, AQ, HA, Eastern syndicates, etc. Perhaps the current protestors could even explore some ways to demonstrate new ways of organisation that would be acceptable to society at large, even though they would not share in many of the basic assumptions that underpin current adoration of the rule of law.

Of course, that would also require us to break with key mechanistic and scientistic assumptions about how our society should work. Current persistently loud demands from both corporations and their opponents that legislators reform corporate law at primarily at the edges indicates that most stakeholders are not prepared to have that discussion.

T: I really don't know where your coming from with Corporations being the saviors of modern society. I don't understand why all this vital infrastructure relies on corporate identity. LAst time I checked you don't need a corporation to build a bridge or hospital.

T: There is an inherent different in the identity of Parliament and a corporations, namely that they have different constituencies, the parliament is vested in the creation fo legislation for the perpetuation of Peace Order and Good Government, whereas corporations are only beholden to their share holders. What is a non-Idolatrous open source project?

24 October at 21:09 · Like

T: What ever happened to small companies, locally run, owned, managed etc.? I think there is a lack of alternative solutions and there needs to be more development here, I for one would establish asa fundamental principle of how a society should function, that it not be suicidal and self destructive. The current system fails on this respect. ergo change is needed. But we stray, the initial point was whether or not corporations are owned by the middle class. I would contend that ownership and management are different. I myself have owned shares at various times and at no time did I feel as though I ran the companies, or my votes at share holders meetings were relevant. Why? Because the majority voters are the elite, rich, or massive hedge-funds managed by the elite and wealthy....

D: T - question for you: do you understand the reasoning behind Corporate personhood?

T: Whose reasoning?

In re: THiNKiNG ABouT CLoSiNG YouR TBTF BaNK ACCouNT? | ZeroHedge

In re: THiNKiNG ABouT CLoSiNG YouR TBTF BaNK ACCouNT? | ZeroHedge

http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/thinking-about-closing-your-tbtf-bank-account

B: Cashier's cheques: How do they work?

?: Or, you know, get a debit card form a credit union... this is a political act... equating criticizing TBTF banks with some sort of a luddite tendency is on par with screaming "Communism!!!" everyone someone criticizes a private firm...

B: Using debit cards reinforces rather than changes the infrastructure that some people are trying to undermine. Cash and cash-like transactions concern the exchange of stored value alone (neglecting the clearinghouse functions on an instrument payable to 'cash'). Electronic transactions attach several information and fee components, and engage third parties that may or may not add value to the transaction.

If even 10% of the population used only cash for one month, their cumulative negative impact on banks in retail would be far greater than simply moving money out of accounts. (Also, local economies would almost immediately benefit from not having 3% of the value of each transaction go immediately to the banks, or something like a 1% reduction of total transaction costs).

What would subtracting 1% of the value of retail transactions from the finance sector (±$400,000,000,000 per year), say during the holiday buying season, look like on a balance sheet?

It's unfortunate that this common-sense solution will never be attempted since it lacks the political posturability of protests.

Don't know if trolling, or just very broken

Categories

It is said that a place and its people are defined through its categories. Snippets from a survey that made the rounds today:

I have not found the Finnish lectures any more or less interactive or inspiring than those from anywhere else; however, Finns are typically more reserved.

So much derp...

In re: "CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About... "

http://www.businessinsider.com/what-wall-street-protesters-are-so-angry-about-2011-10#

I disagree with the protestors' proposed approach to solutions, but at least some of them are sufficiently numerate to articulate consistent arguments based on rational interpretation and presentation of facts and evidence.

This feels like the work of Beck: Lots of charts out of context, some misleading, some under-used, but all without even hinting at a theory linking it all together that someone might critique or apply toward a solution.

#1, #5: The plutocratic theory explains the blips better than recession, right? Also, population pyramids.

#2: Which Acts passed around 1960 do we want to repeal? Which Acts passed around 2005 do we want to strengthen?

#2-#7: Those who found employment in 2009 obtained steady, recession-proof positions? Also, why would WS/WH/etc. deliberately keep the unemployed masses from becoming eligible to take on new debt?

#10 and #13: CEOs (in aggregate) are being paid more for better performance (in aggregate). We'd applaud this if the CEOs were top bureaucrats of government departments.

#11: Scale: What's in the other 90%?

#12: So we've lost the non-profitable and unsustainable CEOs at the bottom end of compensation. What's the problem?

#13: What's a CSR or legislative solution to this that does not move CEOs out of US jurisdiction?

#14: People are being more efficient with their resources. This is good, right? Also, this chart is misleading: Examining the cost of consumer debt maintenance would show a far worse situation.

#15, #40: The financial sector isn't responsible for overall wages. There are huge SMB and public sectors in there as well. Also, CEOs are not responsible for success of the economy as a whole. If they were, CEOs would make sure that wage earners earn enough to buy corporate junk and go further debt.

#17: This is a tautology. By definition, the top n percent of wage earners in any field will earn disproportionately more than everyone else, because top has been defined in terms of income.

#18: Missing most recent decade of data for other countries, exactly where the largest difference is claimed.

#19: Other trend: Large countries appear at the bottom. More importantly: The measure of inequity has been increasing for the US, UK, India, and China over the last 40 years. One of those things is not like the others...

#20: It's as easy to move up in economic status as it is to move down. Why is this necessarily bad?

#21, #22: In other words, wealth distribution and net worth, should have very little to do with most measurable characteristics of the vast majority of the population.

#23: Figure 2a is more helpful: The top income earners front most of the risk and underwrite most of the non-governmental social security mechanisms. It makes sense for most of the population to own most of the assets and to owe most of the money.

#24: This chart says several different things, incorrectly. a) This is a chart of the tax rate on the top-most slice of income, not the tax rate on the top income earners. They only pay the highest rate on income above the highest cutoff. b) The top tax bracket has changed rather a lot over time: http://www.taxfoundation.org/files/fed_individual_rate_history_nominal&adjusted-20110909.pdf c) No one with serious money earns it as personal income.

#25-26: Yes, that is what a progressive income tax does.

#29: Note *commercial* banks. Also note: Data's too short to say much about the effects of this (non-)lending on jobs or SMB earnings or much else. Also note: We need a graph of met or unmet demands for loans in order to do attribution.

#30-32. #35: So, the banks have leveraged their interest-free loans to return to and resume their pre-bailout profit margins. That doesn't seem like very good use of free money.

#36: Steady growth trend since the 1950s. Needs additional data such as capitalisation, employees, etc. about this, and the rest of the comparators to see whether this line, or recent bumps, are to be expected.

f7u12 salad

From the creators of fu salad:

MORE F. MORE U.

NO SALAD.

Fall 2011.

Fail day

(write on the board how you have failed)

A sustainable fail:

And this:

Wanted: One beefy arm of justice.

In re: "Bankers’ Salaries vs. Everyone Else’s"

Regarding "Bankers’ Salaries vs. Everyone Else’s" at http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/11/bankers-salaries-vs-everyone-elses/

Three takeaways:

a) The complexity and diversity of securities available to be traded appears to increase in approximately the same fashion and time as the securities professionals' salaries. This complexity and opacity is often cited to justify regulatory reform.

b) There's an embedded cycle in which securities professionals appear to get a pay increase, followed by a two year decline, starting with election years. This cycle stands out as needing to be explained or discounted from the broader argument concerning links between finances and politics.

c) Securities professionals and the top earnings quintile likely overlap significantly for a very good reason: We select for individuals they demonstrate at least personal proficiency with finances. This matters because the chart presented is essentially a different version of these charts:

http://advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/Household-Income-Versus-Medical-and-College-Costs.php

which show essentially the same pattern of wage growth for all income categories. (Even the scale-compressed chart at the NYT shows that private sector salaries move in the same direction and in the same direction as the securities professionals'.)

The question no one has asked is why the income and income growth distributions have held throughout the last 30 years despite essentially three different domestic financial policy regimes, and two to three different international financial policy frameworks. If wealth distribution follows one of the normal distributions, even the most flattening and skewing of policy interventions would not be able to eliminate the tail ends. If the distributions are effectively subject to policy, and if the top income earners can control policy, why have they not used policy to skew the distribution even more strongly in their favour?

(There's also a question here about the kinds of structural factors that enable individuals in the top income categories to better leverage the common environment to accumulate advantages, but that would invoke a different discussion about the tendency of restrictive policies to be profitably circumvented to the great advantage of the innovators.)

RG: B!! In English, please! You've no doubt raised some excellent points, and are dead on, but I have very little idea what you just said. I do know that I disagree with the suggestion that policies are "restrictive"--it seems to me there's very little regulation, which allows for all sorts of crookedness (e.g., sub-prime mortgage defaults)...but then I'm probably mixing up several different issues into one. Please correct me (in Common) when I'm wrong.

B: tl;dr: Securities professionals deal in more than just in retail banking; specialisation, diversification, and increasing complexity of their products and services could explain increased labour costs as with other industries.

Securities professionals' wages changed in the same directions and in the same time periods as everyone elses', no plutocratic theory is required to explain the data presented by the NYT.

With respect to regulation, US Code devotes as many chapters to finance and commerce as to each of: military, all other industries, human resources.

To expand on the last item: As you may be aware from MDROs or the many recent political uprisings, unsustainable restraints to contain a phenomena usually result in catastrophic failure because costs for the restrainer grow exponentially with the number of restraints, while costs for those being restrained grow linearly (at most) with the number of attempts to escape. Thus it would be unsurprising if the securities professionals who most successfully innovate around the restrictions they encounter also receive the most rewards (as in every other industry). In securities specifically, in the months it takes legislators and regulators to codify a technical restriction (and thereby point out a symptom of some deeper flaw in the system), each motivated securities professional could use automated systems to try, with close to zero risk, dozens of other ways to circumvent the proposed restriction or to elsewise exploit the flaw. (This is why I find the current demands for piecemeal finance reform unconvincing as compared to the systematic solutions that I and others have discussed elsewhere.)

Let's fighting love

Wait... Are we supposed to be angry because the powers that be *are* maximizing their exploitation of labour, or because they *are not*?

If the proposed mechanism is that imbalance arises from a small group of elites who strongly control everything, why would they not fully exercise such control to maximize utilization and efficiency of their profit-generating workforce? Why would elites in full control even permit enough of the workforce to become sufficiently unemployed that they can no longer maximally produce or purchase?

In any other system, the rapid development of a huge local energy or material surplus within a system indicates that some quality external to the system has changed. Often that change is the local consequence of the broader system becoming more organized.

If we remove the money abstraction from our world, what do we see in matter and energy? Globally, more humans are alive now than have ever been alive on this planet before, and they are much better fed, sheltered, and clothed for longer lifespans than for the majority of our existence. Locally, small numbers of individuals can channel the sun to cause great works to rise out of the ground without maintaining vast warehouses of goods or a standing workforce. The automated trade of information and time, of which we slowly take part, generates far more activity and wealth than any activity that humans mediate directly. However, the rich perhaps avoid death slightly longer than most, but remain subject to the same limits as all others.

Are we simply supposed to be angry because most of us were not chosen to accompany SkyNet when it came online? Curious that we protest our fellow humans but forgive machines to which we are made to feed our attention and information for the small gruel of online companionship and community. Are we angry that we're being sold the same social relationships that we worked so hard to build?

Culture of transparency

Earlier this month, someone moving out was trying to sell excess tobacco and alcohol by the list, and was reminded not to do so. This came across the list tonight...

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [Exchange] other than cigarettes
Date: Mon, 10 Oct 2011 18:47:16 +0300
From: [redacted].honeybunny.[redacted]@gmail.com
To: exchange@lists.oulu.fi


Hey all,

I have noticed that some people actually try to sell stuff with this list. I would like to offer you something as well. If you are in need, some day, of company for going out for example... or a nice dinner at a fancy restaurant... or stuff like that, let me know. The conditions have to be negotiated individually (like massages and so on, if you know what I mean...), the price as well.

Just let me know, I am talkative, pretty and nice companionship :)

See you,

[redacted]

Between 99 and 1

The approach proposed by the occupy-foo supporters will not work for a simple reason. Even if every demand for policy and structural reform were met, the niche occupied by the mechanisms of the 1% must continue to exist if we wish to keep benefitting from their use. Only solutions that would deprive the top tier predators of their energy sources in the financial ecosystem can possibly succeed, and all such solutions will cause at least some short term pain to the 99%.

At a very high level, the function of every institution on Wall Street, including banks, brokerages, and other financial services providers is identical. Because we as individual humans and organizations cannot reasonably gather sufficient information to trust every agent or system with whom we would like to transact, we outsource that relationship-proxying task to a third party trusted by all transacting parties. For this service, the third party receives a modest commission in cash and/or information. That commission /should/ cost all parties less than would be required to perform the service themselves.

Thus, a customer and a shopkeeper both trust Interac or Maestro or Cirrus to transfer money from the customer's account to the shopkeeper's. Pension fund trustees in turn trust funds managers to make good decisions about which relationships to develop with which shopkeepers by investing capital. Funds managers in turn trust transaction brokers to carry out their trades on exchanges. Public companies trust exchanges to list and match orders for their stocks. etc.

Every relationship is built on trust (trust in another party's characteristics, or in their *lack* of particular characteristics), which in our financial system, is represented in bits of information in various computer systems and databases. And with billions of transactions per day needing trust to be verified, any third party that takes part in testing trust or moving resources is well positioned to be greatly profitable, especially if the trust-verification service becomes a de facto requirement for all transactions, even those that do not require the service. Counterbalancing this structurally advantageous position is a clusterpile of piecemeal and contradictory legislation and regulation accumulated over centuries which acts as a perpetual source of loopholes to be exploited.

Legislation and regulation are logical propositions and algorithms that form a model of the universe according to which we are to socially operate the immediately accessible physical universe. It is notoriously difficult to develop or prove that algoritms run bug-free for all possible inputs. Of consequence, many combinations of unexpected inputs can be readily discovered and applied to circumvent the non-technical intent of any legislation.

It is my conjecture that because writing bug-free legislation is nigh impossible, and because trying new exploitative gimmicks is easier than enacting formal restraints against new gimmicks, no combination of further piecemeal amendments to the legislations and regulations concerning Wall Street will achieve the desired outcomes. Wall Street will not suddenly become noble defenders of the middle class just because legislators have made it slightly more difficult for them to systematically exploit the loopholes.

Piles of amendments are unlikely to disable interested parties from discovering and exploiting internal contradictions that violate the social intent of legislation and regulation concerning Wall Street. Legislators could literally pass every day a new reasonable demand about legislative and regulatory reform from the occupy-foo supporters, and still not sustainably prevent rules from being exploited. Legislatively killing the entire top layer of exploitative information brokers in the US or any subset of jurisdictions would simply push the physical locus of exploitative activity out to less restrictive jurisdictions, or to a different layer of intermediary. Thanks, Internet.

Because the outsourced trust-brokering service has been designed and infused into almost every aspect of social intercourse, stopping the use of electronic payment systems, information systems, or other transactions into which brokers currently mediate, value and opportunities will continue to trickle up for as long as we depend on the brokers' services for our transaction routines.

Analogous arguments can be made about lobbyists, elected officials, and activists, who all attempt purchase influence with cash and information (and time).

The 99% must pay for a cost for this transition, but the costs do not necessarily need to trickle up according to current relationships or structures.

If we can't nuke the top layer from orbit, how could we act? Assuming that a vast majority of citizens, say, 99 percent, could agree to act in a coordinated manner, several possibilities are indicated.

a) Recall that currency pre-dates silicon-based information brokerage by several thousand years. We don't *need* fee-based third-party services to buy objects or influence using cash or social trust. (This also implies that no campaign finance reform could be effective in the long run.) The under-employed and unfairly compensated have available more time than money, and, unlike money, time cannot be freely created or destroyed by policy.

b) But we still need access to large concentrations of resources in order to fund any large project unobtainable by any one individual's wealth. We do not need aggregators of public wealth for public projects to take on any particular government or private form or other activities. The pains professed by various law enforcement agencies about underground global financial networks is a testament to the robustness of grassroots models.

c) Information brokerage systems run continuously, regardless of whether they are used to capacity. Running a non-full system is costly and inefficient. Hence, unlike in most protests, even temporary boycotts generate real costs for the targets. Millions of individuals can each buffer a slightly higher cost for individual transactions than the handful of top-level predators whose models depend on volume (of transactions, votes, eyeballs, dollars).

d) Externally induced broad-based FDIC event. The Coase theorm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem) suggests that the overall outcome for the 99% will not be any worse than the current situation, even though some of that 99% will temporarily suffer more than others. Shaking up the 1% in this manner will enable all parties to explore the solution space, and perhaps work toward some superior Pareto efficiency.

The 99% need only to look up and step back to realize that they could achieve the outcomes they seek, and that the outcomes *DO NOT* depend on the cooperation of the 1%.

In summary: The model assumed by the occupy-foo movement incorrectly assumes that its success depends on working through current top-level mechanisms and structures. I believe that the 99% working in coordination can be much more powerful if they break out of the mental model imposed by the very 1% they seek to depose. They do not need permission from the 1%, or from the designated activist opposition.