A struggle to think about ideas

“Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.”

-Eleanor Roosevelt

Lately, I don't follow up much on ideas; instead I read the news about people with great ideas. I don't care much for such vicarious pleasures, but that is what's mostly on offer for a lazy reader such as myself.

~
Kicking yourself in the butt now and again is not a bad thing.

Toronymous

[A short story in progess..]

The twenty teens were destructive. Constructive, really, as the saying goes, but that only came behind its ruinous wake. For just as the web's ecological structure, it's business model, as they liked to say in the day, was beginning to solidify, just when it seemed the Wild West had finally been tamed, just when click-through rates were hailed the most accurate barometer of economic activity, the rug was about to be pulled from underneath.

The dark web, as it was later called (and then forgotten), like the web before it, developed mostly in the shadows, and by the time the captains of the new [old] order could see it coming, it was already too late. It represented not just new technology but also a movement. It was embodied in a word, an electronic device, really: the Toronymous.

In 2014, the small Taiwanese router manufacturer NextHop first introduced the device. Technically, it was hardly groundbreaking: a mashup of off-the-shelf hardware, and open source software that many a hobbyist could build themself, now packaged in a smooth, reassuring, charcoal black encasing bearing an orange lizard logo--available at Walmart.

To be sure, there would have been many other similar devices on the store shelf at this time. Bundling home and business routers with extra smarts and storage capacity was already a booming growth category. These new smart routers (recall, the vernacular "smart" connoting snooty comes a few years later), not only serviced their owners inside the network, but also served users outside the network (the public): the router, in other words, was also one or more websites.  They were touted to do many things: a thermostat manufacturer, for example, provided a simple plugin that allowed the temperature be set remotely.

But more significantly, following a number of high profile divorce suits in which Facebook data were subpoenaed, people had begun to see a need to take physical possession of their digital contributions to the web. These routers now allowed their owners to host their own blogs, blurbs, and albums on a device they physically owned and could always unplug.

A number of geeky developments had set the stage. From small beginnings, W3C work on a secure, web-based, push/pull information exchange protocol had yielded a set of basic building blocks--collectively called DOSN (pronounced "Dawson")--for constructing (among other things) distributed, implementation-agonsitc, social networks. This simple, Spartan "standard" had attracted a good deal of mindshare in the community: developing DOSN-based, social networky apps was considered sexy. What was cool about doing apps this way was that different implementations now had a way to talk to one another. And these applications had now found a new home in those shiny routers sitting on the store shelf.

The movement had caught on. A dark web had emerged. From the inside, it looked very much like the ordinary web outside. Only, who could see what was now determined by you and your friends, not some central clearing house. In the dark web, you would trust certain people with certain information. To be sure, your friends could leak the information you shared with them--but that is how it had always been and would be. Now, however, using steganographic tools, it was usually possible to determine who had leaked the information by examining the version of the leaked artifact.

Facebook page views, meanwhile, for the first time in the company's history, started trending lower, and the company's stock price sank following two consecutive quarters of declining growth. The market had been caught off guard, and there were now no shortage of pundits predicting the next business model headed to the dust bin.

The growth of the ad-free, dark web, however, had thus far not come at Google's expense. Indeed, the benevolent giant was making forays into the smart router market with its own Linux-based Droid Route (DR) operating system. Google had seen no decline in overall traffic as the dark web had emerged. To the surprise of many, it turned out a great many darkies, as they liked to call themselves, were not so private after all. They still shared a great deal of information about themselves publicly--which the search engines were only too happy to index.

Google's advertising model had evolved. Broadly, its ad placements were determined from two inputs: the content the user was viewing, and "anonymized" information about that user. The content side of this equation was safe. The Personally Unidentifiable Identity (PUI, pronounced "pew-ee") end of the business, however, was increasingly under attack. Privacy groups had long bemoaned the lack of oversight in this burgeoning industry, and time and again, security experts had demonstrated how to de-anonymize supposedly anonymized information. Google, it was said, knew more about you than any other government or commercial entity on the planet. This concentration of informational power worried many, and some were even considering legislative measures and remedies that defined what, how and when personal information could be harvested.

But the browser makers had already begun chipping away at the ability of PUI outfits to harvest personal information about users. Better cookie / persona management, HTTP request header sanitization (e.g. user-agent, and referrer), ad-block mode, and a slew of other out-of-the-box improvements had made life for the PUIs more difficult. A cat and mouse game had begun--with the cat casting an ever wider net, as the mouse got better at evading it.

Still, the PUIs' ace in the hole was the user's IP address. At the end of the day, whether dynamically or statically assigned, a user's IP address was an anchor from which much information could be gleaned, cross-correlated against databases of user browsing habits, pieced and assimilated into existing "anonymized" user dossiers maintained by the PUI.

Others however saw a giant industry standing on its last leg. Take away the IP address, and they got nothing, they argued. Already a growing number hobbyists and technically savvy users were modding their smart routers to do this by installing Tor/Privoxy gateways.

What distinguished NextHop from its peers however was that it was the first to introduce this mod out-of-the-box. Toronymous was a fantastic, if short-lived, marketing success.  And the story of how Mr. Lang managed to engineer on-demand manufacturing capacity, of course, is still a subject of study for students of business. For example, instead of scaling manufacturing capacity by making more of an existing model, he would craft a new model suited to the manufacturing location at hand. (And so it was that NextHop next introduced the Toronymous X series, and as if the pun needed explaining, this branding pattern was followed by Toronymous Rex, and then simply the Toronymous Rx series.)

Mr. Lang was right to milk this brand as fast as he could, for he never even owned it. Tor, the open source project responsible for a key software component used in the device, had sent the company a cease-and-disist over their use of Toronymous . NextHop at first rebuffed the claim, but when Lang learned his trademark applications at the Patent and Trademark Office were going nowhere, he approached the group hoping to license the mark. It was not to be, but Lang somehow managed to keep the license negotiations going, all the while Toronymous sales continued.  A Chinese manufacturer, meanwhile, having caught on to NextHop's branding game, introduced the T-Rex. More copycats followed with other variations on the name.

More interesting than its etymology, however, is the movement Toronymous later came to represent. The big, established home/business router manufacturers were the last to embrace the game changing trend towards anonymous browsing. Much of the establishment in America thought anonymous browsing should be illegal, anyway. The public, however, demanded anonymous browsing, and so great was the flood of email citizens sent their representatives that a grand coalition of liberals and conservatives of many stripes in Congress aligned against any legislative measure that would make Toronymous-like devices illegal. That left the fate of Toronymous in the safe hands of the glacial court system.

Toronymity was making the transition from grassroots to mainstream. Or rather, it was the other way around. The early devices had a button which when pressed, glowed an orange icon depicting three overlapping stick figures representing "community mode". In this mode, the device was also a Tor relay. Users were advised to run their devices with the icon glowing. The basis of anonymity, the online help page explained, was safety in numbers and running the router this way helped increase both the online privacy of the owner and the community at large. For some, running in community mode was a way to thumb your nose at power; for others it felt more like pledging money to public television--sharing communal burdens, only now a lot more cheaply. Either way, pressing that button had a feel-good effect for most anyone who had bought the device. It turned consumers into activists.

The world was changing. The router was getting fatter by the day, and more and more storage and computing power was drifting to the edges, to the end user. As Facebook had demonstrated before, people spent increasingly more time on social networks than the web at large. This dark web had emerged as a tier-accessed, individuated, grassroots social network.  It lacked an all-seeing eye.  In fact, no one could see but a small part of it.

Now, to be sure, the web itself was not going dark. Far from it.  The public web was still growing as if there had never been a dark web.  But the dark web was expanding even faster, filled with photos, videos of family and friends, and other information shared discriminately across smaller circles. And as it grew, some private information, whether by intention or accident, whether leaked or released, would make the transition to the public realm. By the time the dark web was an order of magnitude larger than the public web, this constant unidirectional leakage had caused the growth rate of the two webs to converge to a same number. The dark web, in other words, was where the vast majority of web content originated.

Business wasn't quite sure what to make of this new medium: not even the porn industry had come up with a scalable business exploit for it. There were two seemingly insurmountable problems, from a business perspective, with this dark web. One, it was one-to-one: it was relationship-based, and relationships take much too long to develop. Two, it required an authentic human voice, which in turn made working these dark networks labor-intensive.

Meanwhile, a precipitous drop in the Nasdaq PUI Index signaled the coming collapse of a once legitimate industry based on trading, packaging, and selling dossiers of clandestinely gathered personal information. A commentator on a popular financial network lamented, "I don't imagine people quite realize how much this toronymity is costing them. The slide in the PUI [index] alone marks a half-trillion dollar of wealth destroyed."

Maybe. But in a sense that informational wealth had been returned back to its rightful owners. A new world order was in the making.  Or rather an old world was in the remaking. For the dark web heralded the return of the individual, the guild, and the community at the expense of that historically younger institution, the corporation.

Avatar: what to make of 3D projection?

My son and I went to see Avatar on the big screen. In 3D. I don't usually go to the theater (I'm rather attached to the "rewind" button on my remote), but this was an experience we couldn't replicate at home. I was very impressed with how far the technology had come along. Now, looking back, I'm wondering how soon this technology will make it into every living room. Not very soon, I'd venture.

Update 1/11/10: Perhaps I was obtuse when I wrote this. I never considered how this technology could be used in gaming and VR programs in which the scene responds to user input. That could turn out to be very interesting, indeed. But regarding its use in more passive applications like movies and static video, I still think this new medium has little to offer.

The main obstacle to fast adoption is that you need special glasses to view such a display device; conversely, without the glasses, the viewing is horrible. That's one downside of this stereoscopic 3D display technology. So what's on the upside? What's the great value-add that would make putting up with the glasses worthwhile?

Immersion. The 3D experience feels more real than the 2D one. It takes the viewer a half-step further into the screen. A step closer into a virtual reality, a simulacrum. But is it [closer]?

While watching Avatar, I was surprised at how often I would mentally step back (unconsciously) from the screen and watch the walls of the theater instead. It was as if my mind preferred to frame the experience inside the cinema, instead of inside the movie itself. What was going on? I later mused.

In order to experience the 3D immersion, you need to surrender your eyes to the movie. Surrender, in the sense that once you have mentally stepped into the screen, your eyes must follow the action on the screen; they cannot wander about in the simulacrum. You must place yourself and your eyes at the mercy of the camera. It is as if the camera were one of those birds in Avatar you're riding, with your head and eyes fixed in a brace: you only have a narrow field of view ahead. (And unlike the characters in the movie, you cannot control the bird.) You must resist the expectation of freedom the mind is so accustomed to in a 3 dimensional world; for as soon as you try to exercise that freedom you are awakened from the illusion, and you perhaps find your eyes wandering off on the walls of the movie house.

Not only must you not forget to keep your eyes on the screen once immersed a half-step into it, you must also try to keep your eyes from trying to focus on projected objects that are meant to be out-of-focus. For example, a petal descending inches before the "camera lens" may have been intentionally left out-of-focus so that it obstructs less of the background. But if curiosity begets you and you try to focus on the petal, I speculate one of two things might happen: (a) your failure to focus breaks the illusion, the suspension of disbelief that maintains the psychological immersion, or (b) you maintain the immersion but blame your tired eyes for not being able to focus.

So it would appear current 3D projection technology requires of the viewer some of the same mental rigor that is necessary to ride a bird in Pandora.

And glasses, aside, do we give up anything when we switch to this 3D medium? I wonder. Quite a lot, I imagine. For the traditional motion picture is less of a technology than it is of a language, an art form, cultivated over generations. Much of that language is a play on the medium's limitations. The composition of the picture, think of golden ratios, for example, is only realized against the bounds defined by the edges of the screen. Moreover, as our minds have become more introspective, more self-reflective, we have developed a more self-aware narrative, the camera behind the camera, the eye that sees the eye that's seeing. A meta language that describes itself and sees its reflection. A way of thought that cherishes its ability to step back and see itself--in a sense, an ability to step out of an immersing experience, the opposite of immersion. (It's this cultivated mental ability that makes the sports bar possible.) This new 3D medium, on the other hand, is like a mirror that breaks when it sees itself in it.



In summary I'm not particularly fond of the 3D technology on offer for two reasons. One, there is little extra information that can be gleaned from it that was not already present in its 2D version (I doubt there is any detail that would have been lost on a viewer watching the flat version of Avatar). And if it is not about the information delivered, then it must be about how it's delivered. Which leads us to Two, the experience itself: impressive as it is, it adds little value once its novelty has worn off. That's because we already know how to immerse ourselves in so many mediums: the novel, the play, the radio, not to mention the 2D motion picture. The technology offers little that viewer's mind cannot already synthesize from its "flatter" 2D version.

As for Avatar, itself, aye.. the story line itself presents an artful play on the stereoscopic medium's own limitations. How fitting that the viewer is made to identify with a paraplegic protagonist! And even more fitting that the plot itself involves the very concept of immersion: the medium's inability to visually frame itself is compensated by the eye-behind-the-eye theme in the narrative. A beautiful production. But to draw a line from here to the everyday use of this new medium, I think, is overreaching. It'll be more like a difficult brush few can master how and when to use.

Decentralizing social media over HTTP and HTTPS

From a recent email I sent a friend:

I've been thinking about Facebook recently: their misuse of personal data, specifically. FB is a pretty fun site. And, for me, at least, it has been very useful. Too bad you end up locked-in to a specific vendor like FB. Not only do you have to trust them, you also have no way of porting your personal data to a site like ning.

A better scheme, I imagine, would involve making social media [personal] data, and indeed its whole ecosystem, more decentralized--more like the rest of the web.

I've been thinking about the requirements for a decentralized, standards driven, web-based social media ecosystem. At the very least, I imagine you need an easy-to-configure access control mechanism that lets you choose which friends can read what. The picture I have in mind is a file specification (maybe a zip file with a standard directory structure) that completely describes the state of a user account, and a (HTTP) container specification for loading and implementing the "intent" of the file specification as well as a network protocol (over HTTP) that implements cross-container messaging for user accounts. The spec would not concern itself with the presentation layer.

Do you know of some such project already underway? (My searches came up naught.) And is this interesting, silly, or old?




Update [15 May 2010]: There is now: Diaspora. I'm trying to find out how I can contribute time instead of money to the cause.

Update [1 Nov. 2009]: My friend sent me this link to a recent paper entitled Privacy, Cost, and Availability Tradeoffs in Decentralized OSNs. Here's an abstract:

Online Social Networks (OSNs) have become enormously popular. However, two aspects of many current OSNs have important implications with regards to privacy: their centralized nature and their acquisition of rights to users’ data. Recent work has proposed decentralized OSNs as more privacy-preserving alternatives to the prevailing OSN model. We present three schemes for decentralized OSNs. In all three, each user stores his own personal data in his own machine, which we term a Virtual Individual Server (VIS). VISs self-organize into peer-to-peer overlay networks, one overlay per social group with which the VIS owner wishes to share information. The schemes differ in where VISs and data reside: (a) on a virtualized utility computing infrastructure in the cloud, (b) on desktop machines augmented with socially-informed data replication, and (c) on desktop machines during normal operation, with failover to a standby virtual machine in the cloud when the primary VIS becomes unavailable. We focus on tradeoffs between these schemes in the areas of privacy, cost, and availability.

I've done a bit more reading and thinking since. First, I think it's a good idea. Second, it's not a particularly clever idea. We already have decentralized login (think OpenID): controlling access to personal data is a no-brainer. A lot of people have been thinking about this problem and have proposed various implementations--see Henry Story's RDF presentation, for example). So this is old, but as Marshall Kirkpatrick points out, perhaps it's an idea whose time has come.

Why then aren't people already developing such a thing? I would venture that it's because

1. there is little profit motive in such an undertaking, or
2. the community that could pull this off is all wrapped up in that proprietary, gated, winner-takes-all battle which Facebook dominates, or
3. the W3C crowd, the folks you'd expect to be most involved in such a project, are too busy shoe-horning RDF to real world problems. Or,
4. it's just a bad idea.

So what is it? Here's a sketch of what I'm imagining. (A sketch is all I have right now..)

Each individual controls a mini website, which we'll call an indisite. This indisite serves its authenticated owner (logged in, say over an OpenID protcol) a customized view into their social universe. That view (over HTTPS) is something like what you see at Facebook or some other social media site.

Beside providing this individuated presentation layer for its owner, an indisite also serves other [usually] authenticated users (friends of the owner) raw data (without presentation markup) and files. Some files and data may be public (for discovery purposes, for example), in which case, no authentication is required. For example, an indisite's default page might be the owner's profile page.

A key feature of an indisite is that it allows its owner to control access to their data and files. For example, as a user, I might not want to share a particular family album with all my friends. An indisite would allow me an easy, convenient way to assign access rights to only those friends I want to share the pictures with.

Indisites are designed to work with friend indisites (sites operated by the owner's friends). Privileged information is shared across sites over HTTPS. A user adds information to their network by publishing new information to their indisite. Their indisite in turn routes notification to friend indisites (again, over RESTful HTTPS calls). How and when this routing is done requires much thought. Also, there obviously needs to be a way for an indisite to poll friend sites.

Those considerations aside, the information exchange is XML-based. A "wall" posting notification (or meta description) may look something like..

<wall xmlns=.. >
<posting id="https://friend2.host/wall/posting/549">
<type> .. </type>
<date> .. </date>
</posting>
</wall>

Other types of information may involve rule-based authentication schemes--for establishing a friend-of-a-friend relationship, for example.

An individual's indisite, then, is both an aggregator and publisher of user information. Information is exchanged and used based on an honorary protocol. It's honorary because friendships themselves are honorary.

Implementation route

I'm thinking an indisite could be packaged as a .war file to be run in a servlet container. But in order to use it, you'd need a trustworthy service provider who'd let you drop in the .war file as well as provide storage space for the data that will be published, aggregated, or cached. The web application also allows the owner to download the entire state of the application as a single compressed file. This feature allows application portability across service providers.

At first glance, it's hard to see how anyone could make a business out of this (becoming a service provider) without charging users. There are few opportunities to sell advertising under such a scheme since a lot of privileged information is encrypted. (And so it should be!) But users (indisite operators) may opt to make a lot of information public (for example, if the scheme implements, or is bundled with blogging) and rent advertising space. So perhaps there is a business angle to providing such services for free.

This would have to be a community-driven project. Some ideas take a very basic reference implementation to take off. I can't see how this is one of those, but I'm hopeful that I'm wrong. I think I'll share and give it a try..

How to power a frisbee

I was wondering the other day how a free standing object like a frisbee, or a rotating space station, can be made to spin (where it counts) at variable rates in an efficient manner. By "variable rates", I mean that the thing can be made to spin fast, then slow, and then fast again, for example. By "an efficient manner", I mean a mechanism that doesn't cause significant mass loss and which therefore conserves the angular momentum of the whole system.

So the idea here is that if there is one component of the thing that's spinning in one direction (the outer hull of the frisbee) then there must be another component spinning in the opposite direction (e.g. an internal flywheel). If you use only one internal flywheel, then the only way to slow the rate the spinning is to slow the internal flywheel's spinning by braking against the outer hull that is spinning in the opposite direction. A better solution (no doubt already discovered by some gyro tinkerer from the 18th century) is to use 2 flywheels: instead of having to change the magnitude of the spinning, you change the orientation of the flywheels. Here's how it works.

The schematic is a side view of the contraption. At the center of the device we have an "engine" from which 3 arms extend. One arm is fixed to the engine and represents the thing that is to be spun (labeled "power train"): the engine will spin along with the thing it's spinning. The other 2 are affixed with identical flywheels at the ends and spin along the axes of their respective arms.

The engine controls the rate of rotation of the "power train" by two means: one, by controlling the rate at which the 2 flywheels spin, and two, by changing the angle between the arms of the flywheels. (The 3 arms always lie in a same plane relative to each other in, as we shall see, the rotating reference frame of the engine).

Using those 2 levers of control, we may employ a variety of strategies to make the "power train" spin. For example, starting at rest (top figure in drawing), we can arrange the arms of the flywheels (initially not spinning) along a straight line perpendicular to the power train (shown horizontally in the figure). The engine could then expend energy to make the two flywheels spin in opposite directions in such a way their net angular momenta cancel each other. So in this configuration as the engine stores rotational energy in the flywheels, the engine and its attached "drive train" remain at rest.

After the flywheels each have absorbed a sufficient amount of kinetic energy, their angular momenta can be transfered to the power train by drawing the arms attached to the flywheels inwards--towards the engine and therefore the axis of the power train arm. The two arms of the flywheels, each subtended at an equal angle from the horizontal, induce a rotation on the engine and the drive shaft (power train) it is affixed to such that angular momentum of the whole system is conserved (see lower figure in drawing). (Given the initial conditions of our example, the angular momentum of the whole system adds up to zero.)

For a frisbee, of course, some of the angular momentum would be dissipated into the environment (the surrounding air) in order to create lift. So in a real application, the angular momentum of the whole system is not conserved. Nevertheless, the same principles can be applied. To get a better appreciation of the dynamics of the system, it would be instructive to look at the system's Lagrangian--which doesn't seem too complicated. That's a task left to the reader or a later article.

So why do I think this is interesting? Mostly because it avoids using gears and such for directing rotational motion: instead, it uses inertial forces. Compared to the teeth of a gear, for example, inertial forces can be more evenly distributed over a larger volume of material. This suggests we could achieve greater acceleration (or deceleration) for spinning the outer of hull of our hypothetical frisbee: the achievable angular acceleration is more likely bounded by the structural limits of the whole system, than by the limits of some small component of it (e.g. a tooth in a gear).

On health care reform

Over decades health care costs have been rising at unsustainable rates. While the need for change is intuitively obvious, the actual remedies are not. Lacking a proper, more or less unified conceptual foundation upon which to articulate their arguments, the proponents of reform seem to be outsmarted, outmaneuvered by the defenders of the status quo.

The status quo has an economic theory and model to draw on--or defend, as Stephen Colbert once critiqued proposals to better regulate the financial industry: "After all, I have an economic theory to defend." The proponents of change, I believe, lack the language and conceptual tools to counter much of this laissez-faire bunk. Meanwhile, some on the right even argue that there really isn't any problem, that rising health care spending is a natural consequence of greater prosperity.

Take Andrew Briggs of the American Enterprise Institute, for example, who drives the point by comparing health care spending for people vs. pets over the last two decades. He observes the two categories of costs have been growing at roughly the same rate, and that pet health care expenditures are more discretionary than expenditures on humans because a) we value our own lives more than those of our pets, and b) pet care costs are out-of-pocket expenses (little to no insurance for pets). Using this relative priority scale in consumer decision making (should I spend the money on myself, or my pet), Briggs makes an implicit logical leap to conclude that pet health care spending is indeed discretionary, and if consumers are spending ever increasing amounts on their pets, then the onus must be on the consumer to spend less, not on the [pet care] industry to provide more affordable health care. And the reader is left to conclude that indeed the same relationship between the consumer and the general health care industry must also hold.

Such laissez-faire arguments ignore the reality that health care spending is generally non-discretionary. Health checkups, for example, are a necessity, not a choice. In fact, using a similar (fallacious) argument, one could argue that a responsible parent's health care spending on themselves is more discretionary than their health care spendings on their children; so what? that doesn't make the parent's health care spending discretionary. Using the same data Briggs uses, one can plausibly infer the opposite conclusion: neither of the health spending categories (pets or humans) is discretionary.

At any rate, health care costs cannot continue to eat into an ever increasing slice of the GDP pie. The situation is clearly untenable. At some point, the health care slice of the GDP will become so large that our other industries will become globally uncompetitive. At that point (if we haven't already crossed it), we will either be net exporters of health care (hard to imagine), or we will be facing some sort of economic malaise.

From an economic theory perspective, the laissez-faire-do-nothing camp of the health care debate is armed with a well-articulated, widely understood, and widely applicable, market driven economic model. The proponents of health industry reform, by contrast, seem to lack a solid, articulated economic theory or model to base their reforms on. I wonder whether the difficulty in articulating the message for reform stems from a lack of public understanding about how certain industries do not fall neatly into the unregulated, market driven model (e.g. law enforcement, public utilities, roads).

The proponents of change need studies to buttress their arguments, but tellingly, there's a paucity of such research. Simple facts, like the inflation rate for the cost of stitches for ordinary cuts requiring emergency room visits, or the inflation rate for the cost of casting a broken arm, are hard to come by. Concentrating on the cost structure of clear, "simple," everyday services that have remained largely functionally unchanged over the decades might crystallize the message for needed reform. In any event, the message for change is muddled: it is intuitively obvious that we need it, but we lack the popular concepts to express and defend that need.

Where are the studies showing the in inelasticity of demand in the face of rising health care prices? Where are the studies showing the breakdown of the health care market's pricing mechanism? (I imagine this would involve an analysis of how powerless health insurance companies are in controlling costs, except for the cruel and crude ax of denying coverage.) And who would fund such research?

I am a bit befuddled by the health industry's adolescent-like stance in the debate. Surely the big players must realize it is in their long term interest to be proactively involved in shaping policy and reform. Surely they understand that postponing reform will only make future reforms even costlier, that the longer they wait while the national health care crisis simmers, the more onerous will be the regulatory attempts to fix the system. Instead we have a political class beholden to a health care industry that is largely happy with the status quo--a status quo which, under the laws of gravity, cannot stand.

Here's how I'd try to frame the reformist platform.

1. Fund studies into the breakdown of the market mechanism in the health care industry and establish a language and popular nomenclature for this breakdown. Taking exception to pure, free market thought is no small undertaking and requires a solid, yet easy-to-communicate conceptual framework for why the status quo needs fixing. (Take our anti-trust laws as an example.)

2. Establish the idea of a "right" to basic health care, and delineate the boundaries where this "basic health care" ends.

3. Propose offering "basic" health care insurance from the government. (Usage of the expensive GE Omnigotron machine that'll keep you alive for another 2 weeks is not covered.)

4. Phrase the concept of a government run insurance plan as a mutual insurance scheme, where the interests of shareholders and policyholders are aligned. (There's a lot of meat in considering and contrasting the business models of public and mutual insurance companies , I think.)


But the first step on the way to change has to be winning over thinking minds. And hence the need for a new language to crystallize the dialog.

The Little Depression

If we do get an economic depression, and there are signs aplenty that we will, it will be short lived.

That's my crazy investment thesis. When I search my feelings, I cannot see how a protracted depression is in the cards. (Yes, that's how I imagine I decide things: the mind leads the gut, but it is the gut that ultimately [thinks it] "knows".) So what after-the-fact arguments do I have to support this view?


The Velocity of History

The obvious is easy to overlook. History unfolds, unwinds, at an ever faster pace. The dynamism of the world is incomparably greater today that it was some seventy years ago. The rise and fall of actors on the world stage has been both amplified and shortened. The rise of new corporate titans such as Google, and Microsoft before it, is historically breathtaking. And so is the fall of the once mighty.

So if things get bad quickly, then likely they wont stay bad for as long as they did last time.


The Information Currency

Imagine we're in a depression. I wont bother describing how horrible things have become (no job, no credit, foreclosures and soup kitchens). Still, does the internet still work? Do cell phones still work? Do airplanes still fly?

Of course everything will still work. We wont somehow fall into the dark ages--at least not from an economic calamity. No, the better question is "Will these things still be plentiful?" If the cell phone owning homeless of today are any guide, then the basic communication tools will remain around even in the hardest of times.

Now imagine how trade could possibly come to a standstill. Retailers have gone bust, distributional channels are somehow broken, and producers have no efficient means to meet consumers and sell their goods, so prices plummet driving even more folks out of business.

I submit that was the real cause of the Great Depression: a breakdown in distribution channels. That the failure of distribution channels was caused by financial mismanagement is a side issue. The point is "If we can somehow avoid a systemic failure in the distribution of goods and services even in a crippled financial regime, then the economic rebound will lead the financial rebound; not lag it."

Todays communication tools (most notably the internet) make it easy for producers to meet consumers. The new distribution channels (think eBay) are efficient, many, and resilient. It is hard to imagine how these can disappear. Ultimately, that back door through which consumers and producers can meet will alway be open.

If capital is not just a store of wealth, but also a "signal" that allocates resources to a purpose, then information too, when it reaches a certain "critical mass", acts as an agent that repurposes and reallocates resources. The big difference between now and seventy years ago is that we can find each other.


Positive Black Swans

And lest we forget how improbable predictions generally are, let us enumerate a number of technological game changers that might lift human economic activity. Odds are there will be a game changer; moreover, it'll likely not be any mentioned here.

1. Clean, cheap energy
2. Quantum computing
3. Mind/machine interface
4. Stem cell and tissue regeneration
5. Cognitive enhancers (drugs)