Jake uncovered it, and as he says, it’s almost stupidly easy. Curious to see if this gives you access to the bootloader firmware, and if so, whether you can alter it to allow non-signed kernels. Exciting! Should-be-unnecessary!
Walking down a Bernal Heights street, I heard a guy shouting from behind me to a woman in a garish, oversized white t-shirt with somebody’s name on it. “Hey, you guys are doing well — I see posters for Tom everywhere!”. The woman shouted back, “Thanks! Who are you walking for?” “Eric!” “Cool!”. Later, a bunch of bicyclists fly by in convoy, playing an upbeat latino tune on speakers, and waving flags for another candidate.
It’s election time in San Francisco. As well as the presidential election, there’s the usual Bible-sized selection of other plebiscites to be plebbicized, including the election of the supervisor for my local neighbourhood. You can decide whether you should vote for Eric or Tom or Eva or David or Vern or Mark or the other Eric by thumbing through the 268 page local voter guide here. I believe that’s on top of the 166 page State guide.
I was going to witter here a little about the vibrancy of American elections, and then I remembered where else I’ve lived where elections were this vivid and fun. When I was eight, I remember the cars driving around with loudspeakers balanced on top, and posters, and speechifying and lots of local excitement to a British election. I grew up in Basildon, a marginal constituency (Ohio-on-the-Thames, if you will), and ground zero for those wanting to extrapolate results from their glib little parodies of voting patterns. You had to admit though, both sides fought like prize-fighters for every voter there.
San Francisco is about as far away from a swing state as you can imagine (unless you mean between Cindy Sheehan supporters and Nancy Pelosi fans), but the internal city politics are gloriously internecine and bloody. Supervisors have a surprising amount of power: en mass they are a counterbalance to the major. One of them just pleaded guilty to take $84,000 in bribes. I admire the huge encyclopedia of political explanations that turn up on everybody’s doorsteps every election, as well as the miles of columnage in the local papers analysing the minutiae of the city’s internal politics. Even the alternative free papers here often have front covers with titles like “REVEALED: JUST WHAT THE HELL DOES DEPUTY VICE ALDERMAN DIFRAMBRIZI THINK HE IS DOING WITH THE MANHOLE COVER FINANCIAL ALLOCATION FOR FINANCIAL PERIOD 2007/2008?”. To give a less made-up example, I have just read a (genuinely fascinating, actually) three page piece expose on the fines builders have to pay for having their cones in the wrong place. It is all connected with police graft, of course.
I honestly wonder who reads all of this, and yet I love that it’s there. I was reading Linus Torvalds slightly agape bemusement at how uncivilized American elections are, and wonder: is it better that politics be such a loud carnival? Or would all this corruption go even more unnoticed if no-one was watching?
So you may have noticed that I’m not quite posting here daily. That’s because I’m exercising my precious new freeedoms. The second month finished a while back (on the 17th?), and I’ve been running on inertia and the powerful fumes of trackbacks and comments since then. As everyone says it does, the blogging has helped out in a bunch of other areas. I’m writing better and faster in other spaces, I’m paying a bit more attention to the world, and I end up finessing ideas instead of going “huh, maybe I should write that down somewhere, one day.”
Most of all, I impressed by the magical power of public guilt. I am thinking about other potentially humiliating things to do to get ORG more members; I am also thinking a little of new beginnings. It looks like I’ll be moving apartment again pretty soon (sainted flatmates’ toddler is getting very walky, and they want more room). I might have a studio on the top of Bernal Heights to look down on the city. My work is picking up again, too: for a while, one of our team was telecommuting from the East Coast, which is good for the fact that we have to deal over lots of timezones, but not so great for co-ordinating between us. He’s been here in SF now for less than a week, and we’ve already picked up a little pace. I like to keep work out of this blog, but the issues do wriggle so, begging me to form half-baked opinions, if only ones highly tangential from what I do during the day (where we spend much of our time baking our opinions until they are perfect).
I also, God help me, have been thinking about what the next administration will actually be like. I keep thinking back to the local campaign manager for Howard Dean in San Jose, sitting with me in a cafe crammed with Dean-fans writing letters and exchanging email addresses, back in August 2003. Months before the election, his movement had already shown the others what was possible with the Net, and carried him to the frontrunners table by fundraising and publicity. A year or so before the election, I asked the campaign manager: suppose Dean does get in. Suppose he becomes President. What happens to all of this, I asked. Do you just put it in mothballs for the next election?
The campaign manager’s eyes got all dreamy, and he said: well, think how having this communications network works for a Whitehouse. Think about being able to explain your side of the story to your base like this; build on them to work with other candidates. Report back on how they feel the country is going.
Me, I’m not sure that’s something you can really achieve and stay Presidential. American Presidents are supposed to be folksy, but then ascend into Whitehouse heaven and live apart from the mortals. Not mail them every four hours like MoveOn. And it would feel a little Chavez to have the Obama fans still wired into the secret messaging while he’s also running everyone else’s country.
But the question still remains: when you have a wired campaign, do you run a wired whitehouse?
I studied economics at college at a time when the two great questions of economics was: How Did Stagflation Happen? and How the Fuck Did Monetarism Manage To Fix It When Most of Us Still Believe that Strict Monetarism Was Just Mad Monkey Moon-Juice?
Stagflation is when you have rampant inflation, and low growth. It isn’t supposed to happen. Monetarism isn’t supposed to happen either. Britain and America tried it briefly in the early eighties, and it almost broke the economy, but when things recovered, the stagflation had gone away too.
In some significant ways, you can argue that inflation is a state of mind. Or at least, stagflation was. People had grown so used to inflation in the Seventies that they factored it into their future models of the economy, especially when asking for raises. People would envisage inflation being 10%, so they’d ask for 15% more money this year. Unfortunately, one of the key engines of inflation are wage increases. You can see where this is going: even if inflation was actually going down, the expectation of it caused workers to demand more money, which caused inflation to rise, which made it a self-fulfilling prophecy.
That inflation is largely generated by the belief that it already exists is not a shocking statement for economists to make. Still, it’s surprising to me how rarely they say it out loud. Instead, economists (especially those employed by central banks) spend a lot of time really loudly declaring how inflation is their number one enemy, and that they will do anything to reduce it. The monetarists were particularly emphatic about that. I hope you can see why doing this plays a key part in reducing inflation; why it worked for the monetarists, and why it works now. If you tell everyone you’re going to do everything to reduce inflation, and people believe you, you’ll reduce one of the key engines of inflation. (Especially if you also wipe out the unions and hitch up unemployment so no-one dares to ask for better wages, but that’s another story)
It was the great trick of Reagan and Thatcher to use their ideological fixation to convince the markets that, by gum, they were going to reduce inflation, even doing so meant riots, mass unemployment, and destroying their industrial base. It’s sort of like proving you’re serious by carving “FOR REAL” on your arm in blood.
What I’m trying to get to here, is an explanation for this line from Forbes that has been banded around so much recently:
In fact, some of the most basic details, including the $700 billion figure Treasury would use to buy up bad debt, are fuzzy.
“It’s not based on any particular data point,” a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. “We just wanted to choose a really large number.”
That sounds incredibly, upsettingly, vague, doesn’t it? But here’s the thing: the main job of the bailout package is to convince the markets that everything is going to be okay, and that if the foreclosures go on, the US government will pick up the tab. If the markets believe that, there’s a vague chance that they’ll stop panicking about the foreclosures, and the economy will unfreeze. If it does that, there’s a chance that the foreclosures won’t happen, because the economy won’t suck as much as it might have done, people won’t lose their jobs, and they can keep up the payments.
In the same way as inflation only goes away if a government can convince everyone that it really is going to do everything to diminish it, so a bailout of this size only works if the government can convince everyone that it’s willing to do anything to save the market.
If the markets don’t believe the bailout is sufficient (or there’s no bailout at all), the markets could collapse in neurotic self-pity, the economy will tank, and the foreclosures will happen. And if the half-baked bailout is around, then the government will have to pay for all those foreclosed mortgage risks.
It is therefore really important that the number be very very big. Insanely big. Far bigger than will actually be necessary. If it’s any smaller than that, then no-one will believe it will be enough to save them, so the market will collapse, and whatever amount it is, it will be necessary, because we’ll have foreclosures up the wazoo. Better to say “Don’t worry, capitalism, my darling, I will save you, even if I have to pay you a quadrillion gazillion dollars”, and successfully reassure the current neurotic marketplace, than say “My darling capitalism, I will save you, but the taxpayers say I can only lend you a fiver.” Chances are in the second case, you will lose your lovely capitalism and your fiver.
No-one says from the administration or Congress, because they can’t, just as no-one could have said at the time “Look, just between you and me, the only thing holding up the Eighties deflation is everyone’s believe that Reagan and Thatcher’s would eat a baby on live TV rather than see inflation go up again”.
That lone Treasury spokeswoman was speaking the truth, but she wasn’t supposed to.
Now, say what you like about Bush, he is capable of displaying Thatcher/Reagan-like pigheadedness when needed, and that’s exactly what is needed right now.
Unfortunately, Bush is the President that cried Wolf. As the Daily Show pointed out perfectly, Bush has already managed to convince the American people to trust him to do something radical, without him really spelling out the reasons why — in Iraq. Now, no-one trusts him, which means that no-one really trusts his bailout package, which means there is no party unity, which means that the bailout plan can’t weave its magical confidence spell.
There’s a reason FDR said that the country had nothing to fear but fear himself. And there’s a reason why FDR refused to help the lame duck Hoover in the months leading up to his inauguration. To truly pull off a return to confidence when the country has lost confidence in almost everything, you need to have a sharp break, a clean pair of hands, with a message of hope, and a figurehead whose job is largely just to calm everyone down.
I have to say that America may be fairly screwed right now, but if it votes the right way this election, I think it may be in with a chance. Looking at the polls and the current choice, I can see why Bismarck once said that “a special Providence protects fools, drunkards, small children and the United States of America.”
Or at least, I hope I can.
We took Ada and friends down to the Computer History Museum this weekend, to see the Difference Engine, on loan from Nathan Myhrvold until April.
The computer museum looks a lot better than when I last gatecrashed it — back then it was just a hangar in the local NASA airfield, and me and the guide had to clamber over its stash of artifacts to find the really good stuff. I’ll never forget him casually handing me a disk of metal, saying “Hold this a sec”. I gave him exactly the right feedline, which was “What is this?” to which the answer was, “Oh, yes, you’re British, you might be interested:It’s a piece of Colossus“.
These days, it’s a slightly more bland, but far more professional building in the sprawling business ‘burbs of Mountain View. It’s pretty tiny, unless they don’t open the whole thing on Sundays. There’s an exhibit on computer chess, one on innovation in the Valley, the temporary exhibit of the Difference Engine — and the treasure chest of the museum, the Visual Storage exhibit.
If you’ve ever wondered how best to understand the effect of Moore’s Law, the Visual Storage exhibit is the place to go. I thought the five-to-seven year olds would be bored by this part of the museum, but they visibly gaped at the size of previous generations of PCs. “LOOK AT THE SIZE OF THIS PRINTER”, screamed Ada in joy. And, then, just to make me feel old, had me lift her up to show her the exhibit I was standing, dwarfed by the room-sized IBMs, DECs and Zuses. “That was your first computer?” she said, staring at the dusty, wooden, Ohio Scientific single board machine sitting under glass. I had that feeling that older people describe, that one day they would be wheeled in to join their belongings in a local museum.
The museum was mostly empty, but their was a little pool of geeks hanging around this display, all frozen with teariness. When I muttered under my breath, “But no BBC Micro”, a guy next to me swivelled around to face me. “I still have one! You turn them on, and beep! Ready to use!”
Really, though, I was hear to show Ada the Difference Engine. At one o’clock and two o’clock on Saturdays, museum volunteers arrive to explain the maths, and crank the engine to produce a table entry or two. As we sat and watched the amazing, DNA-spiralling beauty of Babbage’s carry bits, I prompted Ada to tell the docent her name. The volunteer broke out of her patter and did a marvellous speech directed to Ada about Ada Lovelace, explaining her great imagination, and how her mother had tried to make her mathematician because she was scared she would end up a waistrel poet like her father, but how she was sure in another age, like now, when we have greater freedom to choose who we want to be, Ada would have been able to be both fine mathematician and a fine poet. Ada was wide-eyed: she had clapped her hands in delight earlier in the day hearing about the woman who could imagine computers a century before they were even made, but this sealed the deal.
I was happy, because there was nothing about Lovelace in any of the literature or talks about the Difference Engine (possibly fairly, given she was all about the Analytical Engine, but still). Later, the docent explained to me the extra irony. The building used to be SGI’s headquarters: the first room they re-named in the building was “the Lovelace Room”. When it came to fit the Difference Engine into the building, they had to knock it down.
I was predicted a tie, and called it one afterwards, but everyone else seems to think Obama came ahead. That might actually have been because our stream went down during Obama’s “You were wrong” litany. We also ended up watching it in RealPlayer tiny thumbnail o’ vision, so I didn’t get to see a lot of the expressiveness that other I think many undecided voters pick up on — McCain as angry, Obama as … well, what was Obama seen as? I guess I’m going to have to tour the conservablogs to find out.
Mixed feelings on my part. One half of me is impressed at how substantive it got, and the other half was bored rigid through a lot of it. I do get the feeling that this is what Obama will be like as President, which intellectually I’m relieved about — he seemed a lot more considered and concessionary. On the more emotional side, I guess day-to-day Obama isn’t going to be some kind of magical Jed Bartlett constant rhetorician.
One of the more astute comments noted how McCain’s humor is all about punchlines, and Obama is all about the sarcasm and wry asides. I remember arguing with a friend who thought Obama couldn’t be funny, whereas one of the reasons I like him is that he’s one of the few politicians whose humour I enjoy: my friend is definitely a punchline kind of person. I wonder if it’s a generational matter?
Got to run to work, but … can’t… keep… away from today’s national trainwreck installment.
Yesterday looks like it must have been a terrible polling day for McCain. The average lead for the national daily polls so far is +4-+5 for Obama, and given that most of these polls are averaged over a number of days, that hides a big leap in yesterday’s polling.
Twitter has automated the “searching for McCain” trick I talked about yesterday, and spun off a separate site (reality has once again already transcended my lame predictions: you don’t even have to hit reload for this crack-delivery-mechanism). Selected twitters are going to be running under the debate feed tonight on Current.TV. That seems a bad idea, and calling it “hack the debate” sseems an even worse one. Whatever real-time filtering you can do, the distributed nation of Anonymous will still evade it. Could this be the debate that rickrolls a nation?
I’m probably playing some subconscious counter-over-under-expectations game for my man Obama, but I don’t think he’ll necessarily rule tonight as some are expecting. If people are looking for Reaganesque smackdowns or answers shorter than a paragraph, that’s not what he does. And I don’t think he’s going to suddenly drop the umming and ahhing (though I do expect at least one pre-hearsed speech-Obama moment). By contrast, McCain’s calm talking-point delivery is going to contrast with the crazy-like-a-fox image that electors currently have of him. I think what it might do is moderate the frenzy of today’s reactions a little. less of a debate bump, more of an attenuation. I think that Obama will maybe settle back to being up by two, and the pundits will scream that he lost the debate. Fingers crossed for something better.
On Palin: I feel for her in the Couric interview. She is way, way out of her depth, but outside of the most cringeworthy parts, she does okay as a generic politician answering generic points. In the clips where she completely loses it and just babbles incoherently, I think I recognise a little what’s going on. She launches into her answer, screws up a bit, and then a whole part of her head lights up going “OMG THIS IS KATIE COURIC”. There’s a real isolation when you’re on your own responding to a question in a big media organization. All around you, dozens of people bustle and operate in the most professional way possible, because they’re absolutely the top in their field. From the make-up to the lights person, they know exactly who they are and what they are doing. The person interrogating you is a familiar, famous, face. Sometimes that leads you to your own shell of professionalism: you click in and play the role. Other times, if you have even a smidgen of self-doubt, it kicks your feet away from you. You’re surrounded by people who know their job; and you know nothing about yours. It must be like a nightmare for her.
One thing is for sure: there’s going to be a hell of a market for the insider story of the McCain campaign, post-election.
Here’s the best (Obama-leaning) piece on what happened yesterday, for my mind:
It was McCain who had urged Bush to call the White House meeting but Democrats made sure Obama had a prominent part. And much as they complained later of being blindsided, the whole event turned out to be something of an ambush on their part—aimed at McCain and House Republicans.
“Speaking professionally,” said one Republican aide, “They did a very good job.”
When Bush yielded early to Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D- Nev.) to speak, they yielded to Obama to speak for the assembled Democrats. And it was Obama who raised the subject of the conservative alternative and pressed Paulson on what he thought of the idea.
House Republicans felt trapped — squeezed by Treasury, House Democrats and a bipartisan coalition in the Senate. And while McCain spoke surprisingly little after asking for the meeting, he conceded that it appeared there were not the votes for the core Paulson plan without major changes.
Obama’s done a great job of taking control of the Democrats. Of course, it helps when they think you’re going to win, rather than scrabbling to distance themselves from Bush, McCain and each other, as the Congress Republicans seem to be right now.
Oh, and my favourite quote so far on that version of the non-deal:
“Bush is no diplomat,” said a Democratic staffer, “but he’s Cardinal freaking Richelieu compared to McCain. McCain couldn’t negotiate an agreement on dinner among a family of four without making a big drama with himself at the heroic center of it. And then they’d all just leave to make themselves a sandwich.”
There’s now a fairly large confessional group attached to those of us addicted to 538: a friend of mine described hitting reload there as an “instant election endorphin hit”. God knows, it’s getting more like crack these days, in more ways than one.
I think the reason why there’s such an addiction to polls — perhaps more in this election, perhaps no more than usual — is a phenomena that I’ve described before: it’s just impossible to gauge what other people think at this scale, and with this level of cultural separation. Most of the people who supported Obama were spooked by Palin, just because it was so impossible to predict how she would play out. Revitalizing VP? Nightmare neophyte? When I watched her convention speech, I was convinced that she’d blown it: she seemed like an amateur reading from a script.
I know well enough that my impressions are not the same as others: but where do you find out what others really think, and in what proportion. You’d think that the Net would be good for this, but there’s no proportion there: you can hear people’s opinions, but only individual opinions, never an aggregate.
On my Twitter stream, my friends were saying predictable things about the Palin speech. But then I switched to searching for palin through the public sum of twitters. It was like a sudden reveal: almost everyone was talking about how well she’d done, and how Obama must be scared now, and how awesome she was. It was chastening: particularly because, if you were going to ascribe a bent to Twitter, it would probably be a liberal one. (I doubt that now: like blogging, it may have started with a majority in new-san-fran-londonaustincisco, but it’s everybody’s now). Palin’s speech was, sure enough, a hit.
Now today, and cut to McCain’s current randomness. How’d it play? If the Twitter searches mean anything, really badly. For people who don’t seem to really care about politics, Letterman’s drubbing of McCain in tonight’s show is all there is right now. From the moment the preview tapes got uploaded to YouTube, when people talked about McCain, that’s what they talked about. And I really didn’t detect much sympathy for McCain.
Like the Palin moment, it’s mostly about the spectacle. It’s not so much about whether they themselves could support the person, it’s whether, in the distant arena of politics, the candidate make a good or bad throw. As the convention bump showed, that kind of impression can be transitory. But it’s going to be hard to turn this one into a positive. I wonder if the presidential run that started on Letterman will end there too?
Anyway, I think in times like this what people are looking for in polls and the Net, is just an aggregated taste of what everybody is saying: I do wish there was time before the debate to create a webpage that had three dials, one for Republicans, one for Democrats, and one for Independents. You’d pick one, and spend the debate (if it happens) twiddling your dial, up for good, down for bad. The stream of values gets ajaxxed over to the server(s), which average the total value they get, and report it back in realtime to be displayed on the same meter (so you can see how others in your demo are reacting). It’d be live-streaming bandwidth/latency intensive, but averaging would be pretty simple and parallelizable function. Probably gameable, but maybe not in this timeframe — or maybe not if it got popular enough. World wide focus group!
People think trolls are other people: He/she is a troll, you are a feisty opponent, while I merely have strong opinions. And it’s true that some people do turn into trolls full-time, presumably while growing hair out of their ears and developing a head-under-shoulders look (or is that gonks?)
But really, we’re all just one “submit” button away from being a troll. I’m writing this meta-narrative because I was just about to write a long aggressive dismissal of a column someone had written about the “death of e-mail”. What stopped me was the following:
So I just hit <delete> on my entire flame. I tell you this, because I think more people do that than you’d think. I want you to know that when you next do it, and feel that weird emptyness from having denied yourself the troll-id pleasure of going nuclear on somebody’s arse-delivered opinions, the ghosts of a billion other flames are cheering you and welcoming your flame to the blissfully quiet troll afterlife. Some things are better left unsaid.
Of course, that never stops about three hundred other people with exactly the same opinion spooging all over the Internets immediately after you. But your ascetism has been noted.
Because I didn’t shave my beard off as promised, I now have to lose a few pounds elsewhere, so as from today I’m messing with my eating habits. Not a diet, because everyone knows diets are bad, you just end up yo-yoing your weight and biting everyone’s heads off (mm, delicious heads, full of low-carb brains). No, I need to do a little gear-shift to a lifestyle that perhaps doesn’t involve random mealtimes whose name is determined by how long I can be bothered to use the microwave for (hot pizza == dinner. warm pizza == supper. cold pizza == breakfast!).
Getting up the motivation change my bad (but delightfully familiar) habits is hard for me. Like most geeks, I mostly feel that my body is just something that keeps my cerebellum from dragging in the dirt. Still, some things get me going. As you may have deduced from this blog, I have a fascination with those who wander off the mainstream in ways that I both admire and gawp at, so I’ve been drawing a lot of inspiration from Ray Kurtzweil’s Fantastic Voyage (mental note: what a great parody show title that would make).
The three word summary for Fantastic Voyage is “The Singularity Diet”.
Everyone who, like me, was promised that John Macarthy and Daniel Hillis were seconds away from booting up Skynet in 1983 and creating a glorious hive mind as soon as their were as many Commodore 64s as neurons in the human brain, has become slowly resigned to the fact that infinite lifespans and the serious planning of a Far Edge Party was, and is, always going to be another 20 years away for the forseeable future. Kurtweil , who also wrote The Singularity is Near, is self-evidently more optimistic, but even he is running out of spare decades.
Therefore, he and his medical advisor Terry have made the sensible decision to simply stop aging until life-extension reaches the crucial “average life expectancy increases one year, every year” point.
If you were going to make me stop and pay attention to a diet, hinting that it might freeze my decrepitation long enough to allow me to download my brain into a Moravec Bush is probably going to win me over. As in all transhuman endeavours, the science of Fantastic Journey is so magnetically attractive (and heavily cited) you almost buy in, and then, bang!, suddenly they’re off wandering off talking about drinking six barrels of alkine water a day and sitting in a room for a day a week have nutrients injected intravenously into their perfectly pickled bods.
Jon Ronson would love and scorn this nuttiness, but really my sympathies are more with Julian Dibell’s attitude, which is more there but for the grace of God — oh shit, even with the grace of God and an attachment to contemporary mores in my favor, I’m almost with you. Stop messing with my mind!
Yes, [it] flies in the face of common sense, but it’s got the preponderance of scientific evidence on its side. Yes, it’s a little crazy, but the crazinesses it requires are only those already endemic to our age and area code.
No matter how you feel about the Singularity, reading about someone who takes hundreds of separate pills every day so that he can live for a thousand plus years does at least make you think about eating a salad sometimes.
Well, it’s day one of not eating crap, and I should say that I’m already more sceptical that at any point reading the book. Point one: shirataki soy/yam noodles maybe the cutting edge of low-carb nutrition, but I’m currently thinking their “authentic aroma” may just be too high a price to pay for a bazillion years of bliss. Someone upload me a doughnut!
