Change

Change is either institutional or chaotic.  The changes of the last century have been institutional  mostly as an evolutionary process guided by the current economic system.  A time traveler from 1895 would be totally lost in our current environment, but would be able to conduct business in much the same manner:  Have someone pay him a wage for a skill or his time, which he can then exchange for food, clothing, and shelter.  Magazines, newspapers, and advertisements have been digitized  but essentially offer the same services as they did 120 years ago.  We can hold in the palm of our hands access to the world's libraries and all the information on the internet, and use that capability to play Angry Birds.  Our physical infrastructure continues to change and that change is accelerating while our intellectual progress is muted by our inability to change the institutional predispositions that guide us today.  While the world is on a chip of silicon, poverty, war, and ignorance pervade our collective consciousness.  Change will necessarily come because the current system is not sustainable for tens of thousands of years.  Change that is outside of our current system is going to be chaotic on Human time scales.  Which is not a bad thing.

Givens

There are Givens in the Universe, but they belong to the realm of physical laws.  Force equals mass times acceleration  etc.  There are no Givens when we look at Human society, although we frequently act as if there are unalterable rules.  We find ourselves with seemingly intractable problems with violence, economics, distribution of wealth, and morality.  If things aren't working, we can simply change the rules.  (The act is simple, not the consideration of what the act will entail and how it will be of benefit to society.)  We invented the current economic system and social order, and we can certainly re-invent it.  The two party system is currently failing and should be replaced.  Democrats and Republicans should be outlawed.  This will inevitable result in a highly fragmented party system, much like the early days of the United States, where the parties will initially have to cooperate to achieve their goals and after some many election cycles once again coalesce into the stable, albeit ineffective, two party system again.  During the time of fragmentation and before coalescence, political competition will have produced for a short time new solutions to our troubled social evolution.  The problem is that change itself is highly institutionalized or chaotic, a problem in itself which I will discuss in the next blog.  

Black Cat Analogy

Science is the antithesis of Religion, Metaphysics, and popular culture.  The word gets bandied about without understanding what it means or giving it the respect it deserves.  Yahoo headlines are frequently emblazoned with "Scientists Befuddled" or "Scientists Amazed".  Science is a intellectual tool, the best tool we have.  It is not a culture or attitude or even a savior.  The media don't have the patience or inclination to give proper analysis to scientific stories.  But they do love a good end of the world scenario, as was the case with recent analysis indicating the nature of the Higgs Boson portends an end to the universe in about ten billion years.  The scientific method of learning is the cornerstone of the structure of our knowledge. Yet is it tossed aside in most of the Human and societal decisions we make in our daily lives. Whether we are buying a new television set or subscribing to a set of moral principles, the scientific method is left to the scientists. This is not only unfortunate, but also leads to most of the conflict between people and nations.

Change: The intellectual disconnect

The above is a recent Harris poll, part of which details Industry Reputation Ratings.  The government fare only slightly better than tobacco companies.  Yet, incumbents will capture over 90% of their offices.  The disconnect is that while people recognize that government is bad, they are unable to make the correlation between bad government and the fact that the voters hired the bad government and despite the government continuing to perform badly, the voters keep hiring them.  It does not cognitively register in the voters mind that in order to change government they have to change the people who are running government.  We have all kinds of these disconnects:  We are overweight and continue to eat poorly, we believe in god without any evidence of a god, we gamble with a very low probability of any return, we yearn to right the wrongs of society and do nothing to affect change.   Without the substantial physical pain of imminent negative reinforcement, we trudge along with the status quo  and pretend that change will occur via the ether.  

Connections

I was thinking of James Burke's Connections when the Carnival Triumph cruise ship lost power in the Gulf of Mexico.  I didn't take very long for things to get uncomfortable for the passengers and had it not been for the possibility of rescue, it would have disastrous.  Without rescue the thousands of people on board would have faced certain death within weeks.  Without the engines to produce electricity to run the infrastructure, the weight of maintaining so many humans in so little space would have collapsed this micro-ecosystem, as far as humans are concerned.  It would not take long, in the case of the world's human ecosystem, to collapse in an infrastructure crisis.  We are dependent on out technology to support the 7 billion plus people on the planet.  I am not suggesting that any such crisis is imminent, it just came to mind.  

The guy in the funny hat resigned

Pope Benedict has resigned to much media coverage.  Some other guy in a different funny hat will become the leader of about a billion Catholics.  So it goes.  I find all of the media noise much ado about nothing.  Some other guy will be Pope.  It's not like the new Pope is  going to have Catholics all over the world rise up against infidels or pagans.  Or make all Catholics wear funny hats.  The Catholics will continue to do their Catholic thing.  The only effect it has on me is that I get to be sarcastic.  Not sacrilegious,  because I am not a Catholic.  I am not anything, so I get to make fun of all religions, which are silly in one way or another.  I get to point out the obvious because the law allows it and social pressure is minimal for a barely seen blog.  When the time comes when I can't make fun of the silly religions of the world, and it may come in my lifetime, the promise of the human intellect will be stamped out like" a boot stomping on a human face, forever".

Gutless Wonders and the USPS

The United States Postal Service is planning on punishing the people it serves because it is fiscally incompetent.  The USPS plans to reduce Saturday delivery to packages beginning in August 2013.  This is not the first time the fiscally incompetent have chosen to reduce services rather than address the problem.  California politicians regularly threaten cuts to police and fire departments to get tax increases that will support a bloated and inefficient union bureaucracy.  The same thing is happening to the USPS.  They are reducing services to the people paying for it because they cannot stand up to the unions who have increased compensation to the point of insolvency,

The postal service has lost revenue due to the information age and yet has stayed away from the very technology that could save it (If it would also pay a competitive wage package, which is inconceivable under the thumb of the unions).  The post office should be working on a way to deliver everything electronically.  The bulk of the mail (junk), could be delivered by the USPS to a secure, physical address based, web based mail box.  Everything printed is digitally prepared anyway.  People could opt in or out of digital delivery and the post office could stop the horribly inefficient task of running to millions of homes of day with bits of paper destined for landfills.

Instead, they keep the same model little removed from the previous century.  They do this because they and the Congress are gutless wonders when it comes to challenging the ultimate authority:  The Postal Workers Union.  We pay the price.   

Addendum:
A day after I wrote about politicians threatening vital service cuts unless taxes are increased, the following came from Los Angeles about a proposed tax increase:   Villaraigosa said: “We cut a third of the Los Angeles civilian general fund budget. We’ve had consolidations of departments, we found efficiencies. We’ve done everything that we can. When you look at the kinds of tough decisions that we’ve made … I can now support a sales tax increase.”  Done everything he can except reduce bloated wages and benefits, which is the bulk of inefficiency in government, but that would mean going against the unions.    

The Immigration Obfuscation V

It looks like some sort of immigration law change is imminent, which will result in more illegal immigration and higher taxes.  We have the legal right to regulate who immigrates to the United States.  Because we have plenty of people, we can afford to be selective and adopt a "Best and Brightest" immigration policy.  We will not and will actually give citizenship to millions of people who violated our immigration laws.  Certain industries, mainly agriculture, love the importation of millions of people who pay no taxes and will work for substandard wages.  The healthcare, education, and infrastructure costs are borne  by the rest of the taxpayers.  The overwhelming majority of immigrants will have originated in Mexico or Latin America, effectively eliminating any possibility of fairness or diversity (if there were such a thing), which is usually the impetus for policy change.  Mexico has de facto most favored nation immigration status due to its geography and economic status.  Any sort of amnesty will motivate further illegal immigration.  Citizenship by birth on U.S. territory is as archaic and desultory as the electoral college.

The immigration changes to come will eventually lower the standard of living for most Americans.  The myth of immigration strengthening a nation or economy is unproved.  The costs are readily apparent.  I hate to dredge up the 99% to 1% arguments and all of the disinformation it entails, but the reality is that the people who are deciding and (not)enforcing immigration policy will not in any way be affected by its negative outcomes.  The myths will fly and the masses will salivate, but in the end, America will be worse off.  

The Immigration Obfuscation IV

There is a myth that the United States needs cheap immigrant labor because Americans won't take the jobs.  We need cheap Mexican labor because it is cheap.  Americans would take the jobs illegal Mexicans are now doing if there were no alternative.  If, as in the First Depression, there were no safety nets such as unemployment, welfare and food stamps, destitute Americans would do whatever they had to do to make money.  Because we have safety nets and because the businesses that employ illegal immigrants do not pay the full cost of the illegal immigration , the myth persists.