Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

Every since reading Anisle’s “Breakdown of Will” I’ve be thinking and reading a lot about what might be called self management. I’m currenly reading “Ethics, Law and the Exercise of Self-Command.” There is a delightful quote in this essay:

Social controls play a role; the Times Literary Supplement for January 22, 1982, contained a splendid example, a review article by George Steiner on the life and work of the Hungarian radical Georg Lukacs. “When I first called on him, in the winter of 1957-8, in a house still pockmarked with shellbursts and grenade spliters, I stood speechless before the armada of his printed works, as it crowded the bookshelves. Lukacs seized on my puerile wonder and blazed out of his chair in a motion at once vulnerable and amused: ‘You want to know how one gets work done? It’s easy. House arrest, Steiner, house arrest!’”

That example is splendid, but exceptional and extreme. The student of this stuff should, I think, pay more attention to more pedestrian social controls; e.g. voluntary membership in groups who’s habits we admire and aspire to. The rough edges of voluntary are far more interesting than the strong arm example of house arrest.

The essay appears in “Choice and Consequence” by Schelling. The topic of this essay is the ethical puzzle of what society can and can not do to help individuals keep their promises to themselves. This is an extended discussion of the curious fact that you can’t make contracts with your self and then go to the court to have them enforced. Schelling’s other essay in this arena “The Intimate Contest for Self-Command” also appears in this book.

Schelling also reached the conclusion I got from reading Anisle; that the individual is a group of interests who’s governance has so much in common with the governance of other groups that it becomes useful to treat the individual as just like any other hard to manage group.

Meanwhile there is little concensus on what the secret of productivity is.

Schneier points out this paper (pdf) reporting on patterns the researches found by listening on on the IRC channels where evil-hackers buy and sell credit cards numbers, bot-net rentals, and the other commodities of the spamming and identity theft industry.  The authors refer to the actors in this market as miscreants.  I guess I can’t really call this a miscreant market; since we usually name markets not after their participants but after the commodity exhanged; as in meat market.

This market is interesting as a case study.  Since it’s commodity is illegal it has a harder time condensing out hubs for the exchange to rendezvous around.  They use IRC channels because that medium is a bit more peer to peer than other choices.  I presume that this community is the one that will finally build a real anonymous peer to peer IRC network.  Well pseudo-anonymous because like any market they need to have a reputation bank of some kind to keep the books of the repeating prisoner’s dilemma.

Had to write this.  I couldn’t reisist getting the word prisoner, miscreant, and evil-hacker all together in a posting about market structure; mentioning peer-to-peer is desert.

This article that Brad DeLong posted to his delicious bookmarks is perfectly aligned with my interests. First off it has a wonderful new metaphor for a two sided network effect:

Think of it as an hourglass on its side, says Brian Cook, a research consultant who studies food issues for Toronto Public Health. “You’ve got thousands of farmers on one side, and consumers on the other. In the middle, there’s a bottleneck.”

That’s nice because fleshes out the usual idea of the two sided network as having a bottle neck and emphasizes the grains, the flow, the rate; i.e. the timing. The article is about strawberries; the grains of sand are not single strawberries but truck loads of them. To get the sand to flow smoothly you need to standardize; as the standards become more exacting the growers who fail to fit the standards are displaced from the system.

… McCarthy, sold to a developer last year after an especially gruesome season. Two weeks before the strawberries on his patch were due to glow red, the nearby chain he counted on to accept hundreds of quarts daily canceled. It no longer accepted back-door deliveries. …

Or this example which is about details, timing, capital equipment, etc.

into the lot behind Food Basics in Georgetown. Already in the lot are two 18-wheel tractor-trailers, one finishing a delivery while the other waits its turn.

They are refrigerated, …

“Oh Jesus, oh my God – we’ve got to wait,” he says, gripping the wheel tightly. “We’ve got perishable stuff here. If it’s left in the vehicle in the sun, it’s going to be roasted.”

That example is the counter point to the pattern I usual talk; i.e. routing around the a monopoly bottleneck. In this case as the standardized distribution hub condenses out it displaces the long tail strawberry producers who lack refrigerated trucks or who production doesn’t fit in the required unit size, e.g. an 18-wheeler.

I wrote sometime ago about how the modern strawberry has evolved. Where it once fit the mouth of the sparrow it now fits into the mouth of the buyer. To survive as a modern producer you have to fit the mouth and the throat of your adjacent hour glass bottlenecks.

It is rare to read a well crafted article about displacement. Most such articles fail to grasp nub of what is causing it. Often the tend in these articles is to over identify with the victims of the displacement. Though there is an another kind of article that waxes heroic narratives about the entrepeur creating the hub of the wonders of the market. Between these two over emotional journalistic approaches it is very hard to think clearly about all the externalities involved in the process.

The granularity of agriculture is right up there with Moore’s law one of the forces reshaping the world economy. And it’s been doing it for much longer (see Diamond’s the Worse Mistake, pdf). Drop into any point in history and you’ll find stories of farmers being displaced by technology. For example writing about the rise of urbanism in the late 19th century as triggered by railroads Douglas Rae quotes an expert suggesting that Connecticut farmers are going to need to diversify.

“… his farm decreasing in value, his capital shrinking, his crops no longer paying fairly because of Western Competition, … expert … suggesting “raising … squabs, trout, carp, honey, mushrooms … “

That’s 1890, but it sounds remarkable like Michael Dukakis suggesting that Iowa farmers raise endive. The tragedy here is that the advice is basically bogus. If the distribution channel is changing in ways that dry up opportunities in the long tail then your an idiot if you try to survive by diversifying. The answer is not to become less standard, more eccentric. Rather you needs to be on find a way to evolve; to fit through the throat of the new hour glass. Or maybe you can route around; find somebody willing to open their backdoor.

Ok! Did Arron Swartz really say in his talk about Open Library what David Weinberger reports:

The first thing librarian argued about when they saw OL was what subject classification system to use. “We don’t have to choose on the Internet. We can store all the category systems and let people choose which ones they want.” Likewise with all the different identifiers, e.b., ISBN, OCLC numbers, OL identifiers. (”We have to make our own identifier system because we’re going to have more books.”)

Ferberization means connecting physical books to all the different abstractions, e.g., print runs, editions, translations, etc. The library world has focused primarily on the physical books on the shelves. “We’re going to have to come up with new ways of expressing the relationships,” including allowing people to create new relationships, e.g., this book is based on that one, this book refutes that one, this one replaces that one.

This is just outrageously funny! It’s perfect! I’m gobbsmacked. Oh, I hope that’s what he said!

For those who don’t know, Ferberization is a process for teaching a baby the skill of putting it’s self to sleep.

Don’t you just hate the way those damn books wake up at all hours demanding to be settled down again into their snug little categories?

Bridges make great venues for collecting a tax.  They are a bottleneck. As soon as people find a route around that bottleneck then your power to collect the tax weakens.  Income taxes, for example, work only because firms have rich accounting systems that it would be hard for them to route around just to avoid the taxation.  Of course the rich can route around them.

As technology changes the bottlenecks move around; and tax collectors slowly follow along behind.  Slowly because people don’t like taxes, but inevitably because people dislike the absense of government a lot more.

So the question arises where in a highly globalized information economy are the bottlenecks where taxes might be effectively collected?  At the emerging hubs.  For example a tax on search would work.  A tax on eBay, Amazon, and Windows would work as well.  I’m surprised I didn’t see this before.  What triggered it was it appears that China sold their search franchise.  I don’t think what your seeing there is censorship; it’s about revenue, regulation, and as usual who’s cronies are in favor.  That firewall of theirs looks like a real money maker!