Two blogs I’m promoting out of my trial folder.  First into my folder of “worry”, as in blogs that create anxiety.  You know were this blog is.
I’m enjoying warming my hands in the glow of flames coming off the hearth at “Who is IOZ?”  He builds a beautiful fire, laying the tinder, applying the match.  I certainly hope he can keep this up, since it does take it out of one.
He’s delightfully wise as well.

I’m not as quick to dismiss articles like this as “anecdotal.” Didion made me skeptical of that distinction when she noted how the political class uses the word to dismiss that which is experienced in real life by actual people.

I mean, I’m even willing to forgive him for being a Libertarian.

Secondly into my folder of “pants”, as in smarty pants.

I’m also enjoying (thanks Karim) reading Matt Webb’s Interconnected.  Apparently his ancestors say this all coming?  Webb?  When he dies they are going to want to stuff him and use him as the species archetype for Isaiah Berlin’s fox.  As he sniffs around the landscape he draws numerous delightful connections.

It’s possible that plants are more advanced than animals, at a cellular level, but us animals – because we took the ‘worse is better’ approach – have had more time to do the bounded random walk into intelligence. Give it a billion years, and maybe the underlying smarter engineering of plants will win out in the end.

That’s a guilt pleasures, taking any pair of things and mapping them into the worse is better framework.  man/woman, Europe/America, big/small…

I think i’ve resolved the problem with my comments, enjoy.  We shall see.

This is mostly a publicist’s piece in about a web site that sells to apartment building owners a web site where their tenants can network.  I’m impressed that the vendor can sell these to landlords.  Most landlords know better than to let their tenants help organize against him.  I recall as story from years ago about a landlord suing a site because his property had such awful ratings.  There is a nice success story near the end of the article about a child birth counselor getting a lot of buisness by advertising via the site.

My town of 40 thousand people has a surprisingly successful email list.  It survives because there a tremendous pool of people here who know how to manage an email list of this kind.  Replicating that success, using volunteers, would be hard.  In time such skill will be more common place, in the meantime I find it somewhat more plausible that a firm could do it.

Boy, I’m late to this party! Freebsd’s usual file system, UFS (unix file system), has snapshots. It’s had them for years. I wonder why MacOS doesn’t appear to have them? In anycase, these are great!
There is a nice tool kit for managing them be found in ports freebsd-snapshot. Written by an old friend too. That gets you 95% of the value of a netapp. So, now I have hourly and daily snapshots of all my main file systems and can trivially recover lost files and do diffs of things like log files. e.g diff /snap/var:hourly.1/log/messages /var/log/messages.  Suddenly it is easy and cheap to see what happen recently.

This is also a big help in doing proper backups; i.e. you can backup snapshots. Orchustrating a good snapshot for backup purposes is a nice programming puzzle. You want to tell every running process to flush it’s state to disk and to lock out changes during while you make the snap. That’s a lot easier if the file system supports snapshots. Of course this flush to disk and lock intervals should create a suitable restart/recovery point for the application. You can see example here for doing just that with mysql as the application.

There is an interesting story about oats, told in passing, in Bill McKibbon’s Deep Economy. The story is nested inside of other stories. The over arching story of Deep Economy is like a tipi; the story hangs on three poles he wants to show how we can all be happier, how we can save the world’s ecology, and why richer more local economic relationships are the key. I’ve no arguement with any of that.

Inside that story he tells about a fun experiment he tried, living for a year entirely on the food produced by his local environment. I found myself thinking this is kind of the modern version of Euell Gibbon’s delightful book Stalking the Wild Asparagus; a book about things you can gather in the wild to eat. I gather that McKibbon’s daughters often said yukk during the winter of his enthusiasm. McKibbon’s version is sort of community supported agriculture on steroids. Ok, that’s unfortunate mixing of metaphors.

So about these oats. I forget why, but he wanted to buy rolled oats. Probably for his morning breakfast. But it turns out that oats undergo a surprising amount of processing in the gap between the field and the table. They must be steamed, rolled, and then roasted to make those flakes that breakfast oatmeal, and most any other oatmeal dish includes.

The oat rolling industry is a classic example of a once diffuse industry that has now condensed into a highly centralized one. He says that these days most of the planet’s oats are rolled in a single factory someplace in Canada. It’s an oat rolling hub; a two sided network hub. Huge numbers of farmers on one side, uncountable bowls of oatmeal porridge on the other. Your invited to think about Goldilocks at this point. Maybe the oat rolling market’s too cold. What if the terrorists attack that plant?

As I am guy who: makes his own bread, grounds his own wheat, raised his own mushrooms, make his on paneer;  this oat rolling is well a challenge.  And it is t this point that all hell breaks loose.

I could spend $120 to buy an attachment for my mixer that will roll oats, because you know that any attempt to get closer to nature should be preceded by the purchase of capital equipment; preferably one per household.

But wait! That thing is make by Messerschmidt! You know, that Messerschmidt.

Oh K.

But you know they used to make a much better roller, the Kabinroller!

Oh man, forget rolling my own oats. I want one of those! Good news, there’s hope.

I find this to be the most amusing line in the Google paper (pdf) about their prediction market.

“As noted above, participants are not representative of Google employees as a whole: on many dimensions, they are closer to the modal employee than the mean.”

It suggests to me that if you want to fit in at Google you’d be wanting to model your behavior on the attributes of this population.

• Optimistic when a new employee
• Longer tenure
• Work in the engineering division
• Degree in computer science
• Attend code reviews
• Work in Mountain View, or New York
• In Mountain View you’ll want to near the center
• Be deeply embedded in the organization
• Have friends, at Google, good enough that they name you
• Be a senior employee.
• Get with the program: i.e. over-price favorites
• Shun pessimism, i.e. have an aversion to shorts
• Stay the course, under price extreme outcomes

Sounds like the default culture, or at least the culture aspired to, of all high tech firms in my experience.

Update: Yes, I know the difference between modal and model. 🙂

Parade Magazine does what’s right for their owners. They avoided a costly recall.  Meanwhile, newspapers gin up assorted excuses.  Shame on them all.

In popular usage the entrepreneur is a scrappy individual who creates by his sweat and passion a new business and since sweat is moral his wealth is admirable. Usually one must be suspicion that his wealth is due to one of the other four less moral ways. But, that isn’t actually a good definition. The entrepreneur is actually the agent of creative destruction. He builds new institutions. Since in many cases those displace existing institutions this work is often adversarial. He’s a change agent. For good or bad since act of change is ethically neutral. Further the entrepreneur is usually assumed to be a leader; a coordinator at the hub of the new institution which is emerging. I think that’s probably far too limiting; I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t grant the attribution to many many more individuals involved in the emerging institution. Personally I have no trouble treating most of the members of the group that manages to establish a new institutional form the title. For example the engineer or marketing people who craft their portions of these new institutions are doing difficult entrepreneurial work as well.

The problem of how to manage (build, displace) institutions is important. Entrepreneurs are key players in that. I’d rather not see the title tainted with the presumption that the change agent’s primary, and possibly only ethically plausible, motivation is his exit strategy through a liquidity event. That would be silly, but it’s also a common misunderstanding. More functionally, ignoring all these other variations is a handicap, it blinds you to their methods.

I yearning to see the word entrepreneur given a broader and more nuanced meaning so we can apply to a wider range of institutions and professions. I raised my eyebrows when I saw this phrase: “availability entrepreneur.” It’s used in this bit of climate change advocacy. The advocate is pushing to continue the status quo – of inaction – but that’s not the topic at hand.

I guess you might guess that an availability entrepreneur strives to create new ways of managing the supply chain. I know a few of those. Or maybe they would be people working to create better pricing models for that impulse borrowing shelf at the public library. But no. You can see the roots of that usage by looking up the phrase in one of or another of the scanned book collections. The availability entrepreneur is a sales and marketing actor his goal is to convince you to join the institution being built. He tells stories that increase the chance his institution building goals are achieved.

It is a possible Cass R. Sunstein introduced the term. In a book published in 2000 he wrote: “‘Availability entrepreneurs’ will thus focus attention on a specific event in order to ensure that this event will be salient and available to many members of the public.” Availability is a psych term, it’s a sophisticated name for the children’s game: “Don’t think about elephants!” It names the tendency we all have to solve problems using what is at hand; e.g. Got a hammer? Well, problems come to look more nail like. ‘Availability’ is a fact of life, it is usually treated as a source of cognitive failure in the literature. Practical people manage it. For example when building a team one of the questions you keep asking is what skills should I be adding or subtracting – which is all about about availability (as well as flexibility and budget).

So this is cool; these entrepreneurs aren’t good guys. The preceding sentences in Sunstein’s work illustrate that: “Interested actors in the private and public sectors can be expected to exploit the availability heuristic for their own purposes these actors are amateur behaviorists, operating strategically to promote their selfish or nonselfish goals.” They are suspicious characters, how non-standard is that! You can poke around in his book, which is fun.

At this point I find myself recalling the term I took away from Tilly’s work on collective violence, e.g. “violence entrepeneur“.

Somebody was poking me recently to opine on the question of displacing Facebook with something less owned, less evil, more open, more community-ish … well something like that. I was surprised that my first thought was how you would need to focus on breaking off groups from the existing network. That one of the tools you’d use to do that would be too weaken their ties to the Facebook network by – to use the framing above – raising the salience in their minds it’s risks. That you could then begin to break them these groups with the help of a bit of further polarization, and obviously some carrots.

That kind of awareness of risks inherent in the existing network is all we got out of the anti-trust case against Microsoft. Developers became more aware of the risks associated with participation in that network. Managing that perception is a part of why Google used too make a point of their “do no evil” motto. I have heard Google people say publically that motto may have been a mistake, and I think Facebook has been more transparent about it’s risks in a way that helps to immunize it – to a degree – from the accusation that you can’t trust them. It’s curious how few people who participate in Facebook seem to be resigned about how the network owner will abuse their trust. That’s a pattern that’s not uncomon with the customers of monopolies.

I think I’ve become more conscious of how the entrepeneur working to create an alternate institution is always forced to devote significant resources to making the risks of the existing network more apparent and in turn diving into the midst of the community and polarizing it so they can weaken and break of portions. These same methods seem to be needed if your don’t intend to create a fresh institution but only hope to create change in the existing one.

I can’t resist taking a swipe at that piece in the New York Times. Boy have we come a long way. A few years ago the advocates of inaction on climate change would accuse their opponents of being a hysterical herd of unreasoning who’s pseudo-science was little more than a lie. Today the best they can do is to suggest that a modicum of accessibility entrepreneurship maybe unfolding in the media. And yet it remains the same rhetorical tactic, and in this presentation it is curiously rich with projection.