Here’s an amusing backfire.

Exchange standards serve two audiences: buyers and sellers.  Well, maybe they serve three audiences; the buyers, sellers, and the middlemen.  Oh wait, maybe they serve four audiences; the buyers, the sellers, the middlemen, and the tool/technology vendors.  No wait, what about the agents?  I could go on, but the point is that as we negotiate and evolve the standards each group advocates.  Successful advocacy for a given class requires solving a coordination problem.

The smaller classes can coordinate more easily.  The middlemen, the agents, the tool vendors are well positioned in this game.  Real estate agents, or condo management companies, or manufactures of tools that conform to the metric system have an inherent advantage when it comes time to set the rules for their respective industries.  It’s not just he middlemen of course, any industry were either the buyers or the sellers are concentrated will end up with standards that benefit who ever is more concentrated.  But I have a particular interest in the folks that gather around the actual point of exchange; i.e. the middlemen and the agents.

Ok, so there’s that.

As market scale up private ordering is reified into commercial and civil law.  This is entirely natural, any large scale market will require regulatory devices at the scale of the law and government.

So unsurprisingly the agents, middlemen, etc. work to assure that the regulatory frameworks are aligned with their preferences.  And this is one reason why their professional societies often transition.  This is one of the drivers of professional licensing.

None of the above requires any appeal to ethics and while it might be standardized fun to we need not say anything snarky about the player’s motivations.  I don’t want to deny people their fun.  There are lots of other fun to be had.

Licensing systems breakdown in pretty regular ways.  There are always some percentage of practitioners who’s licenses have lapsed.  There are always some, and often a lot, of failure of discipline; e.g. practitioners who should have lost their licenses.  There are always tenure issues, that give rise to license holders who’s skills are woefully out of date.

This morning’s news includes the discover that a vast percentage of the real estate agents in Massachusetts are practicing without a license.  Often their licenses lapsed years and year ago.  The commissioned paid to such agents were illegal and so sellers, who generally paid those fees, should be able to get their money back.

What fascinates me about these stories is how the scale of the varies groups plays out.  The individual sellers will have trouble coordinating their response; but on the other had the amounts are sufficient to motivate them to act, even if they have to act individually.  Individual brokers are small entities as well, which makes them hard to track down and means they lack deep pockets.  But, then most of the brokers worked for larger brokerages; some are very large.  One the one hand these provide a deep pocket to go after, but on the other hand these guys have the ability to mount a coordinated response to the threat.

All in all it looks like if you sold a house in the last decade you might want to investigate if the agents involved in the transaction had their paperwork in order.

One of my esoteric interests is currency systems.  For example I wish the feds would stop handing the currency system over to Visa and MasterCard.  This posting by Stan Collender provides a treasure trove of insight into how hard it is to understand the forces at work when you try to shift how a currency system works.  And, it finally answers the question: “why do the dollar coins keep failing?”

• Retailers decline to pay the extra cost to shipping costs (i.e. they are heavier).
• The paper manufacture lobbies heavily and generates the usual fog of PR disinformation to undermine their adoption.
• The vending machine industry demanded to be paid to convert their machines.
• etc…  it’s a fun read, if your into this kind of thing.

Another bad day for Panama, the Northwest passage is open again.

The amount of disruption this global warming thing is causing, it just boggles the mind!

I wanted to set up a n2n vpn and the way n2n works at this point participation in any given requires that you configure the three things, one of which is a password.  Which means that if you want to ostracize a participant to whom you have previously given these facts you need to change one or more them.  That is inconvenient since it effects everybody in current installed base.

This is a tractable problem if you set up the installed base correctly from the start.  If each participant fetches the n2n configuration using ssh and his identity you your all set.  Just set up an ssh persona (<mr_config_provider@myvpn.example.org>) that provides the configuration when asked and add all participant identities to Mr. Config’s authorized_keys.  Then when it comes time to remove a participant you change the configuration and remove that participant’s ssh key from the set of authorized keys.  Presumably you’d also use the “command=…” feature of ssh’s authorized keys.

Of course in the case of n2n using rotating key files and a cron job to fetch and trigger their reload into the edge is probably a better approach.  But this problem, how to get adhoc secrets distributed to community members, comes up a lot.

This quote from Alan Kay is very nice.  It explains a lot

It’s largely about the enormous difference between “News” and “New” to human minds. Marketing people really want “News” (= a little difference to perk up attention, but on something completely understandable and incremental). This allows News to be told in a minute or two, yet is interesting to humans. “New” means “invisible” “not immediately comprehensible”, etc.

So “New” is often rejected outright, or is accepted only by denaturing it into “News”. For example, the big deal about computers is their programmability, and the big deal about that is “meta”.

For the public, the News made out of the first is to simply simulate old media they are already familiar with and make it a little more convenient on some dimensions and often making it less convenient in ones they don’t care about (such as the poorer readability of text on a screen, especially for good readers).

For most computer people, the News that has been made out of New eliminates most meta from the way they go about designing and programming.

One way to look at this is that we are genetically much better set up to cope than to learn. So familiar-plus-pain is acceptable to most people.

I observe this pattern often.  The listener is ready and willing to accept some News, but the story I want to tell is something New.  It remains invisible, and while I can denature it until it is impedance matched to their appetite for News I come away frustrated.  Yes yes, rope is indeed very cool; but you have missed the elephant connected to my tale.

Some notes on the ongoing battle: squirrels v.s. houses.

The house should be, to the extent possible, inaccessible to the squirrels.  I.e. cut back the trees.  It is mandatory that your seal any holes the squirrels create or discover.

Squirrels are very territorial.  During the spring they fill out the region in a patch work of territory.  If you manage to keep your home unoccupied in the spring your good for the season.  If you eliminate the squirrel that took up residence in your territory it is unlikely another squirrel will move in until next year.  If you capture a squirrel and relocate it the squirrel into whose territory you move it will kill it or drive it out.

Squirrels reproduce in large numbers.  Far more than the landscape can support; so most of them die young.  This assures they almost always fill all available territory every year.   Following a mast year more die.  But really they are always dying in large numbers.

Catching a squirrel in a trap is easy, but it demands patience and good practice.  They love peanut butter, maybe with a few raisins and nuts added.  You first need to train them that food is appearing, once a day, at whatever location you plan to trap them.  Then place the trap near that location.  Finally, slowly (over a few days), move the small tray your placing the bait on into the trap and onto the trigger.  Once on the trigger you can expect them to manage to steal the bait once or twice before they trigger it.

The kindest way to kill the squirrel you have trapped is to place the trap with squirrel into a large box.  Then, place a tea kettle containing water and dry ice into the box.  Finally, seal the box reasonably tightly.  The dry ice will be converted into carbon dioxide, which will put the squirrel to sleep, and then kill him.  Of course since you can’t predict what day you are going to need the dry ice on, you will want to have already planned out how to obtain the ice quickly.

The most convenient way to kill him is to transport him into another squirrel’s territory and delegate the job.

Do not kill the squirrel if you have any reason to believe its offspring are currently residing inside your house!  Don’t seal the holes with the squirrel inside!

Finally, watch the funny video.

Many many years ago I read in some high end Optics Society journal about what I came to think of as “the white light.” The article argued that if one extrapolated the patterns in communication there would come a time when the cost of routing information around the network vs. the cost of broadcasting everything everywere would cross and at that point the end points on the net would see everything and just pluck out just the bits intended for them.

Well today I see an early example of just this idea. Here being used to provide optical interconnect for a multiprocessor.

Back in the 70s, when I last worked on multiprocessor interconnects, I sketched out something like this; but the response times on the optical  receivers  were too slow and the complexity of the rest of the supporting junk was way high.  I wonder if you could hack a modern digital camera’s control electronics along these lines in some fun way.  This kind of thing would be a good project for some MIT 6.111 students.

When traveling I sign up for Boingo’s wireless access, which later I then cancel.

This time I called but they didn’t actually cancel the service so I had to call again when the monthly charge appeared on the credit card.  They could see my first cancelation call in their records, and where  appropriately  apologetic etc.  Though they didn’t do anything to compensate for the mistake, they did reverse the charge.

Like most such services they try very hard to make it difficult to find the phone number to cancel.  So I’ll post it here, so I can find it next time:  tel:+1-800-880-4117;  as can others.  The trick to finding it on their site is to search for terms and conditions, and then look for 800 in the fine print.