A quote from their press release:

“Fighting online piracy is of the utmost importance, which is why Go Daddy has been working to help craft revisions to this legislation – but we can clearly do better,” Warren Adelman, Go Daddy’s newly appointed CEO, said. “It’s very important that all Internet stakeholders work together on this. Getting it right is worth the wait. Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it.”

Lets run down the list of things wrong with this policy:

• There are many things that should be far more important than fighting online piracy.
• Who wants to vote for legislation that Go Daddy helped craft?
• ALL ‘Internet stakeholders’ includes the billions of users who deserve the freedom to transact content they own in any manner they see fit.
• ‘Getting it right’ is never worth the wait, the perfect is always the enemy of the good, and if they feel that SOPA is better than the status quo, they should support it, even if I don’t.
• Waiting for the ‘Internet community’ to support something is not good policy considering that one of the most vocal segments of Internet contributors is the legendary troll corps that never supports anything and just likes to hate. If Go Daddy is willing to stand down until the ‘Internet community’ will support it, then they have no business supporting legislation and should just keep their mouths shut.

Go Daddy is making the calculation that the content industry groups have the upper hand with the law and anything that strengthens the status quo they figure will be good for them. The point that they are missing is that in the new economy, it is not the information itself that is valuable, but the ability to create it. Content spread to the 4 corners of the earth serves as samples of the creator’s ability to render entertainment.

The only scarcity constraint that truly exists on the supply of entertaining information is the artificial protection of law. To pretend that the law is a force of nature is to perpetuate a fiction that is just waiting to blow up in the faces of everyone who buys into into the fantasy. SOPA is a bad idea and poses a real risk to the free exchange of idea by law abiding members of the human race. Whatever your thoughts on piracy, the nature of information has changed, and to ignore that is to invite a shock to an economy based on misunderstood reality.

At the same time, there exists a real economic need for information creators to be able to retain some level of ownership over what they have created. Capitalism is rooted in the value of property rights as a means of incentivising citizens to continue contributing to the knowledge base of society. Something real and difficult must be done, but more vigorous enforcement of  outdated paradigms isn’t the answer.

I recognize that I’m not being fair. I’m pointing a finger at SOPA and saying “that’s wrong!” but I don’t have anything to recommend. All I can say in my defense is that SOPA would serve to persecute the vulnerable of society who recognize the role that technology is taking in the world, for the benefit of a wealthy few whose support for it are only rooted in their investment in the realities of the past. To them I say, the world is different, find your new role.

The Occupy movement provided a valuable service to our national debate. With 1 word, we can now imply a whole world of economic reality, perception, and opinion. I want to say that I don’t just feel for the unemployed masses now demonstrating their ire against the rich, but I also think they make a valuable point with a misguided interpretation.

The fact that the world has changed is so obvious as to be cliche. Since the first factory started up, serving as a system for churning out products people needed, wealth has been migrating from those without wealth creation systems to those with them. The ‘means of production’ is not a magic box that prints money and costs a million buck to obtain, but rather a system for meeting the needs of the market, for which the inputs are labor (employees) and capital (tools, machines, generally stuff bought with money). For a long time, the advantage of capital over labor was the strength it could grant to the superior mental power of the employee. What happens when that isn’t true?

The statistics thrown around Occupy mostly seem to stem from a key bit about the top 1% owning 40% of the world’s wealth. The first source I can find for this seems to be a report from the World Institute for Development Economics Research published in 2007 by Davies, Sandström, Shorrocks, and Wolff. That report also indicates that as of 2001, the top 10% of families in the US owned nearly 70% of the wealth in the US. The purpose of the report was to establish what the facts were regarding worldwide wealth distribution. There is a similar though somewhat less scary story about income in the US. According the US Census, the top 8% by income of households earn 28.5% of the nations income. The bad news is that not only is this the case, and that it has been getting worse over time; but that I believe it is neither possible nor a good idea to try to stop it.

Topio playing Ping Pong at the International Robot Exhibition of 2009

Over the last 30 years, information focused capital (read ‘computers’) has grown from curiosity, through mainstream, to mindbogglingly pervasive. With an economy based on systems, improving the system means either improving the labor, or the capital. Priests and educators have been trying to improve people for millennia with mixed results in the short term. Capital on the other hand, can be reprogrammed, replaced, redesigned, reinvested, etc.

For most of the electronics components I buy (capital investment) the first thing I do is find out if there is a software update I can apply, as that will usually improve the functionality of the device. Software updates to existing hardware have been known to improve battery life, system speed, and general useability, all by changing the way the same hardware is used. The device is designed by a team of very smart engineers, many of whom are in the top 10% income earners. The software that powers it is written by also smart programmers, many of whom are also in the top 10% income earners. The device is finally produced in factories owned by the top 1% and sold to the top 80% for $X. Then, while the 80% are using it for the next year, the engineers are busy designing a new version that can do 20% more and will cost slightly less; and the programmers are writing better updates to use the device.

The cumulative effect of that type of capital improvement lifecycle, is that capital can do an increasingly large portion of the productive system. $1 of capital ends up being able to do more work than $1 of labor. I’ll ask you to now change your perspective from that of an employee to that of an investor. Which would you rather be selling, labor or capital? If the value of capital is improving every year, and the value of labor is only improving at a much slower pace, then as an investor, wouldn’t you rather be selling capital.

Humans mostly are not born with much capital, we are all born with some amount of labor. We can think, we can do work, and since we all have labor to sell, we have to choose what we want to do to improve the quality of that labor. If we make our labor the type that competes with machines, then expect that you’ll get paid a lot less for it over time. If you make your labor the type that doesn’t compete with machines, then you’ll enjoy a decent wage for as long as it takes to build a machine smart enough to do what you do. In the meantime, save as much as you can, and invest it carefully. Build up your capital, because not long from now, it will be worth more than you are.

In the absence of any stated demands by the occupiers, many have surmised that since it is a demonstration, the best way to pacify the crowd would be some kind of political change that addressed the disparity between the rich and poor. However, redistributive programs like higher taxes on the rich, and better services to the poor are just examples of taking buckets of water from the lake at the bottom of a waterfall and putting them back into the river at the top. The structure of our economy is moving things in 1 direction and compensating for that tide will be logistically daunting.  Probably the only thing government can do that would make any difference at all for the 99% would be job training programs for the bottom 25%.

No amount of job training will address the structural problems that come from a political system where the top 1% can exercise adequate control over the law to protect themselves from competition. This is one area where I am truly optimistic. I’m of the opinion that the same information technology that will make the human body obsolete will also put more information in the hands of voters in than has ever been possible before. What we lose in that is a certain degree of reliability. Social networking can spread lies just as fast as the truth, the biggest advantage this brings to the 99% is the fact that it is more difficult to control with money than the mass media is. The lies will be rather equally distributed, and the truth can be announced through credible channels and distributed just as quickly as the lies.

I have recently started changing my life around this concept. I believe that the most rewarding area of work is going to be in the that field of making capital do more, ie. programming. If I am one of those who can make the machines more powerful, then making a machine that can do my job for me won’t be a threat, but a profound accomplishment.

You can look at the world ahead 2 ways. It can be a scary world where the machines put all the humans out of work and only the super-rich who own them get any value out of life, or it can be a dynamic world where ideas and creativity are the only problems worth burdening the human mind. Don’t occupy Wall Street, occupy your mind with solutions to the very real problems in the world.

Money is NOT wealth. Many things that increase wealth can be bought with money. Even the wealth of options that are available to somebody with lots of money can be highly valued in and of itself, but even then, it is the opportunity, not the money, that is valued. Wealth is time spent doing things you enjoy with people you love, like surfing, or walking, or simply talking. But money can buy many tools that make these actions easier to do, or more enjoyable while doing them.

I recently declared that ‘My preference is to avoid a government driven economy even if it were to lead to greater overall wealth, which I still do not believe is accurate.’ This was in response to a James Galbraith interview by Ezra Klein stating that there is nothing to fear from large government deficits. (to those who may find the argument convincing, I’d like to point to the role inflation plays in Galbraith’s analysis)

If the government were to decide that X is better for the wealth of the country than Y, but X is worse for your wealth, then the amount of money taken from you to accomplish X should be minimized to afford you the option of securing Y for yourself. (that’s very poorly written, I’ll have to revise it later, but that’s how my brain is working right now.)

Wealth is good, but only insofar is it is created by Freedom and Law. Freedom is the good, wealth is the result, hard work and vision under law is the means.

I call Freedom the good because life is not just a finite series of events during which one enjoys either luxury or a lack thereof. Life is not even a roller coaster of hills and turns that you have no control over. Life is a jungle of challenges and opportunities that can pop up and disappear in the blink of an eye. The choices you make affect your life and the lives all around you.

Money plays a key role in this because money provides access to an array of opportunities that are not afforded to less endowed individuals. More importantly, money tends to flow to those who provide value to others while it flows away from those who detract from that value. Government distorts that flow though when it redirects money to flow for political purposes.

HAVANA (Reuters) – Cuba, in the grip of a serious economic crisis, is running short of toilet paper and may not get sufficient supplies until the end of the year, officials with state-run companies said Friday.
Officials said they were lowering the prices of 24 basic goods to help Cubans get through the difficulties provoked in part by the global financial crisis and three destructive hurricanes that struck the island last year.

Reuters is reporting that Cuba is running low on toilet paper.
So, in case you didn’t catch that, the government ‘decided’ that toilet paper ‘should’ cost less because people ‘need’ it right now. Now that it costs less, people bought it, and there isn’t much left.
Lets be generous and assume that the government is being honest with its people and telling them that it will be hard to get more. That would let them plan on how to use that toilet paper sparingly enough to last.
If they had simply let the price of toilet paper float, world companies would be falling over each other trying to get more TP to the island. As it is, their red rears may be getting even redder as they resort to old school newspaper.

UPDATE 12/06/2011 : racism is never ‘hilarious’

“On Good Friday we had an employee from San Diego County come to our house, and inform us that the Bible study that we were having was a religious assembly, and in violation of the code in the county.” David Jones told FOX News.
“We told them this is not really a religious assembly — this is just a Bible study with friends. We have a meal, we pray, that was all,” Jones said.
A few days later, the couple received a written warning that cited “unlawful use of land,” ordering them to either “stop religious assembly or apply for a major use permit,” the couple’s attorney Dean Broyles told San Diego news station 10News.

Couple Ordered to Stop Holding Bible Study at Home Without Permit

Apparently, the freedom of assembly comes second to the zoning rules of San Diego, CA. This is the same freedom of assembly that is recognized by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations), the United States Constitution, and even the state constitution of California Article 1 Section 3 Subsection a.

This further reconfirms my prejudice that zoning boards are nothing but power hungry land grabbing bastards. Property rights are what make free societies work, eroding them erodes the base of a free society.