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.

Imagine a resistor that can change how much electricity it resists simply by the application of voltage to it. You could build circuits that change their optimal efficiency on the fly, memory chips that store 10x as much data using 1/10 as much power, and replace static processors with dynamic ones that change their circuitry based on most frequently executed commands (jk).

Sounds dull and techy, but this really is a big deal that will significantly improve computer tech over the next 5 years.

Just want to make sure everybody knows how cool this is! It can transfer about 600 Megabytes each second. That’s most of the contents of a full CD, transferred to your flash drive in 1 second. It also carries substantially more power, so charging devices over USB won’t take nearly as long over USB 3.0.

Oh yeah, and Windows 7 is officially out today. I can say that the operating system is considerably better for your health than the burger.

As part of a deal announced Thursday, Google is opening up part of its index to the maker of a high-speed publishing machine that can manufacture a paperback-bound book of about 300 pages in under five minutes. The new service is an acknowledgment by the Internet search leader that not everyone wants their books served up on a computer or an electronic reader like those made by Amazon.com Inc. and Sony Inc.

Google to reincarnate digital books as paperbacks
The machines sell for $100K, so there will probably be one in every college bookstore by 2015. The breakdown was that the sample 300 pg book should retail for $8, with $1 each going to the retailer and $1 going to Google.
The Gutenberg press was revolutionary because it made it affordable to to print a million copies of any 1 document. The Gootenberg press Google instant press can print any public domain book, probably in less than 10 minutes.

For the record, this was already fully possible with a simple laser printer and access to Gutenberg.org.

DISCLAIMER (12/2/2011): It has been brought to my attention, that there has in fact been a company (founded in the 1970′s) called “Gootenberg Press,” the family of this company  has requested that I be mindful of that fact. Please be aware that this article has nothing to do with the writings of anyone with the last name of ‘Gootenberg’ and that the actual device created by Google is not been named the ‘Gootenberg Press’ by Google. This post is not to be in any way associated with anything related to the Gootenberg family. I have renamed the post, and made a few modifications to the content.

Based on these tests, it would seem that if you are trying to maximize system performance, you’d have to investigate further to see if you want to XP or 7. But if you are trying to maximize user productivity, the tests support my experience using Windows 7 that it is awesome.

Time required to calculate Pi, (lower is better)