I recently saw the movie District 9, and it has de-throned Battlestar Galactica and Lost as the movie/TV show for this, the first decade of the 21st century. The themes present in District 9 are themes not only for South Africa, but for the world as well.
Aliens arrive, and hover over Johannesburg in the 1980s. The South African government of the 1980s concludes that the aliens are, well, not white, and are partitioned from society in the epynonymous District 9 neigborhood outside Johannesburg. Twenty years later, the management company that runs District 9 decides to move the aliens to a new neighborhood. They send a bureaucrat in to do the job, and everything goes wrong.
The director of the movie, Neill Blomkamp, shows Apartheid explicitly. Other themes are present as well. The government of South Africa has essentially outsourced a civic responsibility to a private company. A refugee situation from nearby countries, complicates the situation. Several worlds collide, and English, the alien clicking language, Swahili, and Afrikaans are shouted. The bureaucrat can understand the alien's clicking language, and the aliens can understand spoken and written English. This mutual understanding proves essential to the story.
District 9 is not only science fiction for the current period, it is practically beyond the ken of the world that produced 2001: A Space Odyssey. In that movie, aliens are absent. Their interactions with humans are abstract and enigmatic to say the least. World society is distant, though presumed to have advanced enough to have rotating space stations, moon bases, etc., all by 1999. The 2001 book mentions a global food problem that affects even Americans, but this detail is not explored. Also, by 1969, the Green Revolution in food production had been underway for more than two decades.
Nevertheless, 2001 is way more optimistic about people and societies than District 9 is. Corporate entities in 2001 are benign, compared to amoral-at-best in District 9. Technocrats are smooth, subdued, nearly soporific Heywood Floyd's and David Bowman's. Technocrats in District 9 hook up guns to unwilling humans to practice firing alien weapons. Bear in mind that the former quality is a personality type, whereas the latter describes a specific act. People in 2001 sleep-walk through a space age, while people in District 9 go about their duties in a blunt, clumsy manner. Even the aliens are disorganized!
2001 showed a path to personal (and species-wide) enlightenment via the help of alien gods. The aliens reward various "stages" of human development by dropping monoliths in key points. If a hominid touches a monolith, they suddenly learn the ability to make tools. Millions of years later, the humans have equipment that can measure magnetic anomalies, and detect where a monolith sends a signal. Then, they build a spaceship for a trip to Jupiter, and give it a very smart computer...
District 9 promises nothing. Humans treat aliens, and each other, like garbage. Johannesburg has Houston-style hi-rises and suburbs, with miles of ghettos all around. The one positive aspect is that the races appear de-segregated (at least within the bureaucracies). One odd scene for this blogger was when the bureaucrat tries to buy food at a fast food joint called "Gunter's", which has a cheesy, vaguely German-looking cartoon character on the front of the building. The staff and clientele are almost all African-descendants. A TV set plays constantly near the order/pick-up counter, and staff equipment includes a shot gun.
2001 can be interpreted as a critique of what people were becoming - zombies with less personality than a computer. District 9 critiques many, many things - mostly short-sighted, narrow-minded thinking, that pervades all sentient beings - human and alien.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Debate: US Health Insurance Reform
While people are yelling in town halls, please remember that blaming "socialism" or "big pharma" is not enough to understand why health-care costs have risen so much over the decades. As the articles below indicate, it is not illegal immigrants, high-tech facilities (not directly), nor lawsuits (at least in Texas). The public arguments so far have trouble progressing due to the fact that much of the way that health-care is financed is invisible.
It is impossible to make rational expenditures without knowing what one is paying for -- where does the money go? Before you say, "to the CEOs and shareholders", read The Atlantic article -- the companies do not make enough money to justify the inflation.
These articles are long reads. The health-care cost issue is very complex, and trying to get one's head around it, as people who live, is something best done thoroughly.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/06/01/090601fa_fact_gawande
The Cost Conundrum
It is impossible to make rational expenditures without knowing what one is paying for -- where does the money go? Before you say, "to the CEOs and shareholders", read The Atlantic article -- the companies do not make enough money to justify the inflation.
These articles are long reads. The health-care cost issue is very complex, and trying to get one's head around it, as people who live, is something best done thoroughly.
http://www.newyorker.com/
The Cost Conundrum
What a Texas town can teach us about health care.
by Atul Gawande
"...McAllen has another distinction, too: it is one of the most expensive health-care markets in the country. Only Miami—which has much higher labor and living costs—spends more per person on health care. In 2006, Medicare spent fifteen thousand dollars per enrollee here, almost twice the national average. The income per capita is twelve thousand dollars. In other words, Medicare spends three thousand dollars more per person here than the average person earns...
"...Yet public-health statistics show that cardiovascular-disease rates in the county are actually lower than average, probably because its smoking rates are quite low. Rates of asthma, H.I.V., infant mortality, cancer, and injury are lower, too. El Paso County, eight hundred miles up the border, has essentially the same demographics. Both counties have a population of roughly seven hundred thousand, similar public-health statistics, and similar percentages of non-English speakers, illegal immigrants, and the unemployed. Yet in 2006 Medicare expenditures (our best approximation of over-all spending patterns) in El Paso were $7,504 per enrollee—half as much as in McAllen. An unhealthy population couldn’t possibly be the reason that McAllen’s health-care costs are so high. (Or the reason that America’s are. We may be more obese than any other industrialized nation, but we have among the lowest rates of smoking and alcoholism, and we are in the middle of the range for cardiovascular disease and diabetes.)...
"...And yet there’s no evidence that the treatments and technologies available at McAllen are better than those found elsewhere in the country. The annual reports that hospitals file with Medicare show that those in McAllen and El Paso offer comparable technologies—neonatal intensive-care units, advanced cardiac services, PET scans, and so on. Public statistics show no difference in the supply of doctors. Hidalgo County actually has fewer specialists than the national average. ..."
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http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200909/health-care
Policy September 2009 Atlantic After the needless death of his father, the author, a business executive, began a personal exploration of a health-care industry that for years has delivered poor service and irregular quality at astonishingly high cost. It is a system, he argues, that is not worth preserving in anything like its current form. And the health-care reform now being contemplated will not fix it. Here’s a radical solution to an agonizing problem.
How American Health Care Killed My Father
"...About a week after my father’s death, The New Yorker ran an article by Atul Gawande profiling the efforts of Dr. Peter Pronovost to reduce the incidence of fatal hospital-borne infections. Pronovost’s solution? A simple checklist of ICU protocols governing physician hand-washing and other basic sterilization procedures. Hospitals implementing Pronovost’s checklist had enjoyed almost instantaneous success, reducing hospital-infection rates by two-thirds within the first three months of its adoption. But many physicians rejected the checklist as an unnecessary and belittling bureaucratic intrusion, and many hospital executives were reluctant to push it on them. The story chronicled Pronovost’s travels around the country as he struggled to persuade hospitals to embrace his reform. ...
"...Keeping Dad company in the hospital for five weeks had left me befuddled. How can a facility featuring state-of-the-art diagnostic equipment use less-sophisticated information technology than my local sushi bar? How can the ICU stress the importance of sterility when its trash is picked up once daily, and only after flowing onto the floor of a patient’s room? Considering the importance of a patient’s frame of mind to recovery, why are the rooms so cheerless and uncomfortable? In whose interest is the bizarre scheduling of hospital shifts, so that a five-week stay brings an endless string of new personnel assigned to a patient’s care? Why, in other words, has this technologically advanced hospital missed out on the revolution in quality control and customer service that has swept all other consumer-facing industries in the past two generations? ...
"...Indeed, I suspect that our collective search for villains—for someone to blame—has distracted us and our political leaders from addressing the fundamental causes of our nation’s health-care crisis. All of the actors in health care—from doctors to insurers to pharmaceutical companies—work in a heavily regulated, massively subsidized industry full of structural distortions. They all want to serve patients well. But they also all behave rationally in response to the economic incentives those distortions create. Accidentally, but relentlessly, America has built a health-care system with incentives that inexorably generate terrible and perverse results. Incentives that emphasize health care over any other aspect of health and well-being. That emphasize treatment over prevention. That disguise true costs. That favor complexity, and discourage transparent competition based on price or quality. That result in a generational pyramid scheme rather than sustainable financing. And that—most important—remove consumers from our irreplaceable role as the ultimate ensurer of value. ...
After the needless death of his father, the author, a business executive, began a personal exploration of a health-care industry that for years has delivered poor service and irregular quality at astonishingly high cost. It is a system, he argues, that is not worth preserving in anything like its current form. And the health-care reform now being contemplated will not fix it. Here’s a radical solution to an agonizing problem.
"...About a week after my father’s death, The New Yorker ran an article by Atul Gawande profiling the efforts of Dr. Peter Pronovost to reduce the incidence of fatal hospital-borne infections. Pronovost’s solution? A simple checklist of ICU protocols governing physician hand-washing and other basic sterilization procedures. Hospitals implementing Pronovost’s checklist had enjoyed almost instantaneous success, reducing hospital-infection rates by two-thirds within the first three months of its adoption. But many physicians rejected the checklist as an unnecessary and belittling bureaucratic intrusion, and many hospital executives were reluctant to push it on them. The story chronicled Pronovost’s travels around the country as he struggled to persuade hospitals to embrace his reform. ...
"...Keeping Dad company in the hospital for five weeks had left me befuddled. How can a facility featuring state-of-the-art diagnostic equipment use less-sophisticated information technology than my local sushi bar? How can the ICU stress the importance of sterility when its trash is picked up once daily, and only after flowing onto the floor of a patient’s room? Considering the importance of a patient’s frame of mind to recovery, why are the rooms so cheerless and uncomfortable? In whose interest is the bizarre scheduling of hospital shifts, so that a five-week stay brings an endless string of new personnel assigned to a patient’s care? Why, in other words, has this technologically advanced hospital missed out on the revolution in quality control and customer service that has swept all other consumer-facing industries in the past two generations? ...
"...Indeed, I suspect that our collective search for villains—for someone to blame—has distracted us and our political leaders from addressing the fundamental causes of our nation’s health-care crisis. All of the actors in health care—from doctors to insurers to pharmaceutical companies—work in a heavily regulated, massively subsidized industry full of structural distortions. They all want to serve patients well. But they also all behave rationally in response to the economic incentives those distortions create. Accidentally, but relentlessly, America has built a health-care system with incentives that inexorably generate terrible and perverse results. Incentives that emphasize health care over any other aspect of health and well-being. That emphasize treatment over prevention. That disguise true costs. That favor complexity, and discourage transparent competition based on price or quality. That result in a generational pyramid scheme rather than sustainable financing. And that—most important—remove consumers from our irreplaceable role as the ultimate ensurer of value. ...
Sunday, November 2, 2008
Fly: A Kite in Hermann Park
Before the hurricane, I decided to take up a mellow hobby that involved going outside. Kite flying came to mind after reading Limor Fried's instructions for Single Use Digital Cameras for KAP [Kite Aerial Photography].
I had never flown a kite before, so down to Galveston to
Kites Unlimited. Remember that I bought the kite and flew it before the hurricane, so I don't know if Kites Unlimited is still open or what Hermann Park looks like. The store clerk there was very helpful, and a test flight at a nearby beach proved successful.
Galveston is windier than Houston, so flying in Houston would be more challenging. As you can see in the video below, I did get off the ground. Overall, a good time.
I had never flown a kite before, so down to Galveston to
Kites Unlimited. Remember that I bought the kite and flew it before the hurricane, so I don't know if Kites Unlimited is still open or what Hermann Park looks like. The store clerk there was very helpful, and a test flight at a nearby beach proved successful.
Galveston is windier than Houston, so flying in Houston would be more challenging. As you can see in the video below, I did get off the ground. Overall, a good time.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Endure: Hurricane Ike (Part 2)
Tuesday ends, and most of the city is still without power. Water is back up. The phones and gas have always been on.
Traffic on the way to work was very light. Nearly all the stoplights are non-functional, though the roads have are also all nearly cleared. What tomorrow brings is still impossible to predict. Wednesday 17 September will not be as certain as 10 September was.
I'm using the words "most", "nearly all", and "virtually all" a lot, because those are accurate terms to use. Most businesses operated at less-than-optimal capacity, if they were open at all. When gas stations have gas, long lines form. Grocery stores close early. Laundromats close early. The curfew is still in place.
Ike was just a Cat 2 storm! It was a Cat 1 when it passed over Houston proper. Imagine what havoc Rita would have caused!
Today is Tuesday, and four solid days have passed since conventional business is possible. What is impossible is the ability to buy groceries and gasoline while holding a regular 9-5 job. Right now, individuals must choose between going to work at regular hours, or buying gas or food.
I did not imagine this happening. I did not imagine the evisceration that would happen in the aftermath of the storm. All this from a Cat 2 storm.
All this instructs us to know that one cannot depend on power, gas, and food deliveries at least four days after a Cat 2 storm. When we recover from this storm, we should keep in mind what we would need to prepare for, when a Cat 5 storm comes along.
My best wishes to those repairing the electrical grid, cleaning the streets, and trying to see to their property.
Traffic on the way to work was very light. Nearly all the stoplights are non-functional, though the roads have are also all nearly cleared. What tomorrow brings is still impossible to predict. Wednesday 17 September will not be as certain as 10 September was.
I'm using the words "most", "nearly all", and "virtually all" a lot, because those are accurate terms to use. Most businesses operated at less-than-optimal capacity, if they were open at all. When gas stations have gas, long lines form. Grocery stores close early. Laundromats close early. The curfew is still in place.
Ike was just a Cat 2 storm! It was a Cat 1 when it passed over Houston proper. Imagine what havoc Rita would have caused!
Today is Tuesday, and four solid days have passed since conventional business is possible. What is impossible is the ability to buy groceries and gasoline while holding a regular 9-5 job. Right now, individuals must choose between going to work at regular hours, or buying gas or food.
I did not imagine this happening. I did not imagine the evisceration that would happen in the aftermath of the storm. All this from a Cat 2 storm.
All this instructs us to know that one cannot depend on power, gas, and food deliveries at least four days after a Cat 2 storm. When we recover from this storm, we should keep in mind what we would need to prepare for, when a Cat 5 storm comes along.
My best wishes to those repairing the electrical grid, cleaning the streets, and trying to see to their property.
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Endure: Hurricane Ike
First, major thanks to Pam and John Odom. They took my sister, my roommate, and myself into their home, for the hurricane. I cannot thank them enough, and hope that we as guests can return the favor one day.
The part of the hurricane's aftermath that affected the everyone was the lack of power. As I type (5:11 pm Sunday 14 September), power has still not returned to much of the city. Combine that with the awfully humid, still weather Saturday night, has produced a unique misery.
Houston is in shambles. While most buildings suffered little damage, many, if not most trees have been severely damaged, if not out-right downed. Roads have tree trunks across them, making driving a kind of dodge 'em affair. Traffic only continues to build from the virtual ghost-town of Friday towards the back-to-business-and-them-some of...Monday? Tuesday?
Schools are closed for Monday, some open Tuesday, most by Wednesday. The Galleria was open this afternoon, and is packed. The food court especially has astoundingly long lines. The Taco Bell on Gessner had a line out onto Gessner southbound. If a store is open, it is packed. Anything to get out of the house.
Before Ike hit, I was thinking that so far, people in the area are acting based on the lessons they learned from Rita. There was no panicky evacuation. Everyone prepared, some got out, some hunkered down, and we'll bounce back.
The part of the hurricane's aftermath that affected the everyone was the lack of power. As I type (5:11 pm Sunday 14 September), power has still not returned to much of the city. Combine that with the awfully humid, still weather Saturday night, has produced a unique misery.
Houston is in shambles. While most buildings suffered little damage, many, if not most trees have been severely damaged, if not out-right downed. Roads have tree trunks across them, making driving a kind of dodge 'em affair. Traffic only continues to build from the virtual ghost-town of Friday towards the back-to-business-and-them-some of...Monday? Tuesday?
Schools are closed for Monday, some open Tuesday, most by Wednesday. The Galleria was open this afternoon, and is packed. The food court especially has astoundingly long lines. The Taco Bell on Gessner had a line out onto Gessner southbound. If a store is open, it is packed. Anything to get out of the house.
Before Ike hit, I was thinking that so far, people in the area are acting based on the lessons they learned from Rita. There was no panicky evacuation. Everyone prepared, some got out, some hunkered down, and we'll bounce back.
Friday, July 4, 2008
Read: The Foundation (the first two books), by Isaac Asimov
I have read relatively little "classic" science fiction, the earliest story of which is War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells, published in 1898. From what I recall, it is one example of Victorian/Edwardian-era literature that doesn't "feel" like something from that era. It doesn't read like Charles Dickens, for instance.
Nothing comes to mind for the decades of 1900, 1910, 1920, 1930, but for the 1940s, there is The Foundation, by Isaac Asimov. According to Wiki (as of 6 September 2008), the stories within Foundation were published from 1942 through 1950. The "feel" of the book is like pulpy, comic-book science fiction, the kind that you can imagine, with characters talking like snarky New Yorkers.
The overall concept is bold: The Galactic Empire is failing, slowly but surely, and one guy has figured it out. Hari Seldon, psychohistorian, has modeled civilization mathematically, and has seen the future, mathematically speaking. He arranges the creation of a Foundation (two, actually, but that is mentioned only once in the first book, and again once or twice in the second book) to preserve the scientific knowledge after the Empire falls.
Naturally, the powers that be at the Empire do not like the idea of someone spreading word that their government system is going to fail, and that there is nothing that anyone can do to stop it. This doesn't stop Hari, who tells a young protege, Gaal Dornick, about his work. The suspense builds; will Gaal be able to create the Foundation? Will someone from the Empire try to stop them? Will anyone not talk like they have an attitude problem? All that and more, just turn the page to read the next chapter and--
--fifty or so years have passed. What happened? Well, apparently, the Foundation was established, and it has a bunch of scientist and bureaucrats arguing. At this point, I had a hard time caring. What happend to Hari and Gaal? Who are these new people? Why are they all so sarcastic? There is a crisis or something, political parties form, and something like a revolution occurs, and so then you turn the page and--
--not again! Sixty or so years have passed, another crisis, new characters, new names, no new attitudes...
And so it goes for the rest of the book. The reader goes through a history of the first two or three centuries of the Foundation itself, faster than one goes through American history in fifth grade. Imagine reading the personal accounts and meetings of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and Benjamin Franklin. Then, just as Washington refused to be elected to a third term, you turn the page and--
--Kansas is bleeding! Now you have Congressmen beating each other up, and South Carolina secedes and...what is going on?
The point is, one can excuse the reader for thinking that the story of The Foundation is really the story of the crises of the first Foundation. As if nothing of interest ever happens on Foundation in between the crises. To top it all off, near or just after the resolution of each crisis, a scheduled hologram appearance of Hari lets viewers and the reader know that he, Hari, saw the whole thing, and that such-and-such should have happened.
The reason for this story arrangement is that The Foundation was not published as a complete body of work. Asimov wrote each crisis as an independent story. This would explain the near-zero character development that occurs. By the end of the book, I could have cared less about what happened to the Foundation or its residents, especially since Hari reminds everyone that he saw it coming, but won't tell you what's going to happen next, since that would violate one of the laws of psychohistory.
So, onto the second book, Foundation and Empire. This book is actually much more interesting, featuring things like character development. This book is also actually two stories, one after the other. They are both crisis stories, but the reader follows two or three characters as each crisis unfolds over months and years. This in-depth approach actually lets the reader know more about what happened before each crisis, in a casual, non-encyclopedic way.
The first story is about a General, named Bel Riose, who thinks that he can take on Foundation. Why? Just because he has been successful in the past. By this point, the Empire (still falling, three or so centuries after Foundation was started) has lost technological superiority over the Foundation, despite having a much larger population. What is comedic about this story is that one of the people that Bel consults, tells Bel that he will fail. How Bel will fail is not known exactly, but since his success would mean the demise of the Foundation, Bel will fail. Foundation cannot fail, which means that anyone who tries to destroy will somehow not succeed.
So much for anyone.
What about anything?
The second story in Foundation and Empire is so far the most interesting story in Foundation. Two newlyweds, Toran and Bayta, meet a performing jester, Magnifico, and take him with them on their travels. Meanwhile, a civil war is brewing between Foundation and the surrounding planets. And then, something, known as the Mule, begins to take over the planets. The Mule can do something no one else can -- manipulate other people's emotions. Mostly, in a negative way. He kills morale, brings people over to his side, and sort of saunters his way to power.
So, Toran and Bayta find themselves on the run with Magnifico and a scientist, trying to find ways to defeat the Mule. After an encounter with a mind-controlled agent of the Mule, and a run-in with other unsavory characters, Bayta points out one fact: after all their running, why are they the only ones who haven't fallen under the power of the Mule?
Overall, if you can get past the first book, the second one is pretty good. Foundation encompasses a whole series of books, making reading the entirety of the story as daunting as reading The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson. If you have the patience, it's worth it.
Nothing comes to mind for the decades of 1900, 1910, 1920, 1930, but for the 1940s, there is The Foundation, by Isaac Asimov. According to Wiki (as of 6 September 2008), the stories within Foundation were published from 1942 through 1950. The "feel" of the book is like pulpy, comic-book science fiction, the kind that you can imagine, with characters talking like snarky New Yorkers.
The overall concept is bold: The Galactic Empire is failing, slowly but surely, and one guy has figured it out. Hari Seldon, psychohistorian, has modeled civilization mathematically, and has seen the future, mathematically speaking. He arranges the creation of a Foundation (two, actually, but that is mentioned only once in the first book, and again once or twice in the second book) to preserve the scientific knowledge after the Empire falls.
Naturally, the powers that be at the Empire do not like the idea of someone spreading word that their government system is going to fail, and that there is nothing that anyone can do to stop it. This doesn't stop Hari, who tells a young protege, Gaal Dornick, about his work. The suspense builds; will Gaal be able to create the Foundation? Will someone from the Empire try to stop them? Will anyone not talk like they have an attitude problem? All that and more, just turn the page to read the next chapter and--
--fifty or so years have passed. What happened? Well, apparently, the Foundation was established, and it has a bunch of scientist and bureaucrats arguing. At this point, I had a hard time caring. What happend to Hari and Gaal? Who are these new people? Why are they all so sarcastic? There is a crisis or something, political parties form, and something like a revolution occurs, and so then you turn the page and--
--not again! Sixty or so years have passed, another crisis, new characters, new names, no new attitudes...
And so it goes for the rest of the book. The reader goes through a history of the first two or three centuries of the Foundation itself, faster than one goes through American history in fifth grade. Imagine reading the personal accounts and meetings of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and Benjamin Franklin. Then, just as Washington refused to be elected to a third term, you turn the page and--
--Kansas is bleeding! Now you have Congressmen beating each other up, and South Carolina secedes and...what is going on?
The point is, one can excuse the reader for thinking that the story of The Foundation is really the story of the crises of the first Foundation. As if nothing of interest ever happens on Foundation in between the crises. To top it all off, near or just after the resolution of each crisis, a scheduled hologram appearance of Hari lets viewers and the reader know that he, Hari, saw the whole thing, and that such-and-such should have happened.
The reason for this story arrangement is that The Foundation was not published as a complete body of work. Asimov wrote each crisis as an independent story. This would explain the near-zero character development that occurs. By the end of the book, I could have cared less about what happened to the Foundation or its residents, especially since Hari reminds everyone that he saw it coming, but won't tell you what's going to happen next, since that would violate one of the laws of psychohistory.
So, onto the second book, Foundation and Empire. This book is actually much more interesting, featuring things like character development. This book is also actually two stories, one after the other. They are both crisis stories, but the reader follows two or three characters as each crisis unfolds over months and years. This in-depth approach actually lets the reader know more about what happened before each crisis, in a casual, non-encyclopedic way.
The first story is about a General, named Bel Riose, who thinks that he can take on Foundation. Why? Just because he has been successful in the past. By this point, the Empire (still falling, three or so centuries after Foundation was started) has lost technological superiority over the Foundation, despite having a much larger population. What is comedic about this story is that one of the people that Bel consults, tells Bel that he will fail. How Bel will fail is not known exactly, but since his success would mean the demise of the Foundation, Bel will fail. Foundation cannot fail, which means that anyone who tries to destroy will somehow not succeed.
So much for anyone.
What about anything?
The second story in Foundation and Empire is so far the most interesting story in Foundation. Two newlyweds, Toran and Bayta, meet a performing jester, Magnifico, and take him with them on their travels. Meanwhile, a civil war is brewing between Foundation and the surrounding planets. And then, something, known as the Mule, begins to take over the planets. The Mule can do something no one else can -- manipulate other people's emotions. Mostly, in a negative way. He kills morale, brings people over to his side, and sort of saunters his way to power.
So, Toran and Bayta find themselves on the run with Magnifico and a scientist, trying to find ways to defeat the Mule. After an encounter with a mind-controlled agent of the Mule, and a run-in with other unsavory characters, Bayta points out one fact: after all their running, why are they the only ones who haven't fallen under the power of the Mule?
Overall, if you can get past the first book, the second one is pretty good. Foundation encompasses a whole series of books, making reading the entirety of the story as daunting as reading The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson. If you have the patience, it's worth it.
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Read: The Mystery of Capital
In all of American history, you probably learned just how land ownership was conferred, approved, and made transferable. In Texas, empresarios recruited colonists to settle in the then-Mexican state. The Texas General Land Office says,
Mexico retained ownership of the land within a colony until the colony's land commissioner issued title to it. The colony's actual boundaries were therefore determined by the extent of settlement within it, rather than by the boundaries specified in the contract. Mexico made more than two dozen empresario contracts, about half of which were even partially carried out. However, empresarios brought about 50,000 settlers to Texas between 1821 and 1836.
...
The Colonization Law of 1825 also created the office of land commissioner. Because Texas was so large, the governor was authorized to appoint commissioners who would issue land titles, maintain land records and provide the colonists with copies, maps their regions and supervise surveys. In addition, commissioners were to take the oath of allegiance from new settlers, appoint surveyors, select sites and mark the streets for new towns and provide and maintain ferries. Payment for performing these duties would come from title fees collected from colonists.
Source.
Texas apparently did not go through the same trouble that colonists went through in other parts of the United States, and what people in many developing countries currently experience.
The problem of land ownership, title, and transfer is a major stumbling block, and that is the thesis of Hernando de Soto's book, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. This book is important, and explains why some countries, like the United States, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, and others are wealthy, and why some seem to stumble or spin their wheels.
De Soto claims that mystery of capital is such because it has received the least amount of attention from activists and the media. Economic reforms have been tried before, and in many countries, they have failed to bring about the long-term economic growth that the US has experience since the 1930s. Even today, leaders like Hugo Chavez propose economic policies that are troublesome at best, and disastrous at worst.
The mystery of capital, of why many countries have trouble building wealth, is actually five separate mysteries: the mystery of missing information, of capital itself, of political awareness, the lessons of US history, and that of legal failure. De Soto devotes a chapter to discussing each of these, and proposing solutions.
The missing information is just that: no one really knows who owns what, outside one's inner circle of friends. Much of this comes from fairly recent, post-1950 economic development. De Soto compare's the post-World War II development of the third world to the post-Revolution developments that occured in Europe and the new United States. The Industrial Revolution was not isolated to the city; its impact was felt in the countryside. Then as is now, people left the agricultural sectors permanently. When they left, they found themselves against a legal system that made entry into legal property ownership, employment, business management so difficult as to be impossible. De Soto cites the example of Lima, Peru:
De Soto and his colleagues have done a stunning amount of historical research, going back to Adam Smith and Karl Marx. Economists such as these attempted to define capital, and de Soto says that capital is an abstraction that must be realized, that is, made into something concrete, fungible. Only that which can produce greater value is capital. A car that transports one to work, so that one may earn money, to buy other things (like a replacement car) is capital. A car used for joy-riding is not capital, until put to productive use. De Soto claims that several billion dollars of "dead capital" exists in most of the world, mostly in people's houses, workplaces, and business transactions. Few of these are recorded, made public, and given titles, proof of ownership.
What does exist is an ad-hoc network of informal systems. How to prove that you own what you own? You have a piece of paper, issued by some office, but that office is itself not a legal establishment. The only proof you have is your word, the word of your friends and family, and your neighbors. A stranger has little reason to trust you, and you have little reason to trust them. Among those strangers, is the local, state, provincial, and federal governments.
The word "messy" does not begin to describe the chaotic approach millions of people have taken to securing employment, buy houses, set up utilities, and, well, build capital. It is as if the way that undocumented immigrants have gotten jobs were extrapolated to most of the US population. People like you and me, driving cars, working on computers, renting apartments, blogging, doing all of that without licenses, registration, an accurate electric meter, housing inspections, and a journalist license. Imagine spending years of your life to get an officially sanctioned house. You would probably blow the process off, find a house, arrange payment, move in. You hope that nobody comes knocking on your door, claiming to have a piece of paper demonstrating ownership of the property that was given to them decades ago by the previous government.
At one point, something like that existed even in the US. De Soto writes how in centuries past, the transition from extralegal arrangements to inclusive was made throughout Europe, North America, and Japan. The process then was not easy, and in the US took nearly the entirety of the 19th century. Progress was made in fits and starts, with a lot of emotional rhetoric on the part of lawmakers.
The part where de Soto describes US history is for me the most alive part of the book, no doubt at least in part because I'm an American, and the Wild West is romantic, if only in very fuzzy hindsight. He writes,
This is an important fact: America was a 3rd World Country, too. Its progress from 3rd to 1st was not due solely to technology or (as some would have it) providence. It was the way that the law reflected the vast majority's outlook on life and its processes. The law reflects society's habits, not commands it. The law is useless if irrelevant and impossible to enforce. Every citizen would do well to be acutely aware of that fact.
If only modifying the law were to be so easy. De Soto says that developing nations have spent more than a century trying to reform property laws, but to little avail. He thinks the problem rests on misconceptions on the part of the reformers. The people who attempt to fix the problem seem to fall in the trap of thinking that people who live and work extralegally do so to avoid taxes, or that proper surveying and recordation is necessary. Maybe the powers-that-be think that the current law is sufficient enough, and that enforcing compliance is the issue. Maybe other leaders think that the current social contracts, however informal, can just be ignored, and that in any case high-level leadership is not necessary.
De Soto deconstructs each of these arguments and demonstrates their fallibilities. Living in the extralegal sector is hardly a tax break, compared to all the "favors" that one must pay to avoid crossing the local gangs. Proper surveying in the United States was not conducted until after property law was reformed.
There is a point in the book that makes me wonder if de Soto contradicted himself. At one point in the book, de Soto writes "Does that mean that lawyers should lead the integration process? No. Implementing major legal change is a political responsibility" (158). Later, he says, "To be sure, the battle [of property law reform] was uphill all the way, mainly because, as Peter Stein has remarked, lawyers' 'contribution to a proper understanding of legal institutions was obscured by their emphasis on antiquarianism and their acceptance of Roman law as a finished product.' Nevertheless, over time, great European jurists overcame excessive rigidity because as Stein points out, they 'made it their profession to become experts in the intricacies of the Roman law, and to ensure that it moved with the time.' Against their colleagues' rampant unresponsiveness, in every European country an elite band of lawyers emerged to help lift the bell jar" (201).
Maybe de Soto thinks that lawyers need to stop venerating the law so much, and assist or lead the political process in adapting the law to be more inclusive. This is a call to profound citizenship.
De Soto concludes that if capitalism is not introduced on a micro-economic scale, then the problems afflicting developing countries threatens their already fragile stability. Earlier I mentioned that non-capitalist movements are seeing a revival, with all their problems. Capitalism for the elite is a bad investment in the long-term.
I conclude by saying that this is one of the most important books of this era. This book should have been published, distributed, and injected into the popular global mindset back in 1991. I posit that many, if not most, economic problems are unnecessary. They are the result of bad management, poor risk evaluation, and now as the case has been demonstrated, an impossible legal framework for the majority of people in developing countries. We the people of Earth deserve better than that.
Mexico retained ownership of the land within a colony until the colony's land commissioner issued title to it. The colony's actual boundaries were therefore determined by the extent of settlement within it, rather than by the boundaries specified in the contract. Mexico made more than two dozen empresario contracts, about half of which were even partially carried out. However, empresarios brought about 50,000 settlers to Texas between 1821 and 1836.
...
The Colonization Law of 1825 also created the office of land commissioner. Because Texas was so large, the governor was authorized to appoint commissioners who would issue land titles, maintain land records and provide the colonists with copies, maps their regions and supervise surveys. In addition, commissioners were to take the oath of allegiance from new settlers, appoint surveyors, select sites and mark the streets for new towns and provide and maintain ferries. Payment for performing these duties would come from title fees collected from colonists.
Source.
Texas apparently did not go through the same trouble that colonists went through in other parts of the United States, and what people in many developing countries currently experience.
The problem of land ownership, title, and transfer is a major stumbling block, and that is the thesis of Hernando de Soto's book, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. This book is important, and explains why some countries, like the United States, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, and others are wealthy, and why some seem to stumble or spin their wheels.
De Soto claims that mystery of capital is such because it has received the least amount of attention from activists and the media. Economic reforms have been tried before, and in many countries, they have failed to bring about the long-term economic growth that the US has experience since the 1930s. Even today, leaders like Hugo Chavez propose economic policies that are troublesome at best, and disastrous at worst.
The mystery of capital, of why many countries have trouble building wealth, is actually five separate mysteries: the mystery of missing information, of capital itself, of political awareness, the lessons of US history, and that of legal failure. De Soto devotes a chapter to discussing each of these, and proposing solutions.
The missing information is just that: no one really knows who owns what, outside one's inner circle of friends. Much of this comes from fairly recent, post-1950 economic development. De Soto compare's the post-World War II development of the third world to the post-Revolution developments that occured in Europe and the new United States. The Industrial Revolution was not isolated to the city; its impact was felt in the countryside. Then as is now, people left the agricultural sectors permanently. When they left, they found themselves against a legal system that made entry into legal property ownership, employment, business management so difficult as to be impossible. De Soto cites the example of Lima, Peru:
Our goal was to create a new and perfectly legal business. The team then began filling out the forms, standing in the lines, and making the bus trips into central Lima to get all the certifications required to operate, according to the letter of the law, a small business in Peru. They spent six hours a day at it and finally registered the business-289 days later (18).With hurdles like these, no one should wonder why so much the economy in developing countries is underground. De Soto has charts in his book that details the mind-numbing process that people in countries like Peru, Phillipines, Egypt, and Haiti must go through to become legit. It takes 168 steps and 13 - 25 years to formalize property in Phillipines. Seventy-seven steps and 6 - 14 years to "gain access to desert land for construction purposes and to register these property rights in Egypt" (22 - 24).
De Soto and his colleagues have done a stunning amount of historical research, going back to Adam Smith and Karl Marx. Economists such as these attempted to define capital, and de Soto says that capital is an abstraction that must be realized, that is, made into something concrete, fungible. Only that which can produce greater value is capital. A car that transports one to work, so that one may earn money, to buy other things (like a replacement car) is capital. A car used for joy-riding is not capital, until put to productive use. De Soto claims that several billion dollars of "dead capital" exists in most of the world, mostly in people's houses, workplaces, and business transactions. Few of these are recorded, made public, and given titles, proof of ownership.
What does exist is an ad-hoc network of informal systems. How to prove that you own what you own? You have a piece of paper, issued by some office, but that office is itself not a legal establishment. The only proof you have is your word, the word of your friends and family, and your neighbors. A stranger has little reason to trust you, and you have little reason to trust them. Among those strangers, is the local, state, provincial, and federal governments.
The word "messy" does not begin to describe the chaotic approach millions of people have taken to securing employment, buy houses, set up utilities, and, well, build capital. It is as if the way that undocumented immigrants have gotten jobs were extrapolated to most of the US population. People like you and me, driving cars, working on computers, renting apartments, blogging, doing all of that without licenses, registration, an accurate electric meter, housing inspections, and a journalist license. Imagine spending years of your life to get an officially sanctioned house. You would probably blow the process off, find a house, arrange payment, move in. You hope that nobody comes knocking on your door, claiming to have a piece of paper demonstrating ownership of the property that was given to them decades ago by the previous government.
At one point, something like that existed even in the US. De Soto writes how in centuries past, the transition from extralegal arrangements to inclusive was made throughout Europe, North America, and Japan. The process then was not easy, and in the US took nearly the entirety of the 19th century. Progress was made in fits and starts, with a lot of emotional rhetoric on the part of lawmakers.
The part where de Soto describes US history is for me the most alive part of the book, no doubt at least in part because I'm an American, and the Wild West is romantic, if only in very fuzzy hindsight. He writes,
The governments and judiciary of the young states, not yet so legally united, were trying to cope with the law and disorder of migrants, squatters, gold diggers, armed gangs, illegal entrepeneurs, and the rest of the colorful characters who made the settling of the American West so wild and, if only in hindsight, so romantic. To a Third Worlder like me [de Soto], this picture of the gringo past is astonishingly familiar. Although my colleagues and I have trouble relating to 11,000 on the Dow Jones, we feel quite at home among the squatters in Thomas Jefferson's Virginia or the log cabin settlements of Daniel Boone's Kentucky (107).
This is an important fact: America was a 3rd World Country, too. Its progress from 3rd to 1st was not due solely to technology or (as some would have it) providence. It was the way that the law reflected the vast majority's outlook on life and its processes. The law reflects society's habits, not commands it. The law is useless if irrelevant and impossible to enforce. Every citizen would do well to be acutely aware of that fact.
If only modifying the law were to be so easy. De Soto says that developing nations have spent more than a century trying to reform property laws, but to little avail. He thinks the problem rests on misconceptions on the part of the reformers. The people who attempt to fix the problem seem to fall in the trap of thinking that people who live and work extralegally do so to avoid taxes, or that proper surveying and recordation is necessary. Maybe the powers-that-be think that the current law is sufficient enough, and that enforcing compliance is the issue. Maybe other leaders think that the current social contracts, however informal, can just be ignored, and that in any case high-level leadership is not necessary.
De Soto deconstructs each of these arguments and demonstrates their fallibilities. Living in the extralegal sector is hardly a tax break, compared to all the "favors" that one must pay to avoid crossing the local gangs. Proper surveying in the United States was not conducted until after property law was reformed.
There is a point in the book that makes me wonder if de Soto contradicted himself. At one point in the book, de Soto writes "Does that mean that lawyers should lead the integration process? No. Implementing major legal change is a political responsibility" (158). Later, he says, "To be sure, the battle [of property law reform] was uphill all the way, mainly because, as Peter Stein has remarked, lawyers' 'contribution to a proper understanding of legal institutions was obscured by their emphasis on antiquarianism and their acceptance of Roman law as a finished product.' Nevertheless, over time, great European jurists overcame excessive rigidity because as Stein points out, they 'made it their profession to become experts in the intricacies of the Roman law, and to ensure that it moved with the time.' Against their colleagues' rampant unresponsiveness, in every European country an elite band of lawyers emerged to help lift the bell jar" (201).
Maybe de Soto thinks that lawyers need to stop venerating the law so much, and assist or lead the political process in adapting the law to be more inclusive. This is a call to profound citizenship.
De Soto concludes that if capitalism is not introduced on a micro-economic scale, then the problems afflicting developing countries threatens their already fragile stability. Earlier I mentioned that non-capitalist movements are seeing a revival, with all their problems. Capitalism for the elite is a bad investment in the long-term.
I conclude by saying that this is one of the most important books of this era. This book should have been published, distributed, and injected into the popular global mindset back in 1991. I posit that many, if not most, economic problems are unnecessary. They are the result of bad management, poor risk evaluation, and now as the case has been demonstrated, an impossible legal framework for the majority of people in developing countries. We the people of Earth deserve better than that.
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