Cyreenik Says
This thought was inspired by this 8 Jun 13 Economist article, Pakistan’s electricity crisis: Long, hot summer The first task for Pakistan’s new prime minister is to keep the lights on, talking about some of the strange ways electricity gets distributed and paid for in Pakistan. From the article:
"LIKE most Pakistanis Mohammad Hussain complains bitterly about the paltry few hours of electricity available each day during the sweltering summer. Life for the 43-year-old labourer, already pretty miserable in the Lahore slum where he lives, is more unbearable without a fan to cool him at night or a pump to guarantee water.
Like many of his countrymen, he has never paid a rupee towards the cost of the dribble of electricity used by his wife and five children, who all live in a one-bedroom flat. Their building is illegally connected to the city’s power grid by a metal hook attached to a nearby electricity line.
Every now and then officials from the Lahore Electric Supply Company (LESCO) launch a “crackdown”. Officials phone ahead, giving everyone ample opportunity to remove their hooks. They then go door-to-door collecting bribes, organised on a careful tariff basis. Households with just a fan pay $5. For slightly beefier “air coolers” the fee is $10 and for the lucky few who can afford air conditioning the cost is $15. These charges are a fraction of LESCO’s official tariff, but none of the money goes into the coffers of a collapsing electricity system anyway."
Totally wacky... but this system evolved with the best of intentions in the minds of both those governing and those being governed. The root problem is that "Let's set up some good oversight." is not the heart-filling emotion that "helping the poor" is.
In this Pakistan case there's also a bunch of, "Yeah! I'm gaming the system!" built into the evolution of this system, too. Feeling you are beating the system is another powerful emotion.
The moral: Avoiding this kind of twisted result is one of the virtues of a competitive, easy entry and exit, free market system where rule of law serves to level the playing field, not protect the privileged.
I was inspired by this 8 Jun 13 Guardian article, Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations The 29-year-old source behind the biggest intelligence leak in the NSA's history explains his motives, his uncertain future and why he never intended on hiding in the shadows by Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill and Laura Poitras, in which Edward Snowden is interviewed. Snowden explains quite clearly both why he did what he did and what he expects to happen. His approach and attitude seem quite cool-headed. I admire that.
Time will tell if his actions produce more transparency in anti-terrorism. It's something we badly need, and it's been more than a decade now since 9-11 so cool-headed thinking may come back in style. This may produce a Daniel Ellsberg Pentagon Papers style reaction which reins in the scope of anti-terrorist surveillance activities.
On the other hand, the Boston Marathon Bombing reaction indicates that panic thinking and blunder response on this kind of terrorism is now well-rehearsed. And this 9 Jun 13 WSJ editorial, Leaking Secrets Empowers Terrorists The NSA's surveillance program doesn't do damage. Revealing it does by Michael B. Mukasey, is an example of predictable outrage at this happening.
In yet another point of view, fellow MIT alum Dan Swanson points out this 10 Jun 13 Xfinity article, NSA contractor risks steep jail time for data leak by Kimberly Dozier, AP, and has this to say about it.
"Note all the contradictions: Mark Udall, a member of the Senate intelligence committee, says he is surprised and concerned to learn how extensive the program is - but he abhors leaks. Dianne Feinstein says that this surveillance played a part in the case against a terrorist - AFTER the bombing attack was carried out. Shawn Turner says intelligence officials are reviewing the damage done to their programs by these leaks - but not reviewing why people are so offended by their programs. And while he proved just how easy it would be to abuse this program - suppose he had actually released the data he dealt with every day instead of just the existence and extent of the program? - this guy will be the target..."
And I will point out: How much time, attention and resource does it take to spot anything useful in that data flood? This is like spam on steroids. Trying to collect and analyze this much haystack is such a waste of time, attention and money! And it will be so subject to abuse in the future.
Abuse in the future is the biggest cost threat. An example of this "abuse that can come as a future surprise" is the McCarthy Era. During the 30's and 40's in the US being a Communist sympathizer wasn't so bad. "Hey! 'Uncle Joe' Stalin is helping fight Nazis." In those days being a Fascist/Nazi sympathizer was the big concern, not a Communist sympathizer. Then the Cold War came in the 1950's and Senator Joe McCarthy took the iconic lead in turning Communist sympathizing into the national evil, and the blacklists followed. This was: a big surprise, an example of how dramatically opinions can change in just a few years, and it showed how important those changes can be to employment. This is the big threat of all this data collecting. The threat is not of invading privacy today, it's of blackmailing tomorrow when opinions change.
With all of the above taken into account, the moral is, once again, that community enfranchisement is much, much more effective than spying at rooting out both crime and terrorism. Spying feels neat, we love spy stories, but the harsh reality is: It's such a waste.
Update: This 10 Jun 13 Atlantic Wire article, America's Outsourced Spy Force, by the Numbers by Philip Bump, talks about how much of the NSA work is handled by contractors: a lot. One bad result of this scandal would be a "TSAing" of the NSA -- bringing its workers all onto direct government payroll. That would be a big, "Ouch!" from the accountability standpoint -- TSA-style corruption and abuse temptations without the TSA-style high day-to-day public visibility.
This 1 Jun 13 Economist article, The workforce in the cloud
“Talent exchanges” on the web are starting to transform the world of work, describes one way new communications technologies -- social media -- are changing how people find work.
The good news is that people can now both search for and offer services across the world. The bad news, for prescriptionists, is this means less barriers to entry for knowledge worker type jobs, which means lower wages and more job uncertainty.
The big benefit of these on-line job exchanges is returning to the KISS principle -- keeping the relation between job offerer and job fulfiller a simple one. Instead of getting married to a company and a position, the worker is in for the duration of the project and no more.
The benefits of this are flexibility and low transaction costs. The worker and hirer can adjust things on the fly and come up with better solutions as the problem is better understood.
This can be real good, but the dark side is "the creeping feature creature", also known as "mission creep", and having goals become moving targets. If the goals are going to creep, then both parties need to adapt to that. If they do, then the costs of accomplishing something truly innovative go way down.
There is another dark side as well. This is revealed by looking at this KISS relation from the Prisoners Dilemma perspective. This is a relation which can be ending soon, and this raises the temptation to betray, a lot, on both sides.
The social justice prescriptionists feel warm and fuzzy about pointing out how bosses can betray in these situations, but workers are just as tempted, and can do so just as well.
This betrayal issue is manageable. It's been around ever since there have been workers hired for temporary jobs. It just needs to be recognized as part of the playing field. Dealing with this temptation is why so much attention is paid to reporting how well the job went for both parties. This reporting adds "future" to the relation which makes betrayal less profitable.
In sum, this is a wonderful example of new technologies changing the world we live in. This means lots of experimenting to learn what it can and can't do well, and keeping an eye out for neat surprise uses.
This 1 Jun 13 Economist article, Repression ahead Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on opponents, protesters and activist groups may be a sign of fragility as much as of strength, is a fine indicator that the ruthless leader recipe is still very much alive and well in our modern world. I first wrote about Ruthless Leaders in 2002 and it is now part of my book How Evolution Explains the Human Condition.
More than ever Putin is now leading Russia by scaring the people with stories of dark conspiracies that mix domestic malcontents with evil foreign interventionists. Sadly, it's a formula Russians are very familiar with, and, I guess, are still comfortable with.
But for this recipe to work the people of the community have to be closed off from the harsh reality that other people have many, many other things on their mind besides supporting dark conspiracies.
Becoming more worldly is a great antidote to ruthless leadership. I hope this happens soon to the Russians.
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