Cyreenik Says
Prison is the modern day form of Neolithic Village exile. It is expelling a community member for not fitting in for some serious reason. But these days this "exile" is not working well. As this 25 Dec 14 WSJ article, The Steep Cost of America’s High Incarceration Rate About one of every 100 U.S. adults is in prison. That’s five to 10 times higher than in Western Europe. by Robert E. Rubin and Nicholas Turner, points out it's expensive and not working well.
From the article, "America’s overreliance on incarceration is exacting excessive costs on individuals and communities, as well as on the national economy. Sentences are too long, and parole and probation policies too inflexible. There is too little rehabilitation in prison and inadequate support for life after prison.
Crime itself has a terrible human cost and a serious economic cost. But appropriate punishment for those who are a risk to public safety shouldn’t obscure the vast deficiencies in the criminal-justice system that impose a significant drag on the economy."
The article goes on to point out how poorly prisoners and ex-cons get treated, and as a result they can't fit in and return to being productive members of the community. They remain semi-exiles, so much so that many return to prison again.
This problem is not new. Like the War on Drugs, it is a Blunder: it is expensive, it is not solving the problem, and it goes on and on.
In sum, a lot of new thinking about how we handle exile in modern times is needed. Added bonus: Coming up with better approaches is "green". It will make our world a much better place because we will waste a lot less.
This month's news about Sony, North Korean hackers, movie theater owners, and now Paramount, is classic panic and blunder. Panic happens when a person or community is faced with a new kind of scary threat, and one that must be acted upon quickly. The actions taken to solve this situation are the Blunder -- a deeply wasteful, from-the-heart response that doesn't really solve the problem.
The new, the scary, and the in need of quick action are all important. If the threat is familiar, the response will be a drill -- think of a fire drill at school. If the threat doesn't need a quick response, then "sleeping on it" can inspire a much better, much more cool-headed, response.
Sony was deeply surprised by the magnitude of the hack it endured. This was a first, something novel. And the leaks that followed were deeply scary for someone in the big-time movie-making business. When the hackers then demanded that The Interview be pulled just weeks before the premier this became act-fast scary as well. It became Blunder Time.
The Blunder in this case was to cave in completely and not show the movie anywhere. The Blunder got worse when Paramount did the same with Team America, a movie that has been out for ten years already.
The social media gossip is now talking about how weak-kneed Hollywood is. That has long been true, but the real source of this particular choice was a Panic and Blunder situation. Hopefully, now some cooler-headed thinking will be applied to this situation, and dealing with similar crises in the future will become a drill, not a panic.
Once again a terrorist strikes, and once again the media is there to provide lots of free promotion to the terrorist cause he or she is supporting. <sigh> We haven't learned yet that the best defense against terrorism is responding to these tragic events with "business as usual", as in, ignore the cause and get on with life.
This 15 Dec 14 WSJ article, Terror in Sydney ISIS has called for ‘lone-wolf’ Islamist attacks around the world., is an example of giving lots of free promotion to the terrorist cause.
From the article, "The long reach of Islamist terror hit another Western city on Monday with a siege in downtown Sydney, and we should expect more like it as Islamic State (ISIS) tries to mobilize adherents across the world.
Iranian-born Man Haron Monis, a self-styled sheikh with a long criminal history, held dozens of hostages in a cafe while claiming to have bombs on the premises. Police stormed the restaurant and killed Monis after negotiations failed; two hostages died and four were injured."
The proper response is to report that something terrible happened, but be skimpy on the motivation. The way this kind of event is currently being reported is giving lots more encouragement to other terrorist wannabes, considerably more than the promise of twenty virgins in heaven. All this coverage is happening in our real world -- no promises needed!
If this massive coverage went away then the wannabes would see they would die in obscurity, and their promoters would see no reason to send them in to create these events. If the violence did not produce such spectacular results in the media, then the leaders, and followers, would search for more cost-effective ways of promoting their causes... and find them!
Update: This 17 Dec 14 article, Sony Cancels Release of ‘The Interview’ Studio Scraps Dec. 25 Debut After Terrorist Threats Prompted Movie Chains to Skip Film by Erich Schwartzel and Ben Fritz, talks about an even bigger terrorist success.
From the article, "The cyberterrorists won.
Sony Pictures canceled its planned release of “The Interview” marking the success of a brazen hacking attack against the studio and terrorist threats against theaters that played the film.
The Sony Corp. studio’s 11th-hour decision, unprecedented in the modern movie business, came after the nation’s largest theater chains all said they would not play the raunchy Seth Rogen farce set in North Korea."
Wow! Talk about ROI! (return on investment) These hackers send out a trollish email and the major theaters won't show a big budget movie, plus lots of publicity in traditional media. Man! This is support for having more terrorism that can't be beat with a stick.
This thought was inspired by this 13 Dec 14 Economist article,
Climate change and geoengineering Fears of a bright planet: Experiments designed to learn more about ways of geoengineering the climate should be allowed to proceed, which talks about geoengineering -- the practice of engaging in deliberate activities to control climate, not trying to control it by restricting activities which are already being done for other reasons, such as burning fossil fuels.
From the article, "[These experiments] are the province of “geoengineering”. The small band of scientists which has been studying this subject over the past decade or so has mostly been using computer models. Some of them are now proposing outdoor experiments. ...
Nonetheless, these experiments—and this whole line of research—are hugely controversial. Many scientists are sceptical about geoengineering and most greens are outraged. Opponents object to them for a range of reasons. Some are against the very idea of geoengineering and any experiments in the area, even those which pose no immediate risk to the environment. They abhor the hubris involved in trying to affect the mechanics of the climate and despair at the potential diversion of attention from controlling carbon emissions as the route to countering climate change. They find the idea of some–possibly many—countries having the power to change the climate for the whole planet a geopolitical nightmare. Even modest experiments in geoengineering, according to this logic, are the beginnings of a slippery slope, one that will engender a false sense of security and domesticate an idea that should have always remained outrageous."
This is an example of The Curse of Being Important in action. Climate change is a highly emotional issue to a lot of people, so both lots of people and lots of instinctive thinking get added to the discussions of how to solve this issue. The high emotion content leads to strong instinctive thinking, and the instinctive thinking shows up as prescriptive solutions, as in, "We already know how to solve this problem, we just have to do it."-thinking.
This makes out of the box thinking, and coming up with newer, innovative solutions, a tough row to hoe -- as these geoengineers are now quite familiar with. Sadly, the feel good solutions that are now being proposed are also very expensive ones. This is why they haven't been implemented yet. If we can come up with new ways -- faster, cheaper and better ways -- this will be a blessing for the planet. But to come up with these new and better ways, we have to move beyond prescription and give innovation a fair chance. This takes the modern thinking form... called tolerance.
It is instinctive for people to worry. Add this to the "unnatural act" of humans flying like birds and it is not surprising that Fear of Flying generates a lot of "goat sacrificing", as in, wasteful rituals. Currently the most visibly expensive form of this style of goat sacrificing is the TSA rituals at airports.
But with the new technology of drones getting popular, a new form is being added to the panoply -- the worry that drones and jets will crash, and kill hundreds of people when it happens. And both the FAA and the media are now resonating with this worry. An example of this resonance is this 7 Dec 14 WJS article Airliner Came Close to Colliding With Drone at Heathrow Airport in July Near Miss Incident Happened as A320 Came in for Landing by Costas Paris.
From the article, "LONDON—An Airbus A320 came close to colliding with an unidentified drone as it came in to land at London’s Heathrow airport last July, the Civil Aviation Authority said Sunday."
This is a six months old incident! Only the building of a new panic would make this newsworthy today.
This 18 Nov 14 WSJ article, NTSB Rules Drones Are Aircraft, Subject to FAA Rules Board Reverses Earlier Ruling That Found Drones Aren’t Legally Aircraft by Jack Nicas, talks about how the regulatory "teeth" are already biting hard.
From the article, "The National Transportation Safety Board has ruled that drones are aircraft and subject to existing aviation laws, affirming the Federal Aviation Administration’s regulatory power over the fast-emerging industry, amid challenges to the agency’s authority.
The four board members of the NTSB on Tuesday overturned an earlier ruling that had dismissed a $10,000 FAA fine against an Austrian drone pilot, Raphael Pirker, for allegedly operating a drone recklessly to film the University of Virginia in 2011."
This terrible tragedy could happen, but it is far from inevitable. Planes are designed to endure bird strikes, and drones weigh much the same as large birds. I personally have survived a goose striking a small single-engine plane I was piloting at 10,000 feet on a moonless night over California. The scariest part was trying to figure out, "What in the Sam Hill did I run into that was solid while flying at 10,000 feet?... And I'm still alive to be asking this question?" I didn't figure it out... until the next morning when the aircraft repairman showed me a bowling-ball size dent in the wing with some feathers in it. The moral: planes will much more often than not survive hitting drones.
But the growing of this new panic means Blunder Time is coming. The Blunder in this case will be the blighting of exploiting a new and valuable technology: Using drones in all sorts of ways for making our lives better.
This 6 Dec 14 Economist article, Free the drones Drones have immense commercial potential—so long as regulators don’t try to tether them to the ground, describes the hazard of over regulating.
From the article, "America’s Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) bans almost all commercial drone use. That will soon change, as Congress has ordered it to come up with rules for commercial drone flights by September 30th 2015. But draft proposals due in the next few weeks are expected to show that the FAA continues to take a restrictive view, requiring drone operators to have experience flying manned aircraft and to keep drones within sight at all times. The drone industry suspects that this is regulatory capture—that the FAA is acting as a lobby for pilots.
The FAA’s attitude is damaging America’s drone business. Firms are shifting fledgling drone operations outside the country."
And from this 8 Dec 14 WSJ article, Amazon Preps Faster Deliveries by Bike and by Drone by Shelly Banjo, Greg Bensinger and Jack Nicas, a description of ambition getting ready to move on.
From the article, "The problem is the Federal Aviation Administration has effectively banned commercial drone use, including test flights, until it completes rules for unmanned aircraft in the next several years. ...“Without the ability to test outdoors in the United States soon, we will have no choice but to divert even more of our [drone] research and development resources abroad,” Paul Misener, Amazon’s vice president of global public policy, said in a letter to the FAA on Sunday."
Welcome, FAA, to the Midwest Disease. <sigh>
One of the elements of innovation that "rich get richer" complainers have a hard time grasping is how much experimenting and how many failed efforts are involved before success is finally reached. This 30 Nov 14 WSJ article, Google Glass Deal Thrusts Intel Deeper Into Wearable Tech by Alistair Barr and Don Clark, describes an example of this trying and trying again.
From the article, "Google launched the Internet-connected eyewear in 2012 as a consumer gadget, but it was criticized by privacy advocates and widely regarded as nerdy. But Glass shows early signs of catching on as a workplace-computing device." and from a related article, Looking Clearly at Google Glass by Dan Gallagher, "For investors, modeling the financial impact for Google or Intel is near impossible at this stage. There are no real comparable products to Google Glass currently on the market. And Intel’s efforts to promote its chips for wearable devices are also relatively nascent."
This uncertainty about whether or not something will work, and constant effort to find out how it will fit in well with customer needs and wants, is expensive. If you're a Sears or JCPenney in the early 2010's you can spend a whole lot of time, money and effort... and still not figure it out! It's not that these people aren't clever, and it's not that these people haven't tried hard. It's that success in commerce is far from certain.
"Getting it right" in such a risky environment is what "obscene profits" are paying for in the world of commerce. This needs to be kept in mind: Without the reward, the smart, effective people who can come up with successes won't take the risk. They will do something else instead, and the world won't be a better place tomorrow.
-- The End --