Alex Jacobson 3.0

May 26, 2005

Does San Francisco cause infertility?

Filed under: Social Markets — admin @ 12:06 pm

Yahoo News reports:

San Francisco has the smallest share of small-fry of any major U.S. city. Just 14.5 percent of the city’s population is 18 and under.

It is no mystery why U.S. cities are losing children. The promise of safer streets, better schools and more space has drawn young families away from cities for as long as America has had suburbs.

But kids are even more scarce in San Francisco than in expensive New York (24 percent) or in retirement havens such as Palm Beach, Fla., (19 percent), according to Census estimates.

So, if you live in a city, do you abandon it when you want to raise kids, or do you decide you like your city life so much that you decide not to have them. Do you only have kids in the city if you have lots of money?

Kids are fundamentally more expensive in cities than in suburbs. Cities are valuable because they concentrate people who need to reach each other. Kids take up space in cities without providing commensurate social networking value. Certainly parents meet each other because through their kids, but there are less expensive hobbies that produce the same result.

May 25, 2005

Can open source compete with integrated hardware?

Filed under: Lets do what!? — admin @ 3:04 pm

As hardware gets cheaper, more and more of the value comes from software and integration. That is the Apple strategy (keeping the Mac closed) and it is not Microsoft’s strategy with the X/Box. There is no room for open source in these models. The only way for open source to compete is to stay open from top to bottom and build an ecosystem around developers. This is a variant of the Clayton Christiansen thesis. As software and hardware get sufficiently cheap, value comes from integration.

May 23, 2005

Efficient Outcomes: Selling Service. Buying Service. No "IT"

Filed under: Social Markets — admin @ 5:29 pm

Jeff Nolan has two recent posts on IT. In “IBM Moves in FIrefox’s direction,” He says

The interesting dynamic that I referenced in the beginning of my comments is that these large companies are adopting many open source projects without any expectation of support from a providing vendor. They are going it alone. Obviously in the case of Linux itself there are large vendors providing services, and many large projects like Apache and Sendmail have strong support organization, but the vast majority of open source projects don’t so when a large enterprise IT organization officially supports them it is their intention to be the first and last line of support, and this should strike fear into the hearts of every enterprise software company out there

In “The End of Corporate IT” he taks about corporate customers prefering hosted applications because they don’t want to deal with their own IT departments. He says <blockquote, there is an unavoidable conflict developing. Increasingly I find myself doing customer reference calls for companies offering hosted solutions and when I ask them about how IT responds to their desire to have a hosted application I am told that NOT having IT involved is a major incentive to go with hosted apps.

So it looks like the trend is towards vertical integration of software stacks by hosted app providers. If you are doing vertical integration you get efficiency by sharing costs through support of open source projects. Companies don’t want IT. They want to buy a hosted app or sell a hosted app. Anything in between allows someone to blame someone elsse.

May 19, 2005

Free speech: Echo chamber or error-checking?

Filed under: Navel Gazing — admin @ 2:50 pm

Virginia Postrel in the NYTimes talks about economic models for media bias. That media bias may simply be market differentiation. She says:

The article makes some provocative predictions. It suggests that adding relatively moderate competitors may push rivals to take more extreme positions to hold onto their audiences.

Trying to correct Al Jazeera’s bias, for example, by introducing pro-Western competition, as some analysts recommend, “might cause Al Jazeera and similar networks to further differentiate their product by advancing yet more extreme views,” write the economists. “The effect might be only to radicalize, rather than moderate, their audience.”

The defense against this sort of extremism is to maximize the quantity of new sources so people end up with sane portfolios. There is no reason to believe that people with diversified news portfolios will tend toward extremism. The real problem is people who just rely on e.g. the NYTimes in order to oppose the view of the administration. Or the NYSun just to oppose the view of the NYTimes, etc.

May 18, 2005

Advice for Living One Thousand Years

Filed under: Lets do what!? — admin @ 1:08 pm

The Sunday Times of London describes improvements in science that may eliminate aging as a cause of death. Until they arrive, here are its points of advice. Note: I think it is highly likely that there are different best options for different people so take this with a grain of salt.

1 Don’t even think about smoking and, preferably, don”t hang glide.

2 Eliminate sugar to lower blood insulin levels. Use stevia as a sweetener. It is a South American plant that is both very sweet and good for you.

3 Don’t eat any animal fats. Government guidelies tend to say cut these down, but they probably only say this because they think it’s the best
people can manage. No saturated fat at all is probably best.

4 Eat lots of vegetables that grow above ground. Those below ground are heavy in carbohydrates that turn into sugar and raise insulin levels.

5 Don’t overdo the fruit. Contrary to popular wisdom it’s not unconditionally good as it contains sugar. Non-drinking Arabs and Indians who
sit around sipping orange juice all day end up with diabetes.

6 Eat nuts. For incompletely understood reasons, people who eat nuts live longer. Not salted peanuts, however (see 7).

7 Don’t salt things. Salt raises blood pressure and will kill you through a stroke or heart attack. For this reason, don’t touch processed food.

8 Don’t have heart bypass surgery or have a stent installed to hold a blocked artery open. Latest figures suggest neither works. People who live
longer after them probably do so because the shock made them eat better and exercise more.

9 Have a massive medical assessment, preferably at Kronos in Phoenix, Arizona, to establish what you are doing wrong and, if possible, what genetic
weaknesses you have. Continue these assessments throughout your life and adjust supplements accordingly. Read all the latest medical journals to keep
up.

10 Exercise vigorously and daily but dont run. Running is bad for your skeleton.

11 Take a childs aspirin once a day to thin your blood and a much larger dose before you get on a plane. Ideally, don’t get on a plane.

12 Eat very little. Rats on restricted diets live longer but it is not known if this would damage humans particularly their brains. So if you forget
what 2+2 equals, eat more.

13 Ignore all of the above. They may be wrong and, if a piano falls on you, pointless.

May 16, 2005

Stanley Fish gets it wrong

Filed under: Lets do what!? — admin @ 12:35 pm

Stanley Fish attempts to argue that there is no principled way to differentiate between Ward Churchil’s claims that the victims of 9/11 were “little Eichmans” and Larry Summers comments that the preponderane of males in Harvard’s physics department might be partially the result of genetic predispositions. He claims that both sorts of speech are equally permissible from a First Ammendment perspective and that it is inconsistent of the right to condemn Churchill and demand his resignation while at the same time making Larry Summers a free speech martyr.

Fish is largely missing the point. Summers is making a factual claim that may or may not be justified using scientific evidence. See this fabulous debate to betwee Steve Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke to see how such a discussion can proceed. In contrast, Churchill is making a value judgement about America and terrorism that is not per se provable or disprovable. Discussion and evaluation of factual claims are the substance of science and acadamia and it is indeed scandalous that Harvard’s faculty appears unable to engage in it. In contrast, Churchill is infusing facts with value judgements that at odds with those of the people and institutions that employ him. The left has indeed been entirely ok with the politicization of academia. The right has largely stood for the idea that academia should be the province of intellect.

Churchill’s abuse was to shift from intellectual discourse to political discourse and to represent his political discourse as intellectually valid. Summers was making a factual hypothesis ammenable to proof or disproof. The fact that Fish can’t see the difference is indeed part of the problem with academia today, a problem that Ward Churchill so vividly makes apparent.

"Free Muslim Against Terrorism" rally has low turnout. CAIR decides not to show

Filed under: Social Markets — admin @ 11:28 am

Pics here. Lots of details here. The mainstream Muslim organizations stayed away.

Did Newsweek shout fire in a crowded theater?

Filed under: The Enemy is Us — admin @ 11:10 am

Austin Bay describes it as The Press’ Abu Ghraib. Michelle Malkin as “Newsweek Lied. People Died. She quotes the London TImes story

“At least nine people were killed yesterday as a wave of anti-American demonstrations swept the Islamic world from the Gaza Strip to the Java Sea, sparked by a single paragraph in a magazine alleging that US military interrogators had desecrated the Koran.”

A commenter notes on Austin Bay’s post notes

In every other walk of life, professionals are subject to criminal charges if they engage in grossly negligent behavior that results in injury to innocent third parties. Here have we grossly negligent (if not outright malicious, and I’m still not convinced that Newsweek didn’t make up most of this story out of whole cloth) behavior that has resulted in harm to American servicemen in wartime. This is much, much more serious than Rathergate. Newsweek has crossed over the line from ordinary leftist media conceit into Lord Haw Haw / Tokyo Rose territory.

Newsweek falsely reported that US soldiers descrate the Koran at Gitmo and now 15 people are dead as a consequence. Should Newsweek be punished? What is the punishment for shouting fire in a crowded theater?

May 12, 2005

Transhumanism vs Democracy

Filed under: Navel Gazing — admin @ 11:16 am

I’ve been saying this to various friends for a while and Ronald Bailey says it in Reason more concisely:

Politics in the 21st century will cut across the traditional political left/right rift of the last two centuries. Instead, the chief ideological divide will be between transhumanists and bioconservatives/bioluddites.

In the 18th Century, the Framers of the American Constitution debated whether slaves should count in aportioning representation. The slave owners wanted them to count more because it would increase their power. The free states wanted them to count less because property can’t vote. The result was the “three fifths compromise” counting slaves as three-fifths of a whole person. As transhumanism moves forward, we will be reviving this debate. Do de-encephalized clones count in the census? What about clones in general as they will be more likely to share the original’s political preferences? Are sufficiently modified humans still human enough to vote? They may have preferences, but those preferences may be determined by the gadgets implanted into their heads rather than randomly based on environmental factors. Should unmodified humans be voting as they may be obviously stupider than their transformed counterparts?

At a less esoteric level, will be be coercing people to accept certain treatments (in the same way we coerce immunization)? What are the boundaries here? How dangerous is this?

On the other hand, will be be allowing people to undertake arbitratry treatments? How will they be stopped? How do we protect ourselves from the bio-transformative virus produced in our neighbors kitchen? What about their dogs?

May 11, 2005

Big vs Small, Private Sector vs Public Sector, Personal vs Impersonal

Filed under: Navel Gazing — admin @ 4:12 pm

Many people on the left are concerned about Big Business. They worry that individual expression and liberty will get trampled by a corporate bureacuracy intent on self preservation and growth. Many people on the right are concerned about the behavior of Big Government. They worry that indivual expression and liberty will get trampled by government bureacracy intent on self preservation and growth. Entrepreneurs and artists are or should be concerned about both.

On the flip side, there is a lot of value to scale. For example, the quality of produce in my neighborhood has increased dramatically since Whole Foods arrived. Neither cars nor computers would not be available to most people if there were not big corporations and mass markets producing them. It took the might of the US government to stop both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia from spreading misery and death around the world.

In general I am biased in favor of letting individuals negotiate differences among themselves. I am not at all certain that government enforcement of contracts and payments serves anyone. More on this later. In the interim, read this post by Jeff Jarvis about the problems when companies grow. He is responding to this post by Fred Wilson asking whether Google is becoming AOL.

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